Someone at Toyota, Saatchi thought cyber-stalking was a good marketing idea

In order to market its then-new Matrix model, Saatchi & Saatchi proposed and Toyota OK’d a campaign whereby people who “opted-in” would get “e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew [the person] and where [he/she lived] and was coming to [his/her] home to hide from the police.” And oh, by the way, the participants were entered into the event by people who wanted to set up friends to be "punked."

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Plenty. So much that Amber Duick of LA has filed suit against the carmaker over emotional distress caused by being on the receiving end of the stunt.

Although Bowler did not have Duick’s current address, he sent her links to his My Space page as well as links to video clips of him causing trouble all over the country on his way to her former house in Los Angeles, according to the lawsuit.  "Amber mate! Coming 2 Los Angeles. Gonna lay low at your place for a bit till it all blows over," the man wrote in one e-mail.

You may not have thought it possible, but it gets even stupider.

Duick’s attorney said the marketing company went so far as to send Duick a bill for damages the fictitious man supposedly made to a hotel room. "Amber, ran into a little problem at the hotel," a note with the invoice stated. "After I’m done visiting you, I’m going to go back and sort out that front desk Muppet."

The company’s defense? “Well, she did agree to the opt-in.” Said opt-in was buried in an emailed “personality test” which contained a link to a web page allegedly explaining what was going to happen. Duick’s lawyer characterizes the explanatory note as “indecipherable.” This point seems reasonable as you could hardly expect to punk someone who knows what’s coming.

The entire thing begs two questions:

• WTF was someone smoking when he/she OK’d this?
• What the hell was the campaign supposed to accomplish?

Saatchi & Saatchi told the marketing magazine OMMA last year that it had developed the campaign to target men under 35 who hate advertising. The prank campaign, Saatchi creative director Alex Flint told the magazine, should gain the appreciation from "even the most cynical, anti-advertising guy.

HUH? How the hell does this actually sell the product? It sure as hell isn’t going to make anyone less cynical or anti-advertising. I want to ask did it ever once occur to anyone that even “men under 35” have been known to have problematic people in their lives – but we already know the answer.

Sadly this campaign is excluded for this year’s list of Top 10 (or so) marketing blunders as it took place in 2008. However, I suspect it may receive a special citation from a certain special interest group.

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Toyota reports first loss in 70 years — They made money in 1946?

Toyota — which is the best-run company in the world that isn’t P&G — yesterday announced it will have an operating loss for 2008 of $1.66 billion (or about what GM loses every week). They also announced this was the first time in 70 years it  lost money.

Toyota, which started in business as a loom maker, began making trucks and passenger cars in 1937. Its first and only operating loss came the following year, before it started reporting formal results in 1941.

Other people immediately asked the same question I did: How did they manage to report a profit (or break even) in 1945-47?

Mother nature takes action against global warming: Bull attacks Ford Explorer

Mabel Washburn pulled into her driveway in upstate New York only to be attacked by the enraged bovine. Maybe it, too, prefers Toyota.

Headline of the day: GM Vows to Defend Title Against Toyota

I’ll give the points and take the visiting Japanese for this one. What’s the over/under?

Group says Exxon paid $16M to mislead public; GM doing it for free

The Union of Concerned Scientists claims the oil co. paid groups to spread bad science about global warming.

Color me bitter and cynical but … there’s people who didn’t know that? Everyone remembers the tobacco industry’s efforts at “science,” right? You think they were the only ones who did this?

Meanwhile over at GM (motto: “Remember when we mattered?”), Honcho Bob Lutz says government plans to raise  fuel economy standards will “hand over” the truck and SUV markets to the Japanese.

Under CAFE rules, automakers earn credits for surpassing the fuel-economy standards in a model year. Those credits can then be used to cover a shortfall in the following three years. Many foreign automakers, such as Toyota and Honda, routinely surpass the standards, while GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler have used credits in recent years. The Japanese automakers “have earned years of accumulated credits from their fleets of formerly very small cars,” Lutz said. “They can afford to go bigger, which they’re doing now by the way, and they’d be able to move up and fill the segments we’d be forced to vacate.”

So the argument is that the competition somehow cheated by making cars with better gas mileage when GM wasn’t?

Nor is this the only interesting moment of logic from Mr. L:

Lutz compared the attempt to force automakers to sell smaller vehicles to “fighting the nation’s obesity problem by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell garments only in small sizes. For one thing, it puts us, the domestic manufacturers, at odds with the desires of most of our customers,” he said.

Would those be the same customers who bought 13% fewer GM and Ford cars and light trucks last month than they had a year earlier? Or would those be the customers who pushed Toyota’s December sales up 12% from the previous year?