Sounds like a college football team from Illinois.

Okay. Remember the brilliant mashed-up G.I. Joe P.S.A.s I was talking about last year?

If you need reminding, here's a link to the first one.

Go look at it. Then come back.

Great huh?

Now go check out this.

What do they have in common?

Well, you just saw the Cease and Desist letter Hasbro issued to Fensler, and VW is suing the makers of the faux-spot.

What neither of those companies seem to have grasped is how helpful those copyright infringements are. Most of us know this, although we also recognize and understand why a company would like to distance itself from both Dada, absurdist, polysexual riffs on their wholesome property and suicide bombers respectively. Not good for the image.

But, from an advertising point of view, these spots work. The logic is simple, classic ad-think: Fensler's films implant G.I. Joe in the mind of anyone who watches them. You might think you're impervious to that, but if you've watched 26 P.S.A.s, each of which ends with the branded logo and (slightly warped) jingle, you start thinking about G.I. Joe. You start talking about G.I. Joe. You start showing them to other people and they start thinking and talking about G.I. Joe. And so on. And some day, perhaps in haste to get a gift for your nephew who's in town from Nebraska, you run to your local Toys Super Store atrocity and you think "oh shit, what the hell am I going to buy Little Jimmy, I have no fucking clue what he wants" and you reach for the first thing you think of, and the first thing you think of just might be G.I. Joe.

That's all pretty much Advertising 101 stuff, but it works, and companies that are gifted such rare opportunities would probably do better to just issue a little hollow public huffing and puffing, maybe a statement decrying the bad taste of the artist, and then do nothing.

Hasbro clearly doesn't agree.

The issue is a little more sticky with VW; less easy to dismiss VW's complaint. No matter how funny or shocking the spot, there's no getting away from the association with terrorism. However, you'd have to be an idiot to actually believe that the spot implies that VW endorses suicide bombers.

VW's legal team clearly doesn't agree.

No matter which side you take, the end result is that this spot has done a tremendous amount of work for VW, getting the logo and name out to an incalculable number of people. Even perhaps tens of thousands of people like myself who are largely unreachable by most mainstream media. As I see it, even if VW does find the spot deeply objectionable, and even if a consensus emerges that the spot is tasteless or offensive, it's still performing an advertising service that no media buy could ever perform.

So yes Hasbro and VW: get all indignant, make a stink, even threaten lawsuits. Then, when the public's attention turns to the next great scandal, forget anything happened, and hire those guys to do your marketing.

Anyone that bright and creative is too good to lose.

...

Here is your reward for reading to the end.