What do you folks think of the Lightspeed advertisment showing the road kill that the rider has run over. Personally I thought it’s a bit tacky.
Was out on a ride today with my wife and we came across a dead cat in the middle of the lonely rural road. Had a collar but no tags so was obviously somebodys pet. We stopped and moved it off to the side of the road. Since we own three cats (and a dog) it wasn’t nice.
We realize that road kill is a fact of life, but I feel that the Lightspeed ad is in poor taste. Any other comments.
Agreed, I can’t see how that would possibly motivate anyone to buy a Litespeed. If I were them I would question the capabilities of my advertising/marketing personnel.
Fyi. Without sounding too defensive, the ad was never meant to offend anyone, but apparently it has.
Because we are not a confrontational company we have decided to pull the ad from all publications which are not printed yet.
We’d rather focus our attention on building awesome bikes for great athletes.
Cheers
Herbert
Litespeed
Good move. Lightspeed is an excellent product. That ad would never have prevented me from purchasing a Lightspeed, but I did think it was in poor taste.
Funny you guys are talking about this…I emailed LITESPEED a few weeks ago when I first saw the ad and told them it was somewhat poor taste (especially if you like animals-even rodents!) and received the following response within a half hour:
Hi there,
We are quite sorry that we offended you so much, that was certainly not our goal. But I wanted to let you know that we hear you loud and clear. Because we are not a confrontational company we have decided to pull the ad from all publications which are not printed yet.
We’d rather focus our attention on building the best bikes on the planet.
Sincerely,
Herbert Krabel
I ride every Saturday morning with a woman who gets very upset whenever we come across roadkill. Now, I consider myself pretty sensitive to this sort of thing and I HATE to see dead dogs and cats. But I’ve never really been able to warm up to opossums (you know, that defense mechanism of “playing dead” is really ineffective against cars!), which are usually what we see. And yes, I recognize my species based bigotry, but that’s the way it is.
So, in order to spare us the several minutes of grief and questioning of “why” on every ride (times 4 or 5), I have been encouraging her to just not look. Well, I was until I noticed she was closing her eyes. Now I am trying to encourage her to AVERT her eyes instead. Sigh.
Anyway, if she saw one of those ads, she would definitely never buy one of your bikes.
Let me first say that I ride a Litespeed and am sponsored by them. I guess it’s a requirement to do this. With that being said when I first saw the ad I really didn’t know what to think. I then showed it to my wife and she said that it was gross. I tried to sway her into the ads thinking about how hard it would be to hit a squirrel because they are so fast and jittery. She didn’t buy it.
Glad that Herbert set the record straight. I knew they would. The QR ad about the wetsuit is top notch. Herbert, who is that swimming in the ad? Just curious. Next time you need a wetsuit model give me a shout!
I thought it was funny as hell. I must admit that at the time I saw it I was in a sling because I had just been taken out by a cat. I had visions of the cat in place of that possum.
Everybody walks a fine line with advertising. Edgy ads can bite back. They can be (mis)interpreted in any number of ways.
In general, Lightspeed’s ads have been at least good, sometimes truly great. They were taking a chance with the ad and it didn’t pan out 100%, but I know there was no advocation of hitting animals in the road there.
We thought long and hard before we put a photo of a young female posing provactively in triathlon clothing on our website. The image is not lewd or suggestive in any way- by even the most conservative interpretation. However, we knew it was a risk and may compromise our credibilty. But then again, it could also acheive the desired result of spreading the word that we have a new changing room and a lot of new apparel, especially for women.
It worked. Our apparel sales (especially Cervelo apparel) spiked a little and our web traffic soared: The day before the woman’s photo was posted we recorded 2,380 unique visitors at the main entry point of the page. The following day, with the woman’s photo up, we went up to 3,668 unique visitors. When we changed the photo to “click to make bigger” 1,580 visitors clicked on the photo to enlarge it.
Sometimes a little advertsing risk works, sometimes it backfires. It is almost never ill-intentioned.
…I didn’t think it was offensive - I was able to see the humor in it.
The market should ultimately decide what is and isn’t right…
“There is no such thing as bad publicity” - to quote someone famous
…look at Richard Branson of Virgin…that guy does more outrageous and border-line lewd things than anyone does and…well, he owns an island.
I’m fine with the ad…at least the ad wasn’t placed next to an article written about how the bike is the most aerodynamic ever tested, when, in fact, it was not tested…or any of the other oft-ranted about tri-mag subjects.
The 4yr old with shaving was classic and lived on my fridge for sevaral months.
I’ll agree that the ad was over the line and hopefully we aren’t out killing rodents, but after having a squirrel almost commit suicide into my wheel yesterday (we’re talking inches), it’s bound to happen.
Regardless of cause, any dead item on the road is points eligible for a ‘Daniel Boone Prime’. One not only has to out sprint the other guys, one has to jump over some part of the road pizza without touching. Morbid for sure, but it certainly keeps one focused on the road ahead! Just make sure you clear the skunks!