Commercial Disasters

Ian Eveleigh's been watching too much TV...

By PH Staff / Wednesday, 18 June 2003 / Loading comments

You and your partner are in your late twenties. You're both pretty things and snappy dressers, and you like to get out and about and have fun – y'know, drinking in street-side cafés after dark, jumping in fountains, that kind of thing. Your car is an essential part of this way of life, so what, as the funky young couple around town, should you choose as fitting transport? A cheeky Mini? A stylishly alternative Smart? A sporty little two-seater, maybe? Nope, not according to the ad makers. They reckon you should choose a Laguna. "Serious playtime" they assure us.

If we were talking Clio I could accept it. Now Nicole, her papa and their French-busker-plays-Robert Palmer theme tune have deserted us, it wouldn't seem at all inappropriate to reinforce the little hatch's cheap 'n' cheerful values with such an ad. But the Laguna? It's a car that's so grown up it leaves the factory wearing a grey moustache.

Box Shifting

Clearly the agency who dreamt up this masterpiece thought that a car could be treated just like any other commodity; like the packets of frozen stir-fry vegetables it was trying to shift the previous month. Hand-pick a couple of actors who look how your target customers wish they could look, show the quality of their lives being improved by the product during the ad break in the middle of Friends, then sit back and watch the sales chart go Himalayan. It would probably have worked too, but for one thing: even to the untrained eye the big Renault looks about as enjoyable as boiled cabbage.

You can see what they were trying to achieve, though. Check out Nissan's ad for its X-TRAIL, which suggests that such a vehicle would be the perfect partner for your active, outdoor sports-y leisure time. It's a cunning approach, because it allows some actually-rather-dull shots of the forgettable 4x4 to be interspersed with disparate, pulse-raising images of rock climbing, white water rapids canoeing and, if I remember correctly, hare coursing. Of course, if the ad were the reality then the vehicle would only meet the requirements of three people, all of whom already own an Impreza with a roof-rack. But it's far more intriguing than telling the truth: here's another big off-roader with which you can intimidate the lesser school run traffic.

Style

Yet at least when you're trying to sell cars to people who aren't really interested in cars you've got the lifestyle angle to play with. When it comes to performance cars your potential customers may not give a stuff about the image – they just want to know if it goes or not. And that's where the problems start. Just ask MG, who had its newspaper ads pulled by the Advertising Standards Authority for merely hinting that (lock up your children!) its motors are capable of making progress in an entertainingly rapid fashion if provoked.

You see, speed is bad. Especially in TV commercials, where cars no longer possess 0-to-60 times or top speeds. If they can't tell us about it, the motoring Mary Whitehouses believe, then we'll stop desiring it. Well, it worked with cigarettes, didn't it?

Speed

It's a ludicrous situation. Especially when the car in question is one that is likely to be purchased purely for its performance. Witness the current ad for the Jaguar S-type R, which features a soundtrack stolen from a pre-launch mission control commentary accompanied by suggestive close-ups of some of the car's details (hmm, those taillights do look like rocket flames if you've had five pints and you squint a bit...). Only in the final shot do we see the S-type in full, travelling in a straight line to the explosive sound of lift-off – but with the image played in slow motion so that you can't quite tell if it was being nailed or just doing 35mph in real-time. Cunningly, though, a backing track by Sting is suspiciously absent from this particular Jaguar ad, which does give the impression that the pace is being upped somewhat.

But car commercials needn't always be a clumsy cocktail of the clichéd and the contrived. Just take a look at the efforts from some of the German manufacturers for proof of that – ads that ask you to use a brain cell or two, tinged with dry humour, smugness an optional extra.

For the ultimate in car advertising look no further than the self-proclaimed maker of ultimate driving machines, BMW, who chose to side-step the boring restrictions placed upon adverts broadcast by conventional means by releasing a series of hardcore mini action movies by top directors via the Internet. It's expensive stuff, and you'll pay for it at the showroom. At least you'll be safe in the knowledge that you won't be embarrassed by your new purchase later - when a BMW advertising executive bumps into Griff Rhys Jones at a dinner party and has a bright idea for your chosen model's next ad campaign...

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