Nobody clings to their youth harder than Bret Michaels, Nissan’s new favorite shill!
Sometimes, a beloved and respected musical artist dilutes their credibility by shilling for a car company. Fortunately, this is not one of those times. Sure, there’s a ton of shilling going on here, but it just so happens that whatever credibility Bret Michaels may have once possessed went out the window right around the time the second season of Rock of Love started lensing.
Instead of going the route of embarrassing a reputable musician in the name of branding, Nissan has tapped Poison frontman Bret Michaels–who is fully capable of embarrassing himself–to star in their new “Tough Love” ad campaign, which promotes Nissan commercial vans with the slogan “The tougher we test them, the more you love them.”
In a recently released four-minute music video set at the Nissan Testing Facility in Stanfield, Arizona, Michaels puts the NV line of full-size vans through rigorous tests, while serenading the vehicles with his rendition of the 80’s Lionel Richie classic “Endless Love.” (Because honestly, whose love could be more “endless” than a man who let twenty-five women compete for his affections each year on a reality television show that ran for three consecutive seasons?)
Pictured: the standard sanitation procedure one must endure before exiting Michaels’ bedroom
There are also some decidedly less enjoyable videos in which Michaels relates tales from his own life to the tests that Nissan conducts. For example, the salt spray test reminds him of growing up in Pittsburgh, when the floorboard of his family’s car rusted out and blah, blah, blah.
At the conclusion of the video, Michaels told the NV200 that it was truly the love of his life.
The ad’s narrator then claims that the salt test is just one of “6,600 brutal tests” that Nissan subjects their commercial vans to. Fortunately, there are not 6,600 brutal stories from Bret Michaels about growing up in Pittsburgh that Nissan subjects us to, but we do get six, and that’s more than enough torture to last us for a lifetime.
And while we’re on the theme of punishment (and since sticking with an article about Bret Michaels for this long might suggest that you are a glutton for it), we proudly present four minutes of Bret Michaels singing, best heard on mute. It will make your love of music recede faster than Bret Michaels’ hairline beneath that probably-glued-to-his-forehead headband.
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