My favourite car adverts
As any fool know, car adverts tend to be the best during the commercial break. More cash to splash, more cool to sell, more creative licence, more humour, better visuals.
So car ads tend to look better and be more engaging than any others. Many of them are little art forms in their own right: expounding on the car as expression of freedom; pushing that emotional connection; as a driver of industry and innovation and - sometimes - as an excuse to go totally batshit crazy.
Ford Fiesta - This Is Now
Great combination of visuals and audio.
Peugeot 206 - Sculptor
Great soundtrack, nice idea. Would have been even better if the result had been an Austin Ambassador.
Citroen C5 - Unmistakeably German
Witty and so well executed, even down the phenomenally German-looking bloke in the ad. Part of a current push by volume manufacturers to take their cars upmarket towards BMW, Mercedes and the like. Because of stuff like this - and ever-improving products - that push is working, to some extent.
Honda - Impossible Dream
This looks great and it's quite affecting. But its actually telling the story of Honda through various semi-hidden details and references. As such it's kind of a piece of corporate art, but it looks great so what the hell?
Volkswagen Golf - Night Driving
This is simply one of my favourite things ever. Richard Burton reads Dylan Thomas over Cliff Martinez. Stunning. Beautiful. Moving. Simply incredible.
Citroen C4 - Transformer
Wonderful bonkers stuff from Citroen, with two adverts that suit its leftfield, quirky brand image superbly. Pity they're for the C4, probably one of the more boring cars on the road.
Honda Civic - Choir
Clever, clever, clever.
Seat Leon
Car ads can be funny too. Here's Mark Heap demonstrating that emotional connection - the reason people spend such huge amounts of cash on things that depreciate like a concrete narwhal.
Volkswagen Golf GTi - Singin In The Rain
Lovely stuff. Well conceived and executed by David Elsewhere.
Audi RS4 - Spider
Making your car appear genuinely terrifying is a brave move, but kinda an obvious one for performance saloons like the fearsome RS4 when you consider the kind of people likely to buy one.
Awesome stuff.
Honda Accord - Cog
All-time stone-cold classic.
Vauxhall - Sledgehammer
One of my favourites advert ever; a great mix of visuals and music and so memorable. Pity it ruins it with that awful Clapton riff that was Vauxhall's corporate jingle for years.
Ford Puma - Bullitt
Tricky to reference something so iconic, but great CGI and the best car of all time - the Ford Puma of course - make it work. Awkward CGI in many ads since have shown the dangers of such an ad.
Dunlop - Tested for the Unexpected
Fucking insane. Tony Kaye genius. It's advertising tyres!
Citroen CX - Le Beaute Sauvage
A giant Grace Jones head in the desert burps out a Citroen CX, also driven by Grace Jones. She shouts and drives back into her own head. Presumably it's all meant to evoke savage beauty, rather than ungainly French rust-bucket. Fucking mental, as Citroen adverts should be.
Castrol GTX
Simplicity itself - and all the more memorable for it.
Volvo airbag
Genuinely driving a car onto a genuine airbag? Could there be a better way of embedding your brand with the fundamental concept of safety? Works for Volvo.
Ford Kuga advert
Certainly not the worst advert ever - looks nice, clever theme - but certainly one of the more annoying adverts of 2010.
This advert for the Ford Kuga is the quintessence of the increasingly popular 'singing noises' genre that never fails to annoy me.
They're usually quite twee and hippyish and advertising something that can be vaguely styled as green or rustic. Inanity would appear to sell.
This one is advertising a car, with a selection of human noises that sound like the sort of things that an annoying toddler may hum to himself for hours and hours, safe in the knowledge that it's annoying the tits off everyone in the vicinity.
Sadly, I can't give Ford a slap around the legs for this hideous piece of aural assault, but I may well kick the next Kuga I see.
Place your bets on how long Paddy Power’s new ad will be on screens
So, how long will this one last? Ads that feature anything that even suggests animal cruelty is on thin ice, and liable to get banned in the end, just ask Ford - who actually decapitated a moggy in ads for the SportKa a few years ago.
Of course, the ad doesn't have the courage of its convictions. Despite telling us that there's nothing that can be done for Tiddles, we get a shot of the cat at the end of the ad that shows it to be fine. Curiously, I've not noticed this in the ads that have shown on TV though.
Either way, there'll be complaints, there'll be apologies and there'll be more media interest. Given that this ad is pretty irrelevant and generally uninspired - its enough to make you wonder why they went this this ad in the first place.
Ford Kinetic design advert
Ford's adverts are among the best of all car manufacturers, and with the likes of Beautifully Arranged Focus advert, This Is Now Fiesta advert and Ford Mondeo Desire advert they've been on a bit of a roll.
Ford's product is strong too, in Europe at any rate. The Ka, Fiesta, Focus, Mondeo and Kuga are pretty much market-leaders in their segments and the Kinetic design language translates pretty well across the line-up - it's certainly streets ahead of Ford's late 90s New Edge design, which didn't seem to feature any edges whatsoever.
So, an advert pushing most of Ford's new models and their smart looks is a good idea.
But Ford has chosen to highlight this facet of the models with the notion that the cars look like they're moving even when they're not. And that's all.
I'm fairly sceptical about this claim and the advert's claim to demonstrate this. But, further and more importantly, the only sane response to being told that a car looks like it's moving when it's not has to be a resounding "So what?".
Telling your customers that your design language is cool is neither nor there, and it's not even a claim that stands up to much scrutiny. I think it does. I know someone else who doesn't.
I don't think this is so much a bad advert, just a strange one. What a car is like when it is moving is what counts to me and, given that Ford's models are so strong, I'm baffled as to why the Kinetic design advert is being pushed so much.