BLACK and white shot. A car glides, slim and stylish and gleaming silver, across an apparently endless bridge. Then colour, warm flesh tones. A face fills the screen a man, shaving. Cut. Splodge of red, look of shock. A life belt is hurled from a great height, falls slowly, slowly. A child in a red coat skips happily alongside the traffic. Then a native American face, impassive. Another splodge of red on the cheek war paint. A man walks into the path of an oncoming tank, arms raised in supplication. Somebody jumps off the bridge. A baby, bloody, slippery, triumphant, is born.
The images succeed each other with a be wildering mixture of rapidity and clarity over an inoffensive song by one of the most politically correct groups on the current rock scene, the environmentally sound M People. The opening caption reads "The average person has 12,367 thoughts a day. Here are some of them." The closing one reads "There is no such thing as an average person. Is it a film? A documentary? A trailer for some post modern TV drama series?
Welcome to the world of car adverting in the late 20th century. Car manufacturers have tried just about everything to get people to buy their particular brand. We've had cars tested by robots, driven off the top of the Empire State building, winched gently on to rocky outcrops in stormy seas. There was the gentle saga of Nicole and her long suffering Papa, set in the leafy byways of la belle France, and there was the snake scratching its way across the cracked, parched earth of an Australian desert. But with this particular baby, which even has its own name 406 Thoughts Peugeot has shifted into top gear in the car advertising business.
For a start, the ad cost the best part of £1 million to make. It, took seven days to shoot at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. To launch it earlier this month, Peugeot bought an entire News at Ten commercial break and the nearest break on every other television channel a cheery little, jaunt which landed the company with a publicity bill of something approaching £15 million.
BUT what is perhaps more remarkable about this commercial than its lavish production and promotion budget is that it tells you absolutely nothing about the car it purports to be praising. In fact the name of the car Peugeot 406, since you ask isn't even mentioned until the very end. The 406 is, by all accounts, a useful little car, voted Car of the Year and runner up for European Car of the Year by Autocar magazine, a favourite with Auto Express's road runners and an easy winner out of seven cars of its class in a What Car? group test.
But as you gaze at the child standing mesmerised in front of a huge runaway truck, only to be snatched out of the way at the last moment at one beautiful, near naked man giving another the kiss of life at a lovely young woman leaping on to a restaurant table, grabbing her lovely young male companion by the tie, flinging off his glass and kissing him with fervour is your mind properly focused on spark plugs and anti locking braking?
Not really. Or as Mark Wnek, creative director of the Peugeot 406 ad, puts it "What we have to do is give the car an emotional appeal. The film is all about aspirations. The idea is to expose hidden desires and fantasies man's primordial need to see himself as a hero even if he can never be more than average. I always wanted to play football for England, the thought still goes, through my mind sometimes.
Terry Venables, take note. But I have news for Mark. I think his ad less than brilliant. Sure, it's beautiful but as anyone who has seen the ad for boxing which is currently running on Eurosport will confirm, you can make almost anything look beautiful with the help of a few pretty faces, a bit of slo-mo and some suitably, classy music. Sure, it has a strong storyline but so do those coffee commercials in which the couple get together over Gold Blend only for it all to end in tears. (Well, naturally. What kind of idiot would get emotionally involved with someone who runs out of coffee several times a week?)
No, behind all its impressive superficial gloss, Mark's creation is just another humourless bit of machismo gone mad, a Nineties re visitation of the days when all you had to do to sell a car was drape a bikini clad supermodel over the body work. What do women get to do in the Peugeot 406 commercial? Have babies and stand weeping in the rain, mostly and don't quote the restaurant scene at me, because the image of a slim and beautiful young woman throwing herself, literally, at a man is the ultimate male turn on and nothing whatever to do with equality or repricocity.
THE company's commercial director said last week that if the "406 Thoughts" campaign takes off, it "makes the difference between selling 300,000 or 400,000 cars over the eight year life of a model". Unfortunately for him, the advertisement doesn't make his product any cheaper on the contrary, it has been estimated that anything from £200 to £600 of the cost of a new car is attributable to the manufacturer's advertising budget. Maybe one of these days somebody in the automobile business will give free rein to the hidden desires and fantasies of car buyers and just start producing cheaper cars.
