Skiilight Interactive – Seattle Marketing, Web Design, and Graphic Design

My favorite advertising of recent weeks has been the rebirth of Sprint as a company selling “now.” Formerly known as the cell provider your dad has through work, Sprint appears to be appealing to a graphically-motivated purchaser with its upcoming iPhone competitor, the Palm Pre.

With this new look, comes a new tagline: “The Now Network.”

In addition to the great new commercials concentrating on “nowness,” Sprint has rolled out banner ads that receive (or appear to receive) data in real time, showing things occurring “now.”

The Sprint microsite also “receives now”- which is just a branded way to say gathers aggregated content.

The Sprint commercials remind me of one of my favorite commercials of all time, this Areva spot (shown here in its french version)

While Sprint appears to be moving in the right direction, we have another company dropping like a hot potato no one wants to touch. With consumer confidence in all things GM at an all-time low, reassurances from Saturn simply don’t hold water. All major news outlets report that GM is trying to sell Saturn and if there are no buyers, look for closure of the brand and a GM bankruptcy. “We’re still here” just isn’t going to cut it.

Meanwhile, a very plain-speaking video explaining what GM plans to do to save itself is buried on its corporate page.

So, the question is, which GM do you believe? The one who still thinks Saturn will be around in a few years or the one that says they’re closing nameplates? Honesty is always the best policy, especially when no one will believe that the “still here” Saturn will be that way for much longer.