• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, January 14, 2016

I watch football differently than I once did. I used to shut out all distractions not involving aorta-constricting foodstuffs, because watching football was an experience as pure and beautiful as midnight snow. Now, after careful application of the moral/ethical blinders necessary to consume football in the CTE era, I sit down with the kids and answer their questions (“can Tom Coughlin hear you when you yell at him?,” “does that word mean what I think it means?”) as the action unfolds. When the kids dart off to play or nap, I fold laundry. YOLO, man, YOLO.

Thus it was a towering marketing achievement when one of my takeaways from last weekend’s playoff games was, “What the dickens were all those GMC spots about?” The carmaker bought something like 3,200 minutes worth of media across four networks, which it apportioned out in 10-second teases. Each played like a snippet from a student art film, all slo-mo and glimmery and tightly shot. Were they set to the amorphous slink of ambient music? Of course they were.

For a pricey watch or an exotic vacation destination - hell, for a luxury sedan - this might’ve been a clever approach. Unfortunately, the specific product that the ads teased is the GMC Sierra Denali, a gargantuan chaw-chompin’ landmass of a vehicle that, for reasons unknown, the company wants to brand as the un-truck. Instead of calling attention to its 72,000 cubic feet of legroom or an engine that packs the drive of a classroom of AP Calculus students, GMC instead presents us with super-close-ups of the machine’s grill and headlights.

While the clips look way cool to someone, like me, with no interest in what’s essentially a land yacht, I sense zero potential appeal to truck people. Truck people, it was famously noted by either Glen Campbell or Baudelaire, love trucks. They love their size, their volume, their proud lack of subtlety. They do not care much for the frills, which are generally viewed as incidental to the bulk and bluster.

So heaven knows how they responded to the Sierra Denali teases and the longer brand videos to which those teases pointed them. The clip focusing on the tri-mode power steps affords only glimpses of the steps (and no explanation of what the company means by “tri-mode”). The clip on the signature chrome grill yammers about “the precision of electroplating” rather than focusing on what prospective buyers might want to know (“is the horn sufficiently assertive as to induce seizures in passersby?”).

By the time you get to the abstract images in the magnetic ride control clip, which might fairly be described as a bunch of tiny silver beads group-humping, you lose even the most basic sense of what you’re watching/being sold. It’s like, where’s the big truck? I just want to see the big truck! Mommy, why won’t they show me the big truck?

Only in the most traditional of the videos, the one on Bose active noise cancellation, does GMC succeed in differentiating the Sierra Denali from the competition. Through what feat of dark magic does it achieve this goal, you ask? By actually giving us a glimpse of the truck’s interior.

Turns out that the Sierra Denali has a fine-looking cabin, one so neatly and elegantly appointed that it could sell itself. To recap: In the interest of touting the model’s luxury bona fides, GMC doesn’t bother to call attention to its most alluring asset.

I know I end columns on this note all the time, but really: Marketers, stop overthinking this stuff. If you’re selling a car and the car’s cabin is pretty and luxurious, show us the pretty, luxurious cabin. Once you rope us in, feel free to rhapsodize to your heart’s content about the smooth engine sound and the deer-blinding LED headlights and whatever else. This shouldn’t be so hard.