The accusation that the advertising industry lives and works in something of a bubble is not uncommon. It often seems to suffer from a larger than average blind spot, in its relentless search for novelty and need to break through the clutter. Or just self-aggrandizement. But this ad takes that to a whole new level.
CC’s Don Andreina just forwarded me a post at Mumbrella, an Australian marketing site, that received this Mazda print ad in its inbox. It’s from BBR Saatchi&Saatchi’s Israel offices. It’s a ‘genuine’ ad, inasmuch as its creators and provenance has been confirmed. Whether it actually gets used to any degree in print publications is as of yet unknown. Regardless, to even create and submit an ad like this seems remarkably tone deaf, and even shameful. Time to turn on your Blind Spot Monitoring System, BBR Saatchi&Saatchi.
The setting of the hand-drawn ad is all-too familiar: Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and JFK’s open Lincoln limo (not very accurately rendered) is just passing by. And up in the Texas School Book Depository a yellow light can be seen, in the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald was aiming his high-powered rifle at Kennedy’s head.
The yellow spot represents Mazda’s Blind Spot Monitoring System, which lights a yellow signal in the outside rear view mirror when it detects an unseen threat. The tag line on the ad is “spot the threat in time”.
The Australian blogger, Dr Mumbo, has verified that Mazda is a client at this agency, and it’s been listed at coloribus.com, an archive for advertising copy, which gives credits and says that the ad was released in January, 2017 for use by Mazda in Israel. So it appears to be a genuine ad. And technically, it is.
But it may never be published; it’s just too hard to imagine Mazda being ok with that. So why does it exist? It’s almost surely a “scam ad”, which are created by the ad industry’s creative departments for one purpose only: to win ad industry awards, which are vital to the success of careers and agencies. It’s an issue that surfaced some years ago, and has been called out by Ad Age and clients alike for years as being detrimental to the industry and its clients. Yet it persists, as this ad makes most painfully clear. And one wonders: does Mazda even know it exists?
The irony of selling a Blind Spot Monitoring System with such a huge judgment blind spot is massively ironic. Unless of course that’s the intent too. In which case, this scam ad takes it to a whole new level. Hey, it is 2017.
Wow, If Mazda WAS unaware of this, they should sue, Its their name and logo that people know. And they should never use this agency.
Holy advertising Batman! O_o
There’s was a time when VW disliked the fake ad with Ted Kennedy and the Beetle. http://www.tommcmahon.net/2009/06/the-1972-national-lampoon-ted-kennedy-volkswagen-satire-advertisement.html as well as the fake Polo ad.
Parody/pastiche and dark humour mix very well — but the key difference is that when you pick up a National Lampoon magazine, you know the ads are parodies.
Saatchi&Saatchi should know better than to try to make ads with this kind of tone. If this is really their product, they should be called out on it.
Boom-Boom
Remarkable and total lack of taste and actually hard to believe anyone could think this was in any way amusing. Hard to believe an agency in Israel would be so disrespectful about an issue so sensitive to the USA.
It’s in extremely poor taste. Somewhat shocking, in that content for an ad campaign for a major client is usually carefully reviewed internally by the agency, and by representatives of the clients themselves. What were they thinking? Sign off rests with the client.
Not sure, but the character located in the center of the drawing looks a lot like John Belushi?
Looks like Alex Jones to me.
I can see the belushi resemblance!
The US/Israeli relations are a bit one-sided when it comes to things like this… in the US everybody is very aware of the public consequences of publishing things disrespectful to Israel and its history, but in Israel causing offence to Americans is not really on everybody’s radar. Probably because it is not so likely that it will actually reach American eyes.
The awareness will be more so with President Trump in power…
@ shanghay
I could perhaps see that view if it was an editorial illustration for a publication or website. With the purpose of provoking debate/discussion.
An advertiser would have no reason to touch such a sensitive topic for a tasteless attempt at humor. Why even risk it? Whatever country is involved, it is in extraordinarily bad taste.
Sigh. Just when you think a new level of tastelessness has been reached, someone has to push the envelope.
I agree that this goes beyond what is acceptable in advertising, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mazda terminates its relationship with the agency over this.
At the same time it’s inescapable that for some younger people the JFK assassination is ancient history with no personal emotional content – a little like the murder of Julius Caesar.
