Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Bus Rage Ad - GREYHOUND regrets being too flippant

You just have to feel sorry for GREYHOUND CANADA. They were doing everything they could to polish their image among Canadian Youth - cleaning up their stinky depots, showing movies on board buses, their drivers were ignoring discrete drug use among passengers... yadda, yadda ... and then an undiagnosed mental case steps onto a Greyhound coach and blows their whole deal. If you Google "greyhound victim" today you won't get a dog-biting story. You will get over 3000 stories about murder and cannibalism.

GREYHOUND's ill fated "Bus Rage" Ad. Being a tad flippant
may work for Bloggers but it can be a killer mistake in the business world.

GREYHOUND tooled along complacently for years without much of an attempt to promote its brand. Then last year the Dallas based bus company hired a hot shot advertising firm Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners of Sausalito, California, to get them some attention. (BSS&P is the team which created William Shatner's "The Negotiator" TV ads.) They put together a multi-million dollar broadcast, print and billboard advertising campaign for GREYHOUND which was crafted to "bring back former customers and attract new riders between 18 and 24, and Hispanics".
The blitz started in December 2007 and it seemed to be effective. GREYHOUND'S Canadian division ran the Ads without a second thought. It was true! Canadians had never heard of "Bus Rage" although it has become a common term in England, and to a lesser extent in Australia and even the Philippines.

You might want to copy the Ad for your own file because it's disappearing very fast. Five years from now urban anthropologists will interview people who swear they saw it, while others will claim it is an Urban Myth.

He is Canada's latest obsession in our Criminal of the Month Club. Vincent Weiguang Li doesn't look crazy, but he is. By beheading his victim in public and eating body parts in front of policemen he set a new low for satanic behaviour. Who or what will top this horror?

Bad luck, rotten luck, the worst kind of luck. Tim McLean was a fun loving young guy with a Marvin Martian tattoo, who loved everyone. He didn't have an enemy in the world. And that is why his horrible death has Canadians feeling so, so very bad for his family and friends.

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