A little quieter, please

An entertaining plea for less strident car ads from Giles Coren comes in today's Times. He suggests a future script for the things:

"Here's a car, it's much like all the others. If your own car is beyond repair this is one of the many essentially identical vehicles you might consider as a replacement."

Seconded - all future car ad script to take that form please.

(Admittedly any sort of enthusiasm for cars is utterly mysterious to me, from that alleged "sport" Formula Driving Round And Round In A Big Circle Until All But One Of Those Ludicrously Fragile Cars Has Crashed Or Broken Down Again, to what happens on Top Gear to the appeal of Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe car ads are exciting to people who care about cars. Then again, those people also seem to know about cars and will presumably therefore make informed buying decisions, so I'm back to square one as to what showing millions of hours of ads for dozens of utterly indistinguishable means of getting from A to B is really imagined to achieve. Perhaps simply no-one likes to buy a car they've never heard of.)

Comments

[R N B]

I have no vested interest in Honda, in fact I'm consulting for a rival manufacturer, but the Honda "cog" advert was possibly the finest TV commercial ever, and their Diesel engine advert almost defines quiet. I won't link, but you can see them on YouTube.

[Seamus McCauley]

RNB - many of them are great art, I hasten to agree. Personally I'm a fan of the Bravia ads and the old Rutger Hauer Guiness stuff. But if the ad men are only trying to create great art they're wasting a lot of someone else's money.

(Afterthought - perhaps this is what artistic patronage looks like in C20th and C21st. People who want to create art have to do it under the aegis of making commercials...and assuming the ad makers are smarter than the marketeers, we have a simple explanation for why a lot of the ads have no commercial impact but look pretty.)

[Gareth Roberts]

Well, you say there's no commercial impact, and yet there you are namechecking a television. I don't know about you, but I couldn't namecheck another brand of flatscreen, even the one I actually bought.

I can thing of few things more indistinct than flatscreen TVs - the very best designed of which, perforce, are featureless black rectangles. Nor is it possible, particularly, to demonstrate the (allegedly) marvellous quality of the sound and picture of a television when looking at a bit of film about it on a different television. All they can do is hope to put that brand name, fondly, into the heads of anyone in the market for a big screen TV. I think it succeeds in doing that, and would wager it's generated more sales revenue that it cost, when you consider that there will be a halo of positive associations around all Sony goods as a result. After all, Sony charge way over the odds for goods that are indistinguishable from the competition, except for their refusal to adopt industry wide standards like memory card formats. Something must be allowing them to get away with it, and I think it's probably things that boost their brand image like very clever TV ads.