I was shocked and fascinated a few years ago, attending a deliberately edgy comedy review, when one sketch began with a Jackie Kennedy figure in pink-suit-and-pillbox walking onstage arm in arm with a suited figure with a pink balloon for a head. The audience initially was silent, then groaned and tittered, but gradually began shouting ‘No!’. Nothing happened in the end, but I wondered how the (young) writers of the sketch saw it, whether they knew what they were doing, or just decided to provoke a reaction.
Sad to say you are so right about scam ads which this hopefully is. The scourge of my industry. The truly pathetic part of creating these fake ads is the too-often dreadful work the same agencies put in print.
In addition to being an insult to human decency, it’s also an insult to those agencies – and clients – who work hard to produce compelling work that helps brands grow.
Usually they get away with this kind of crap by using a local brand or business no one’s heard about. In this case, I wouldn’t be suprised if these immature creatives cost their agency the Mazda business, and justifiably.
+1000
There was a similarly disturbing, if less historically traumatic, commercial a few years ago involving the Ford Ka and a cat. I still have reservations about buying a Ford product to this day; it’s not a major factor in the buying decision, maybe, but ads can leave a bad taste long after the controversy dies down.
And yet, you can sell cars by relating them to historical events without being tasteless or gratuitous:
Now *that’s* a good ad.
Curious you have reservations about Ford based on a scam ad they didn’t use.
The cat version of the “evil twin” Sport Ka advert (which – while admittedly a tad grim – I have to confess I think is very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5KgZPNVKAg ) famously never aired. It circulated online as a curiosity a few years after the pigeon version ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7kW5eWk9g4 ) was briefly aired and then pulled.
The “evil twin” campaign (such as it was) is a prime example of exactly the scam-ad phenomenon Paul’s highlighting here, and is all to do with internal advertising industry nonsense, with the brand in question being entirely peripheral if they’re involved at all.
Everyone is quick to condemn this post but far more tragic and inappropriate topics have been mocked (and still are). Hitler jokes are a constant source of amusement for everyone that isn’t in Germany, a topic that, when broken down to it’s base elements, is a horrific thing to create comedy from. It’s easy to be offended by this with most of the readers and writers on this site being from the ‘states but for a little agency in Israel this was probably as humorous as Hitler jokes are to us.
NOTE – I am not excusing this ad company’s actions, creating an ad campaign so offensive to such a large market is stupid and irresponsible, but you have to see it from their perspective rather than ours.
We don’t put Hitler jokes in ads
If any American ad agency did something similar, except switch JFK with Ariel Sharon and replace Oswald with a Palestinian suicide bomber, would you say Israelis should try and view the ad from the American perspective?
Mobes: Humour can be dark, light, slapstick, political, absurd, etc. It’s a many-hued thing that doesn’t translate well at all from one language/culture to the next, nor from one person to the next. A famous comedian said “You can laugh about everything, but not with everyone.” And that’s the key here.
Ads are aimed at the public at large. Comedy is not. An ad can be witty, like the VW copy of yore, but this ad isn’t witty. It’s trying to be funny. If it really is an ad and not something someone cooked up on 4chan or whatever, it’s a very poor one because it will alienate a big chunk of the public.
If we’re not allowed to laugh about horrible people/events, the world would be a very unhealthy place to live in. That’s the purpose of humour, not advertising.
Godwin’s Law invoked. Discussion over.
OK, we won’t get into the poor taste imagery that Volkswagen could potentially use in its ads…
The mere fact that it exists is troubling. Very poor taste and highly disrespectful 🙁
+1
The “run an ad once in the middle of the night in a small town” thing to win advertising-industry awards is a longstanding practice. The legendary “1984” commercial that introduced the Mac was actually run twice – once during the 1984 Super Bowl that everyone remembers, and once in the middle of the night on a small Idaho station in winter 1983 to make it eligible for the year’s advertising awards, and also so the ad could be pulled if it didn’t go over well. I wonder how well that technique works today now that even an obscure showing will get pickup up online and spread all over the internet by the next day.
Hadn’t heard about the 1983 airing, but it’s par for the course. But the fact that the 1984 ad only ran once, on the Super Bowl, was never the intention. I worked for several years with Steve Hayden, who wrote it, and David Yoder, who planned the media.
Originally, the ad was to run as part of a full flight, but the Apple Board got the jitters and ordered Chiat/Day (the agency) to sell off all the media – which David did…but he couldn’t find anyone to buy the Super Bowl time (!) so it ran once. And the myth of the one-time Super Bowl ad sent rates skyrocketing & gave us the whole Super Bowl ad phenomenon. There was also a 20-page (!!) insert in key newspapers the Monday after, and lots of prints. No banners, not back then.
