• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, December 3, 2010

What is Jeff Goodby up to? I mean, he's telling us what he's up to in seemingly honest, sincere and straightforward prose in this Huffington Post post, "Wish Us Luck: We Are Chevy's Advertising Agency." But what's he really up to?

You know you're living in the realm of a different reality from the rest of us when, like a Hollywood star of some notoriety, you start getting press for saying that you didn't do or say the things that people think you said or did. Writes Goody:

Right after we got the assignment, a memo leaked out of Chevrolet in which a high-level executive considered the idea of forbidding people to call the company "Chevy." People went nuts. The Times ran the story on its front page. Evidently, you cannot tell the American public what to call their Chevrolets.

I was immediately called by every news service and accused of planting the memo as a marketing trick. I laughed and said I had nothing to do with it.

"Oh, you're good," said a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. "You're really good."

Back when I was re-reporting what others were reporting, the whole flap certainly got my attention here, here and here. That's a lot of ink, whoever was behind the leak.

Traditional automobile marketing has been a somewhat straightforward proposition: big budgets, bold claims, brassy creative. Make me aspire, then remind me that I made the right choice.

To be sure, the category has its fair share of ingratiating taglines. "Zoom Zoom." "Built Ford Tough." And, of course, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet." You could keep going, I'm sure. But the fact that we keep harping back to Doyle Dane Bernbach's work for Volkswagen in the '60s as an exemplar of breakthrough creative tells us something about the sameness of it all.

Now Goodby comes along and starts blogging bluntly. Not about some obscure startup nameplate that runs on green algae instead of gasoline, but perhaps about the most venerable of 'merican automobile brands. This is almost as paradigm shifting as "Arsenic-Based Microbes Challenge Chemistry of Life," is it not?

Like his boss at GM (and at Porsche and Hyundai before that), Joel Ewanick, you get the feeling that Goodby's a really sharp, very likeable guy. The type you wouldn't mind kayaking with in the wilderness, away from cells and emails and reporters on deadline.

The reactions to his column on Twitter that I saw were overwhelmingly positive, running along the lines of "Jeff Goodby doing this type of PR for client on a personal level is quite amazing."

At least two bloggers have commented positively on the column.

"What I liked most about Jeff's response to the hue and cry was his assertion that the most important thing was to just get on with the task at hand," writes Allen Adamson in his Forbes.com log, Brandsimple. He goes on to say that Washington could learn a thing or two from that philosophy.

AdPulp's Dan Goldgeier writes: "Goodby's doing something very smart here ... putting a human face on the 'new' GM, or at least its advertising folks."

Call me a Carbon Bigfoot, but with two adult children, we currently have two Hondas and two Toyotas registered in my household. I couldn't cite an ad for either that has had any influence on me. My choices were made on the brands' reputations for reliability and repairs. Nor did advertising influence my purchase of the three Ford Tauruses we owned in succession in the '90s.

Am I wrong about this? Sure, I know you cannot not advertise a car brand. We ran a story recently about a brand that admitted that its anemic advertising had failed to make any impact on American consumer (but, tellingly, I can't remember the name of the automaker offhand.) But what I've read from Goodby about the process of re-creating the Chevy brand, even in these early stages, makes me want to consider it more than any campaign he could produce.