Why the Smart Car fortwo TV ad makes me want to never buy a Smart Car

This is not how advertising is supposed to work. The TV advert for Smart Car's fortwo is not supposed to make me want to avoid Smart Cars at all costs.

Adverts (commercials, whatever you chose to call them) are supposed to make me want to spend money on the product in question. This one really doesn't. The message I'm getting: the new fortwo is incredibly destructive.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOvwG2SA9o

The Smart Car fortwo is driven around an impossibly empty city at night, and leaves carnage in its wake. Somehow, through its admittedly cool music player, the fortwo manipulates power lines and makes office lights turn on and off. Not eco-friendly.

While making a vending machine spew out cans (in effect stealing from the manufacturer), the fortwo also wreaks havoc with the traffic lights...good job there's only this one guy on the roads, eh?

It's also lucky that this is happening at night, because in the day this car would be a death trap.

At the same time as switching office lights on and off, the passing fortwo also switches computers on and off. I hope they're set to autosave pretty frequently, because random power fluctuations could become frequent if this ad campaign takes off.

It disrupts everything - including a bloke in the bath, which is just rude, frankly - and causes untold damage. Somehow, the fortwo also manages to set off a load of fire extinguishers. Would someone like to explain that one?

Then, the best bit by far - or worse bit if you happen to be, er, human...which accounts for most of Smart Car's target market - the windows. Every piece of glass anywhere near the fortwo shatters, and you might notice the fine spray of glass (or fine spray of death, as I like to call it) that suddenly descends to ground level. Ground level, in case car designers weren't aware, is where pedestrians walk. Apparently, it's okay to cover this in glass shards, which is what will happen every time someone drives past in a fortwo. Oh good.

Don't worry though folks, it's okay. When he locks the fortwo, everything gets fixed. It's a miracle. Everything is put back exactly how it was.

It's basically a deluxe, suped-up version of the Nissan Juke (watch especially for the electric robots), seen below:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSOgGhZL9t4

The difference here is that the Nissan Juke doesn't absolutely destroy everything (what's with the washing machines?). It seems to make electricity work in its immediate vicinity, which might be useful, but that's about it. Oh, and it exposes a diamond thief. While the effects are destructive when it parks, they are at least localised - it's only that sign that goes crazy, and we're talking a small-scale fireworks display rather than an entire commercial sector needing to be put back together.

Still, not sure I fancy driving a Nissan Juke either.

But the Smart Car fortwo advert raises all sorts of questions in my mind. For a start, when they construct these catastrophic killing-machines, how do the factories cope? At some point during construction, the fortwo's killer instinct must kick in. Why don't the factories get smashed to bits? How many Smart Car staff die every month when the factory gets ripped to shreds and then needs putting back together? Does the line manager give a slightly cute, slightly guilty blue-eyed glance at the bodies, and coyly lock the car, magically replacing the factory walls...but not his staff?

Worse, if several people buy these destruct-o-cars, what happens if two of them meet? I don't just mean in a crash, I mean passing in the same city? Not even the same street; let's face it, the fortwo in the advert does untold damage in streets it's not even in (unlike the relatively sober Nissan Juke). If a fortwo meets another fortwo coming the other way, what happens? Does the universe implode? Do we get a new Big Bang? Think how much money and time CERN could have saved if they just crashed two fortwos into each other, rather than building a Large Hadron Collider.

Actually, let's not let this happen. Everyone must avoid the Smart Car fortwo - this may be the secret message coming from their marketing campaign. Someone in Smart Car marketing knows how potentially destructive the fortwo is, and wants us to know so that we don't buy it. Someone high up at Smart Car is planning to destroy the universe. Don't let them.

This advert, on the other hand...yes, yes and yes again. Simple, effective - it makes me want to buy the product, and no one gets hurt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQzc2hRAjcc

With thanks to Keira Walker.

Lynx Bullet

I saw this at a bus stop earlier today:

It's a teeny, tiny can of deodorant. Called 'Bullet'. Wow.

I think we all know who falls into Lynx's main market target audience - young men. On the basis of that slogan, I'm guessing young single men. In fact, having seen the advert for this on their website, I'm tempted to go as far as saying it's aimed at (slightly desperate) single young men. Which is probably a shame, because it has the potential to be a nifty little product, that has a decent idea behind it. Easily portable fragrance for stinking men - good plan.

But - and yes, it's a large one - there is one glaring problem with the marketing here, isn't there? Isn't there? Or is it just me that has a problem here? Can I be the only one that takes issue with the use of the word 'bullet'?

Okay, let's overlook the latent sexism of the Lynx advert - obviously, that's ridiculous, but we've come to expect that of Lynx; it isn't the issue here. Lynx adverts have always shown single, pathetic men being a bit sad and lonely but suddenly managing to pick up some stunning, scantily-clad model after a quick application of Lynx. In a way, that's always been the magic of the Lynx ad; even losers can have some companionship if they use Lynx. That said, if you read 'companionship' as 'casual sex' the charm is lost a little, though you probably have a more accurate world view. Let's not forget that Bullet slogan: Pocket Pulling Power.



No, the issue here is that word 'bullet'. Has Lynx settled on this as a name because knife crime is under the spotlight so much, and - presumably - isn't cool any more? Suddenly, it's become alright to make adverts that encourage young men to buy Bullets? Come to think of it, when did it become alright for someone (at 21.19) to design this thing? The Louis Vuitton Bullet (or LV-Bullet, for short):




Designer bullets? What? If that's not glamorizing gun crime, I don't know what is.

Since when was it alright to glamorize ammunition in the way this Lynx advert does? Lynx seem to be happy saying that young men should carry bullets with them. There's an especially bad bit in this press release by 'acclaimed thespian' Matt LeRoche.

"For spontaneous guys on the go who are often faced with unexpected pulling
opportunities".

Sorry, what? What exactly is it that makes those men different to your average gangster? They're 'on the go'...from the Police.

"Bullet is perfectly pocket-sized, measuring just under eight centimetres".

So, like a bullet, then? Like a small piece of lead designed to be fired at high velocity at another person with the intention of killing and/or maiming them? One of those, yeah? How is this a good thing to be selling and putting up on posters? Especially when we know that gun crime - especially in London - is increasing, who in Lynx decided this was a good product name? Surely there were better suggestions? The main exponents (read: criminals) of the explosion of gun crime are young men, who unfortunately happen to overlap with Lynx's target market. I say 'overlap'...they're the same people. Alright, so the criminals are getting younger, but they still see bus stop posters and TV adverts, and they still use deodorant (probably...).


Now, I realise that I may be in a wishy-washy, liberal minority here, but am I the only one that holds onto a basic belief that guns are - essentially - bad? Is there really only me that can't help thinking violence is not always - if ever - a good option? Am I the only one that thinks that a kid brought up like the Western-loving one in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a bad thing? I mean, a kid that has this webpage made about him must have something wrong somewhere, right? Therefore, making guns (and associated accessories) look good is also inherently bad, right? In fact, that word 'accessories' is probably more significant than I intended when I typed it - now I see it's a frighteningly good word for the whole issue of weaponed teenagers brandishing their status-symbol killing implements. On the whole 'accessories' front, look at the first paragraph of this Guardian report.

But, it's okay for Lynx to market their products like this?