WHERE HAVE ALL THE WITTY ADS GONE?
Bemoans the passing of the brilliant petrosexual car adverts of the past as electric vehicles loom
Whether on television or in print, I haven’t noticed a great car advert in a while. Have you? Admittedly this topic is a swamp of diverse tastes, ideology, target audiences, brand ethos and the war of sexes. Regardless of risk, please move aside. I’m diving in. A car advert is a complex undertaking, more so when it involves any of the million garden varieties of cars. It’s easier for performance cars. They snort, scream and make smoke while going sideways; all the fiery ingredients needed to craft a terrific car ad. Look to the roaring past before Google, Twitter and Instagram. Ad agencies filled our screens with exciting and entertaining ads all round, some even featuring legendary wheelsmen like Sarel van der Merwe flaunting the smoky business end of a performance car. Borrowing from modern colloquialism — it was lit!
The quintessential car advert has evolved rapidly into a mind-numbing, unimaginative moment in time. The old way was great. Simpler times meant better adverts. The gist was translated in clarified, memorable simplicity. Unforgettable car adverts include Continental Tyres’ where an Opel Kadett is driven ragged on a makeshift road course atop a skyscraper — making heart-stopping braking manoeuvres so precariously close to the edge you’d jump out of the sofa. There’s a couple more too; Opel’s treasured and famous dig at the ribs of Volkswagen with the famous: “It’s better than Golf” — and Volkswagen feigning ignorance, focusing instead on building a Volk led by guitar-slayer David Kramer. You can find many of these on the internet.
But as far as great car ads go, few have trumped BMW’s efforts — the sensational 1998 TV and magazine campaign for its manic E39 BMW M5 and the township slang campaign of 2009 to market MINI to black folk. Magazine readers too were treated to epic wit on paper and bravery from BMW. Double-page spreads showed a clandestinely shot Ferrari front-end with the menacing Cavallino Rampante — the Italian marque’s official Prancing Horse logo — brazenly replaced by a grazing donkey instead, and leaving the humorous insinuations to your imagination. These days incredible ads are defined by incredible Photoshop skills, ha! Clever copywriting has long left the building.
So what happened? The first tragedy is budget. It has become absurdly expensive to create adverts locally thanks to global cost compression. Brand adverts are now shared worldwide. Intensified road-safety awareness campaigns have long judged petrosexuality as sin and thus irresponsible images of burning rubber are banished to the annals of history or to a secluded corner in Boksburg, Eldos and Zola, resulting in the monotonous car stuff we are being fed. Besides, this seamlessly fits into moves to steer humanity to view cars with the same eye as a spatula.
The other tricky elephant — no, rather I use “rhino in the room” as this equally hard-to-hide and near extinct animal needs the support more — is advertising for a Rainbow nation. Should a local agency brave the murky waters, how do they deal with the stubborn industry semantics? Do they maintain the standard and use white faces or do they go with demographic correctness and deploy black faces?
The boldest and most calculating of car brands have long hacked somewhat of a path through this cactus field and sadly, most if not all of the noble work has resulted in boring, humourless or witless ads, or at the worst, utterly condescending whisperings. No advert offends me like that which involves one puzzled-looking black person asking another supposedly beaming and “woke” peer; “What car is that?” – The assumption being people can’t read the bold name glued on its rump. “It’s the new blah-blah-blah!” they’ll retort with invoiced pride. This is creativity at its pathetic worst, ditto filming a moving car and simply layering it with a catchy tune with the hope that it catches on. The latter works only if the concept was fantastic to begin with, otherwise you are going to annoy people — itself another way of effective marketing. Wait, perhaps this is the strategy — to annoy us into submission.
However, despite silent protest from anti-transformation proponents in the industry the osmosis in advertising is in full swing. Aside from the foolish stereotyping and dinosaur-era convictions; clever, fresher, demographically, social and era-specific works are on the rise. Positive self-reflection of different groups is fast conquering the understandably archaic but now expired ideology that white faces must always lead.
Hyundai’s latest Tucson ad is a brilliant step in the right direction. It’s not about tyre shredding, but it’s beautifully abstract and filled with the altruism South Africa is in desperate need of. The advert shines the torch on a number of raw modern South African realities such as; the age of free and artistic expressionism; avant-gardism; tranquillity and interracial love.
But I have to be realistic. The electric revolution is here and any hope of a riveting car ad by my standards is long gone. I can’t imagine a car powered by a row of Duracell AAA setting fire to my soul. For now, though, as I mature and mellow, the ad people at Hyundai have offered a palatable perspective of calmfilled petrosexuality that begins with nonjudgmental love, bearded masculinity and satisfied femininity in a Feng-shui decorated home. Whether I opt for the pretty SUV or a hybrid AMG is now third- or fourth-level priority.
Clever copywriting has long left the building
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