We've all seen those television commercials where a studio cast family happily enjoys its life around the family sedan. The ones where guys in hardhats drive through construction sites with manly looking piles of 2x4s stuffed into the back are ubiquitous, too.
Subaru decided to go a different route by casting someone who actually owns one of their cars in a commercial aired on Discovery. Josh Flure, a mountain biking, Jalopnik reading, rock climbing, white water rafting adventurer, starred in a Subaru commercial that claims, in a roundabout way, that a Subaru will support that lifestyle. Having lived in the outdoor sports paradise of Colorado for the better part of the last year, it's pretty clear that outdoor sports junky types who don't drive pickup trucks often drive Subarus — they're everywhere.
Although my outdoor adventurist cred is somewhat shaky, I drive one myself. As a matter of fact, before I even thought about working for Jalopnik, I submitted a picture of my '86 Subaru GL wagon to the Dear Subaru campaign. It took the ad agency in charge of the campaign two years to get it out in print, but you may have seen my car — with a bicycle and surfboards on the roof — in issues of Bicycling, Backpacking, Audubon, and Yoga Journal this summer.
I was paid zero for it because, as Subaru explained, legal reasons prevented them from paying anyone. I might have been suckered there.
My mother has already begun making color copies of the ad to stick in her neighbors' mailboxes, but only because they bitched about their property values going down when I parked it in the neighborhood while I was attending school in a place where having a car is a huge pain in the ass.
It doesn't look like Josh will have that problem with his shiny new-baru, and it's cool to see a fellow Subie aficionado hit the airwaves like that.