Sometimes it's best not to campaign it

Saw this Lithuanian ad on I Believe in Advertising, and loved it:

And not just the illustration, either. If you're going to sell urban bikes to their target market, you can't go wrong making fun of the well-heeled but stressed out steel cage drivers.

Then I saw these:

The girl needs some common sense and a cab. The guy needs a day job to wake up to... and possibly a cab. Neither of these latter two ads do anything to sell bikes except reference young adult lifestyles.

Yeah, they look awesome. But why not stop when you're ahead, Love Agency? Not all ideas require tenuously-related sets of three.

F'd Ad Fridays: GM insults cyclists, gets its bumper handed to it

Copyranter posted this phenomenally dumb ad from GM, aimed at college students across the United States.

The culture wars between drivers and cyclists are not something the automotive giant wants to wade into. There are already fights in cities all around North America about new bike lanes on downtown streets.

Just this week, where I live, a cyclist was killed as a result of being doored by a careless parked driver, while the trial opened of a man accused of ploughing into five cyclists in his van in the suburbs two years ago.

And right now, social media networks are full of content like this:

I'm not going to say cars are evil. (My wife owns a car.) And I'm not going to beatify cyclists, because as a pedestrian I have been at the receiving end of near-misses by aggressive riders. But I will say that a goddamn car manufacturer — especially one accused of once trying to destroy public transit in the US — is really endangering its social licence by trying to convince young people that they should be embarrassed not to drive a car.

And now even GM agrees. In response to pressure from cycling advocates and lots of Twitter hate, they have pulled the ad.