Vauxhall’s new Astra may well be the best of the hatch pack, if first drives are to be believed, with Ellesmere Port’s most famous export finally getting one over on long-time Moriarty the Ford Focus.
And this couldn’t have come at a better time for Vauxhall, or parent company GM. Both have been stricken by the recession but look to be making good on their escape from the jaws of death.
Strong products have helped Opel / Vauxhall and this latest iteration of the C-segment model is at the forefront of Vauxhall’s rebirth, along with the Insignia saloon.
However, the Insignia was saddled with a terrible marketing campaign, which saw an American secret agent trying to break into Vauxhall HQ (location: Luton) to discover just what it was that made the Insignia so damn good.
We can only assume that GM goons hauled him off and double-tapped him in the head, as he never seemed to find out. Anyway, there’s a lot riding on the new Astra, so they’re going to have a knockout ad lined up right? Wrong. Dead wrong.
This series of ads will focus on some sort of Ocean’s 11 casino heist that somehow involves the £16K car. Don’t ask how – I can’t make head nor tail of this muddled ad.
And do you hear the music? Yes, that is a vocoder-ed voice rapping “Fun- fun- funky drivin’!” over a slap bass jazz-funk wigout. Funky driving?
And are those people – the news vendor and news reader – actually actors, or just people asked to recite lines, badly? Take a look at the guy and ask yourself, does this guy even speak English as a first language? To cap it all off, this advert is supposedly aimed at young blokes. What? How?
Everything about this advert is wrong. I shudder to think what Bob Lutz would make of it.