You know the one. There’s a BBQ, and luggage trundling along various roads. In the background is a portentious male chorus. Another classic music rendering made abhorent by usage in an asinine ad.

The Ad is a ludicrous waste of time. It tells us nothing about the vehicle. At the end, we see a happy new owner polishing the Mitsubishi badge. What an idiot!

Eventually, friends, the Australian advertising industry has concluded that you are a bunch of airheads who will buy cars because they might carry baby elephants. Car Ads that contain absolutely no information about the car are misleading and perhaps illegal.

I currently have the money to buy a small, inexpensive new car outright. But on the basis of current TV Ads I have seen, there is nothing I can base a decision on other than ‘lifestyle’ considerations. I’ve been around long enough to know this just won’t work.

As I’ve said before, the car manufacturers have signed off on all this rubbish. In the Mitsubishi case, they OK’d an Ad featuring a BBQ and luggage trundling along various roads. There wasn’t a word about their vehicle, but here was a portentious male chorus. Are they for real?

I think I discussed the style aspects long ago, but now I’m going to more carefully consider what image I want to project as I drive my humble old Mazda 323.

I’m not as handsome as the male model, whose identity was revealed long ago too, but I’m glad Sarah (no insult intended) has resorted to the logical proposition ‘reductio ad absurdum’. Which means reducing an argument to the absurd.

Who cares what people wear when in their Honda CRVs?

Does the vehicle have an engine. If so, what is it? What new engineering has been incorporated? Are the ‘Bailey Channels’* better? Is there new technology? Why would I want one? Does it offer improved fuel economy? What makes it better than other manufacturer’s 4WDs?

The Ad instead shows that CRV owners can wear whatever they like in their new purchases. Which is kind of stating the obvious!

__________
* This is a fun question true car buffs will get a chuckle from.

My son says this is all imaginative salesmanship (like you did Duncan earlier in this chat), but I can’t see what irrelevancy has to do with advertising.

If I hired an Ad agency to sell my products, and they did so by imaginatively highlighting everything but my products, I would be rather out of sorts.

So that puts the killer wasps Ad into second place in my great hall of fame for the world’s dumbest car adverts. The Ad with people tearing off their clothes is miles ahead at this stage.

Creativity and imagination, surely, is about adding car sales by information. If you were a car salesman or woman on the shopfloor, and a customer came up saying “Can this car actually fit a baby elephant in the back seat”?

What would you say?

Advertising people are taking up far too much valuable space on this planet -- undeservedly so.

I’ve realised, watching the car TV Ads over the past week, that none actually provide viewers with any useful information about the cars.

This is a silly swindle by the advertising companies on us all. I’m thinking now of the car company executives who nodded happily as the advertising roughs were trundled out. ‘Oh yeah, I can see how roofs flying off our cabriolets in the desert will sell our car’!

They OK’d the baby elephant, the wayward wind, the mad genie, the people tearing off their clothes.

They should have told the advertising people “This is absolute cr*p. Go and devise a campaign that actually helps us to sell the cars”!

If I was the boss of a car company, I would be having a close backwards look at the CV of the advertising manager. I would then call him or her into my office for a long ‘chat’.

Nuzzling up, I would tell him or her ‘Another baby elephant, or people tearing off their clothes, and you’re history’.

For that matter, neither do I.

As for the two talkative “blue collar” guys at the BBQ, shame on you! Get a real job far from advertising. Find out what’s really happening out there. You are not convincing.

I’m saving for a new car, but Peter Costello is getting a third of my salary. When I go shopping, I can feel him fingering my purse for gst thrills. At the petrol pump, I’m paying him again. I think he goes through my purse again when I’m asleep.

I haven’t worked it out yet, but the Australian government is getting far more out of me than what they officially admit.

Come to think of it, they’ve sold off billions of dollars of publicly owned Commonwealth assets. A golden rain is falling on their corporate mates.

In the midst of my struggle, I can still dream of owning a Honda Crv can’t I?

Since the ad doesn’t mention the car, the 23.8% increase in sales can’t be attributed to the advertising campaign, can it?

If Honda was smart (so far the ad campaign indicates they are not), they would do a survey of buyers of the CRV. An obvious question would be “What part did the TV advertising campaign affect your decision to buy the car”?

If the majority said the TV campaign had no bearing on why they bought the car, we can all breathe a huge sigh of relief.

If they responded that the ad sold the car, then we can infer that people taking off their clothes in the street will sell anything.

Hhhmmnn. Back to the drawing board…