It looks like our friend Mahk will be busy with focus groups for the next little while. In a Q&A with Automotive News titled "Why Chevy's 'Real People' ads are still running," Chevrolet US vice president of marketing Paul Edwards cleared the air about how and why the brand's oft-mocked advertising campaign has actually been really quite successful for the company. "Our breakthrough measures -- which are a matter of do people remember it, and they do, they know it's from Chevy -- continue to increase month after month," says Edwards. So it's successful because it's memorable and people remember it comes from Chevy. Got it. I'm sure there are countless second-year marketing college textbooks that will back up Edwards' "any publicity is good publicity" stance, but by that measure, does that make this and this the greatest PR videos of 2017?
Despite what you, I, or other people on the internet may think, Chevrolet themselves are not the only ones who actually think their ads are good. The "Unbranded" Malibu spot—you know, the one where Real People erroneously mistake a debadged Chevy Malibu for an $80,000 "BMW-Tesla combination" with a straight face—was awarded the 'Automotive Tech Ad of the Year' awahd from Nielsen at the New York Auto Show last month. "Nielsen said the work resonated with consumers in memorability, branding and likability." To track the ad's effectiveness, Nielsen used neuroscience techniques, so you know they're legit.
When asked how long he thinks the campaign will last, Edwards said, "From where I sit two years in, there's no sign that it's losing steam ... For the foreseeable future, we don't have a change in mind." If you couldn't tell by now, Zebra Corner's parodies starring Masshole Mahk is one of my absolute favorite things to come out of the internet in recent memory. Good news, bad news: it doesn't look like Mahk or Chevy will be stopping anytime soon.