Raising awareness

Unlike 114.4 million other people I didn't watch the Super Bowl this year (long story, mostly because I don't own a TV), which means I didn't see any of the ads until afterward - the most noteworthy of them being the surprise unveiling of the new Nissan Maxima (and the slightly-less-surprising-at-that-point, if still deeply weird, GT-R LM). After the first few slightly fuzzy screenshots got posted, my curiosity was piqued and I pulled up the full commercial.

Oh, dear.

Even a few days later I remain utterly baffled by this ad: what its deliberate marketing intention is, what thematic connection it has to Nissan's showroom products, what positive statements it's trying to say about anything.

Past that, as the son of a man who was spent a significant amount of my childhood away on business trips and with whom I had an extremely complex relationship up until he died of cancer fifteen years ago, this took me on an unwelcome trip to some pretty dark places. I can only imagine how many other people likewise got a nasty kick in the consciousness from the whole "#withdad" thing. Quick note: I prefer my car ads to somehow concentrate on cars, not subliminally suggest that I might still need therapy to deal with unresolved personal issues.

At the very least Nissan and ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day spared us ghastly M. Night Shyamalan twists, and they didn't directly insult our intelligence or preferences, and it seems like this one fit in with what turned out to be a flock of other similarly downbeat ads this year. (And on a really extended conjecture, I wonder if this little film gives us a clue about whether the wife of Patrick Dempsey, professional actor, maybe eventually realized that she was actually the wife of Patrick Dempsey, professional racer, and because of that is therefore now the ex-wife of Patrick Dempsey, professional racer. But I digress.)

Even appreciating that and glossing over the bad vibes for many in the audience (and it would take a year's production from PPG to come up with that much gloss), it's hard to get past the fact that this is a really, really horrible car ad. It offers Nissan as a sponsor of emotionally strained families and distant father-son relationships. It makes racing - and Nissan's involvement in racing - look flatly sociopathic. And, worst of all, the cars themselves are reduced to mere props. They're secondary at best to the storyline. Nissan paid for the ad (handsomely, apparently), but I don't see how it's about their vehicles.

At this point, fine, it's time to eject Jim Croce from my mental sound system and write this thing off as an expensive lapse of judgement on someone's part and get on with it all. But I guess underlying all of this is a very literal take on a modern cliche: What were they thinking?

Not joking, not dismissing: What was the idea here, how was it developed, why did enough of the right people agree to this without realizing what they were making?

Look, I understand: The people who craft vehicle-related advertising to appear in the modern media multiverse are devoted to an immensely complicated and delicate task, working to promote a product whose appeal must combine the objective and subjective and pragmatic and romantic to a degree unique in the sphere of consumer goods - and to deeply varying degrees from product to product. They must come up with a production that manages to stake and hold a place in someone's thoughts, something increasingly difficult in this everyday life. They must also answer to marketers, to lawyers, to accountants, and to their own ability to create something.

That said, the general quality of automotive advertising has always seemed a bit less than brilliant. Maybe it's an understandable conservatism and apprehensiveness on the part of people effectively risking millions and millions of dollars, maybe it's just entrenched Detroit-style attitudes about the way things have always been, maybe it's Sturgeon's revelation at work, but car ads are rarely inspiring.

More insidiously, there are certain issues that occur in vehicle advertising over and over that do significant, if subliminal, damage to both any single effort to promote a high-quality well-engineered product and to the field as a whole.

It's little things. And it's stuff that should never have become common. And it's all quickly, eminently correctable.

I'm not going to do a full orthodox David Ogilvy-style list of rules for how to do a proper successful ad, mostly because I'm not David Ogilvy. However, I would like to offer a few simple suggestions to those in the system for creating a more appealing ad versus one that subtly pisses me off:

- Be deeply mindful of the images your work is explicitly showing and implicitly inducing. That little Nissan fiasco is its own case, but there have been way too many other episodes of advertising hyperbole and strangeness-by-association that go past reasonable limits or in really odd directions - think the MTV overkill of the Plymouth Duster or Infiniti's original Zen poems. A personal favorite was in a brochure for some mid-'90s Oldsmobile sedan that described engine output as feeling like "an avalanche of honey." Maybe it's me, but I don't find the appeal in powerplant characteristics exemplified by the Blob.

- Use complete sentences and proper grammar. Sentence fragments are irritating, as are comma splices. Have enough respect for your readers or viewers to use language properly. Trust that they will read or listen through well-written copy of the sort that used to make Volkswagen and Honda and Porsche ads so effective. (On the flip side, trust that people who will read through well-written copy are the sort of intelligent and discerning people you want as customers.)

Look! Words! (More legible original here.)

- Comparisons to other vehicles should be kept to a minimum, if done at all. The product should be able to speak for itself without inducing a sort of distasteful keeping-up-with-the-Joneses insecurity in the proposition. If I hear one more exclamation about how Product F or Product C has X more features and better mileage than Camry or Accord, that manufacturer is off of my purchase list for life. Also, why remind your potential customers of how the competition is a respectable benchmark? (This rule may perhaps be reconsidered in serious objective cases like full-size pickup towing ratings, but again, discretion is the better part of valor.)

- And for the love of all that is good in the civilized world, stop trying to be down with the hip street lingo. There is a real perceptible difference between writing something that is psychologically accessible to young adult customers and writing something that is the equivalent of a fifty-year-old account exec trying to rap during the office Christmas party.

Yes, this really happened.

The purchase of any vehicle is a significant act of identification and faith on the part of a buyer. Respect the buyer, respect the car, aim for a bit of enlightenment and intelligence throughout the presentation, and the market just might be a better place as a result.

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Oh, the new Maxima?

 Meh.