GM Traverse Commercial

While I was watching another painful bout of NBC's love affair with beach volleyball during the Olympics, I ran across GM's marketing engine at work. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch NBC's primetime coverage tonight, they are sure to cover it.

You can also google "GM Traverse Commercial" to see the banter surrounding this piece.

GM is in some serious trouble, and for them to push their new crossover like this is simply sub-par. At the end of a long day of work, the last thing I want to see is some dude half naked ironing clothes. The target audience is obviously women with families. My wife thought the commercial was stupid.

Maybe this is payback for GM asking their ad firms to lower rates going into 2009? In the WSJ article, a GM spokesperson is quoted in regards to ad agencies "asked our agency partners to work with us to eliminate low-value work and find creative solutions to go to market more efficiently." This commercial is well below low-value work and it is hard to imagine GM executives sitting around the table nodding their heads in approval over this ad. Maybe it's the same group of managers who gave the world the voluptuous Pontiac Aztek.

While my postings usually cover individual companies the and economy, I also pay attention to the marketing efforts companies put into place to drive product awareness. It's an important part of the investing puzzle. GM, you lose on this one.

So maybe we are connected?

At the beginning of the year there were many media outlets debating on whether the European and BRIC economies were immune from the US malaise. As much as some people wished there was no connection, some bits of information have started to trickle in showing otherwise. Two articles ran in the WSJ in the past week, buried deep inside the paper. One article covered Germany’s fall in new manufacturing orders. Germany one of the main components of economic growth in the EU experienced its 7^th straight month decline for new orders. It’s still very early, but it’s important to lay down some ground work if things worsen. Investors fortunate enough to have capital laying around will be able to do a little shopping.

The other article of note surrounded the possibility of China lifting some of its subsidies in fuel and food prices after the Olympics are over. What was once my funky Chinese economic theory may become the story of the Chinese consumer bearing the brunt of higher prices like everyone else in the world.