New ad campaign for the Big 3 plays the "Buy American" card

The Level Field Institute, a group comprised of retired domestic auto workers, is telling consumers "What you drive, drives America" in an attempt to convince car buyers to purchase vehicles from the-group-of-nominally-domestic-automakers-previously-referred-to-as-the-Big-3. The ad campaign uses a variety of statistics to drive home its point, including the fact that direct employment by the US automakers is roughly 3.5 times that of the "transplants" (foreign automakers that produce vehicles in the US). Jason Vines, Chrysler's VP of Communications and always someone that's good for a quote, states "Baseball, hot dogs and Toyota? Sorry, it doesn't ring a bell."

While we fully support the concept of buying domestically-produced consumer products, we also feel that this campaign has an aura of desperation about it - as is often the case when an advertising campaign deviates from focus on the product itself. There is also the simple difficulty in determining the origin of a vehicle; as we posted earlier this week, the domestic content "gap" is closing between "domestic" and "foreign" vehicles, and the information displayed to consumers on the origin of a vehicle's content is often difficult to understand (or perhaps even misleading).

[Source: Detroit News]