Surfing the last few weeks, you may have noticed Pontiac’s new ad campaign targeting women for the Torrent, a crossover utility vehicle. Titled “Crossover Confessions”, the mini-site shows you a few features the Torrent touts (safety, cargo, engine) and then encourages you to “confess” and “unload your baggage” on their site. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the mini-site, and for good reason.

Videos

I went through the featured video confessions, which are basically people who sat in a Pontiac Torrent and were recorded confessing something. By my count, around half of the videos were sexual in nature. Unfortunately, someone in the ad department seems to have forgotten the viral nature of the web, and didn’t provide any way to share the videos (the only reason I can come up with for them choosing mostly sexual confessions - resorting to sex sells, as has been proven over and over time again).

Insulting?

The ads actually come off quite insulting to anyone’s sense of sophistication in the criteria of buying a car:

• No photos of the interior (apparently, this car is so nice on the outside, that we don’t even care how it looks inside)
• There is a disclaimer near the videos “Vehicle in videos is parked in a parking lot” (as in, perhaps we would be so stupid as to tape a “confession” while driving the car)
• Presents women as very shallow (a sampling of the confession titles: Strip to San Fran, Sugar Daddy, Co-worker with Benefits)

I’m continually shocked to see just how disconnected these brands actually are from reality. I get it, they wanted to make a “viral campaign”, but they really need to hire social web experts to help them apply it properly, as well as someone to point out some of the counter-branding they are doing with a campaign like this.

Considering that women decide or influence 85% of the buying decisions related to cars, this is not the way to endear yourself to them.

Here’s the link, if you want to check it out:

Pontiac Torrent - Crossover Confessions

Lastly, the whole ad campaign is aimed at people who are succeeding but want to “maintain lifestyle”…please do leave a comment if this sounds like you.