False advertising
Outrageous car commercial claims
My definition of “false advertising” is any form of ad or sales pitch that makes completely false or bogus claims, intentionally or unintentionally, in any way, shape, or form.
An example would be the quack doctors in the Wild West, who passed off snake oil as cure-all medicine.
A contemporary example, which has gone largely unnoticed, is car commercials. Take a look at any car commercial nowadays and you’ll see a pitiful attempt to excite the interest of the viewers with a bogus representation of a vehicle’s abilities.
Car manufacturers want to give the public the impression that their vehicles have all the powers of a comic book superhero.
Television ads show sport utility vehicles powering up vertical cliffs, or driving along the seafloor, or shoving cascades of water out of their way with invisible force fields.
SUVs are shown to be impervious to gale-force winds, tons of rocks, or any other kind of damage.
Sport car and luxury vehicle ads are even more nauseating.
Vehicles emit rings of shock waves, set off fire alarms, attract swarms of scantily clad fairies, outrace the earth’s rotation and even cause vast cities to erupt spontaneously from the ground.
That, or the vehicles become humanlike, motoring slowly down the red carpet or performing flawless feats of ballroom dancing — in a ballroom.
If I’m in a good mood when I see a car commercial, I feel like buying the car in question and testing the manufacturer’s claims, even if it means shoving the car off a cliff.
On a bad day, I feel like shot-gunning the television set.
Back in the day, car ads, despite being 20 minutes long, were upbeat, easily understood and conveyed useful information. They did a show-and-tell about the vehicle in question, giving viewers a thorough and narrated look-see.
A typical latter-day car ad will begin silently. There will be no dialogue, just some inscrutable “music.”
The ad will show the car in some weird environment (Utah salt flats, a sterile factory floor, or an endless white room).
The vehicle will be doing something completely incomprehensible (swallowing other cars or opening piggy banks with a buzz saw).
The ad will then conclude with some weird message like “Safety Happens” (Volkswagen), “Reach Higher” (Lincoln), or “The Power of Dreams” (Honda).
Occasionally, one of these seemingly doomed ads will succeed in making the point. They may even do so humorously.
But for the most part, car ads continue to reflect poorly on the companies that produce them due to incomprehensibility, nonsensical nature, outrageous claims, brevity, and superficiality—that goes for their slogans, too.
I submit that car commercials, like several other forms of visual media, have taken a creative and inspirational hiatus.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum