Audi's Green Police Super Bowl Ad: Truth in Advertising? Will it Move Units?
I miss the Super Bowl of old (re: before I can remember them) when brothers from another planet like Vince Lombardi (greatest line, ever: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser"), Hank Stram, Bud Grant, and the immortal (read: dead for about a decade) Weeb Ewbank helmed squads of fat, non-muscled off-season insurance salesman to early onset arthritis for about $9,500 a year. Why do I miss that? I've got no idea, but it might have something to do with the endless and endlessly bad Dorito ads in last night's Super Bowl. And that Who halftime show, which made me retroactively gain more respect for Bruce Springsteen's awful appearance from a year before.
Anyhoo, the great ad in last night's game was, IMO, the Audi "Green Police" spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don't know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves…minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
