Skip to footer

Clint Eastwood in Top 6 Super Bowl 2012 car commercials (+video)

6. Chevy Happy Grad

  • By David Clark Scott Staff

A canary yellow Camero as a high-school graduation gift?

It doesn't get any better than this. But it could get worse - if your parents actually gave you a mini-fridge.

This is hands down my favorite: Original, engaging, and funny. And it was shot by an aspiring Long Island filmmaker, 26-year old Zach Borst. Zach's entry "Chevy Happy Grad" was chosen as the winner of Chevy's "Route 66" Super Bowl ad contest. Filmmakers from 32 countries submitted 400 scripts and 198 films for consideration. The winner gets $25,000 and their ad shown at the Super Bowl. Chevy has four other ads it plans to air, but this is a gem.

“We asked filmmakers to depict life’s journey and how Chevrolet is there along the way,” Joel Ewanick, GM’s global chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “When I saw Zach’s spot, I had to laugh because the situation is something many families can relate to—expectation and reality.”

Zach shot the ad in four hours in Floral Park, N.Y. He says he was inspired by his Dad, a cop, who worked hard to buy each of his children their first (used) car. "I wondered: What would it look like if I got a brand new Camaro?" he told Ad Week.

6 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.