Robert, thanks for this. My other history jones besides old cars is the computer industry, which I have a little more of a connection to being an early Commodore and Apple owner. The 1983 airing is a well-known story but your Super Bowl story is a new wrinkle in what is the conventional wisdom.
I don’t disagree with any of the above comments and only want to add, as a driver of a current Mazda3, the issue of poor rearward visibility does need addressing.
Been driving The Pod since July and still it surprises. Or rather the surrounding drivers do…
Can’t wait to step back into the glassy realm of the W108, which coincidentally addresses the issue of good taste by example 🙂
YMMV
Y’know, I will admit. I wouldn’t normally care about this kind of thing. I mean, I usually don’t get worked up over much, and kind of chuckle at people who do. But, there is one thing I wanted to comment on.
To anyone who’s trying to see this ad as an attempt at comedy, trust me, it’s not.
I make plenty of dark jokes, I make a lot of jokes that are in poor taste, my friends and I do the same. So, I can recognize dark humor when I see it. This advertisement isn’t it.
I would say that about 95% of ad agencies and the like don’t really understand humor all that well. Think of all the commercials that have tried to be funny and have ended up cringe worthy and awkward. When it comes to humor, especially dark humor, there’s a certain hint of awareness that at least levies the awkwardness. Granted, that’s not necessarily a great defense. But, if you are aware of what you are making fun of, the joke can work, even if some people cringe at the subject matter involved. To me, any joke can be funny as long as it’s not mean-spirited, but jokes only work if you have the self awareness necessary to make it a joke.
But, advertisement agencies don’t really have that. Advertisement agencies are too po-faced, too serious, too concerned with making an impact, to see anything resembling humor. This ad, is played 100 percent straight, and that’s why it doesn’t work and why it seems in poor taste. But that’s not surprising, think of all the stuff that advertisements have brought up, either to make a point, or to get people to buy their products. It’s pure emotional manipulation, you’re projecting an emotion on your viewing audience, and seeing if they can fall for it. (Think of those overwrought ASPCA commercials and you’ll get what I mean). It’s impossible to hide the artifice for an Ad, but when you push it too far, and bring up something just to make a point or get people to buy a product, then you’re not going to get positive attention in return.
It’s the difference between making fun of a dead celebrity, and using that dead celebrity’s likeliness to sell toothpaste. When there’s no sense of levity, the result is much more embarrassing.
To play devil’s advocate. If they were playing it 100% straight they’d come up with a scenario that would actually be realistic, the self awareness in this is the knowledge that the audience would probably know that the blind spot monitor they’re touting is not going to pick up Lee Harvey Oswald’s sights out the window of the book depository a couple hundred feet away. It would have been more clever with a grassy knoll reference to add a bit more levity though (perhaps Israelis aren’t as familiar with the extensive conspiracy theories concocted). Either way its a surreal take on blind spot monitoring system that only has the range detection within a car length of the sensor, the satire is there, it’s just very easy to look over with the gravity of the deception – which is a probably the most jarring part, making you wonder “are they serious?” until you actually realize the technology they’re selling. It’d be a different story if it was an ad for Remington with the tagline “we don’t need magic bullets”.
As for ad agency’s themselves, using emotional manipulation to sell goods certainly adds a despicable layer to using a reference like this, on the surface, but there’d be zero ads if they didn’t. No matter how benign an ad, they’re wooing you in by poking at your insecurities, getting a laugh, getting a tear, playing into fear, promising hope, ect. If this didn’t come from an agency and were simply a National Lampoon or Onion type ad it would work, without generating any real buzz. – “But Matt, they’re comedy publications, that’s what they do…” Ah, let me stop you right there. Writers/Comedians and their respective mediums are there to sell you product too, it’s show business. Even they get accused of going “too far” now and then despite it being their gigs, and sometimes it’s founded, and a lot of times it’s overreaction. Ad agencies ultimately aren’t any more monolithic than any other business producing product, while the suits may be too po-faced, too serious, and too concerned with making an impact as you put it, the writers downstairs may not be.
