Volvo Ad

Lol, pretty silly if you ask me. I've never heard the voice of Branson but it simply doesn't fit in the commercial. Let alone the lif-off of the rocket. Why don't they use some ss1 footage?

The problem is that the Super Bowl is a huge hype-fest. The 1-2 week* gap between the conference title games and the Super Bowl is filled with inane talk. Then, the day of the game, the talking-heads go nuts pretty much from sunrise to kickoff. It's pretty easy to lose all track of time in the deluge. Compound that with the possibility that a good percentage of the viewers are completely liquored up by kickoff, and it's not too hard to see why the time span would be in question.

Unfortunately, I suppose a great many non-fans would judge the sport by what they're most likely to see of it, which is the Super Bowl.. and more often than not, the Super Bowl is one of the most boring games of the season if you're not a fan of one of the teams playing. (and the talking-head deluge doesn't help) Even the Super Bowl "my" team played in was in all honesty not that exciting, with "my" team winning 48-21 in a blowout.


Now, back to the topic, since I'm not all that big on talking about sports. I wasn't impressed with the ad. Nothing about it made me think about a chance to ride in SS1 or whatever version they intend to fly. Other than being a bigger symbol of power and what not, why even show a Saturn V in a commercial partially about a chance to win a ride on a civilian spaceflight?

Amusingly, as I was typing this out on one PC, I loaded an article on space.com on the other PC and got a large ad for the same thing.. more of the Saturn rocket, and then the Volvo, and the talk of winning. I just don't see the connection very well, beyond what I stated above. As ad campaigns go, I don't think this is a very good one.. but it doesn't yet seem bad enough that it could be any sort of negative impact.


* -- 1 week in the case of my favorite team that went a couple years ago, but now 2 weeks is apparently the mandatory gap between the two conference championship games and the Super Bowl.. even if that violates the old unwritten rule that the game should be held in January. Don't ask, I have no idea why that even mattered..

Ah, but I don't claim to know anything about football; I just threw out my own idea that I might possible have heard somewhere when half-asleep from somebody's second cousin three times removed that a football game takes two hours, +/- 1hr.

Volvo has their ad on the AIM front page as well. Much to my surprise, I signed on this afternoon to see this:



Interesting but yes, I was quite confused by the NASA ground control countdown and the Saturn launch.

Not knowing much about football isn't a crime, contrary to what most football fans would lead you to believe.

Four hours, five hours, six hours.. I think I explained how it could seem like ten or twelve hours.. heh.

Reaction to suggeted Ad change:

"Why is that funny little plane in the ad? I thought you were supposed to win a trip space. You can't go to space in a plane. That's whats wrong with the Space Shuttle, it looks to much like a plane and thats why it explodes. Na rockets are supposed to look like Apollo, you know, the moon rocket. Yah, now those thing are SAFE. One exploded but everyone made it home safe anyway. I think there was a movie about it..."

Remember the ad played during the *SuperBowl*.

Hey, watch it! Even some rocket scientists occaisonally watch football!

Volvo are a weird company. They have just started to make some half decent looking cars instead of those horrible boxes and then they start with the crap adverts! The one's they are running here are so cringe-worthy you wouldn't want to be seen in their products (life on board project?). Still, they make fine jet engines so there is no doubting their technical expertise. It is a Volvo engine in the Bae/SAAB Gripen.
Regarding the timescale of American Football games, it now makes sense why the squads are so large and the high number of substitutions permitted! But why the engine oil under the eyes!? WHY!? WHY!?

Supposedly it helps take away glare during daytime games, ya know the whole black absorbs light thing? SUPPOSEDLY... However if you ever see american football players wearing it in a night game, feel free to slap them, they are only doing it to look 'intimidating.'

Not necessarily, The game lasts so long that there is no guarantee that a night game wont finish in daylight.

Probably explains why there are so many team members also, they probably have to run a shift system to get to the end of a match.

Well thats a bit of an overstatement I think the only way a game would start in the dark and end in the light would be if it started at 4:30 in the morning

COuldn't expect all those highly paid Athletes to get up that early. Mind you they probably couldn't see properly in the dark to but their engine oil makeup on.