Well, you certainly bring up a valid argument. But, while I don’t think that satire doesn’t have to be overt, there needs to be a presence of it somewhere. Originally, when I was thinking about it, the same absurdities were a consideration, but nowhere did I connect that it was satirical in nature. I thought it at a different angle, rather than the ad having some self awareness to it. I’m not exactly one to pick up on subtleties, so this is partially a mea culpa, but then again, the ad should’ve added that extra bit of levity if that’s what it was going for.
Of course, considering the age we live in, it’s not a surprise I didn’t pick it up. In an age where people need to be brained in the back of the head with a shovel to pick up any semblance of understanding, satire has pretty much become a dead art form. Not helped by the fact that the lines between Poe’s Law and reality have blurred to the point of being indistinguishable from each other. Keep in mind, I am very much not of the crowd to have an instant emotional overreaction to something that might be considered “problematic”, so to not get the satirical angle, is indicative of something that requires more discussion than can be had on a simple car website.
I understand and I agree totally. Like I said, it isn’t depicted in a way that looks satirical, and you have to think a second to realize the absurdity to know it’s going for a laugh, but I truly believe that was the intent. The levity in this case is based completely on one’s familiarity with the advertised feature, appropriately enough I only know it from driving a new Mazda 6, and obviously if this technology is new to you (as having need for ad for it would imply) there’s no way to take it but as a serious warning of an unseen threat the car could prevent, and in that light the ad takes on a much darker and serious tone, bordering on offensive. On top of that illustration itself is too real despite minor detail inaccuracies, that would be an easy place to add some cartoonish levity but it completely fails.
First off, I just want to say that the level of discussion on this topic shows just how good the CC commentariat are; a discussion like this could easily go off the rails. I know that as a result of the job you folks do, I always think twice before mashing that post button.
The fake VW Ted Kennedy ad above shows the exact problem: as a piece of satire, it’s brilliant. But if VW itself had run it as an actual ad, I doubt they’d still be selling cars here today. As Joseph above said, comedy needs to first come with honesty and self awareness to work. Someone once asked why all the great comedians seemed to have a liberal bent. The reply was that “comedy is only funny when it’s punching up.” The conservative Establishment lashing out is just mean-spirited, not funny.
Now back in the day JFK was not universally beloved (see http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/11/15/jfk_assassination_flyer_distributed_in_dallas_by_edwin_walker_s_group_before.html) but I think it’s safe to say looking back (at least for someone like me, who was born 15 years later) he is well-respected. So this is just sort of a mean-spirited dig at a well-loved public figure.
At least Mazda and/or S&S were smart enough to use a Lincoln instead of a Miata stretch limo.
I heard the first draft was John Wilkes Booth shooting into an airbag .
Sic semper takata!!!
I would want to research this in Hebrew on Israeli sites and sources before making any comments, but if it is anything more than an internal (at the very least macabre) study, never to be released anywhere, then as an Israeli I can tell you they ought to suffer the consequences. Hitler and Holocaust jokes _are_ made in Israel but generally in private and the same would apply to this.
Please read my comment to Yohai’s comment, below.
I spent my career in automotive advertising, and Mazda was among my clients. This ad shames the entire industry, and I can’t believe a creative director, let alone a client, approved it. Hell, it isn’t even relevant to the feature theyre touting. The U.S. is the only friend that country has, and one would think we’re entitled to some respect. I have a lot more to say about the morons who created it, but I’ll leave it at that out of respect for Paul and the readership.
Beyond the pale. A new all time low. Truly tasteless and vulgar.
As the resident Israeli writer of CC, I can throw my two cents in (sorry to join in so late, I only just saw this).
First off, from what I know about ads (friends in the business), this isn’t anything more than a preliminary “pitch”‘ and you can see this from the sketch-shaped look of this ad. Maybe this was intended to be developed further- possibly into video- should the client approve the general idea. I wouldn’t put it past the BBR agency to have made other sketches of scenarios similar to this (from Franz Ferdinand to the V1/V2 rockets, take your pick).
I can assure you this has not been released to use in Israel, and would never be, because, setting Mazda’s approval aside, it just doesn’t speak to Israelis, it’s too far from the prospective Israeli car buyer. This may come as a shock to Americans, but many Israelis nowadays don’t even know who Kennedy was, let alone familiar with the scene portrayed in the sketch above. This is how they’re selling Mazda now:
http://www.mazda.co.il/site/preparetobeamazed/?ref=mazda.co.il
Free translation: “Mazda has changed, is now more dynamic/sporty than ever and we’ve brought in the ex-Stig to prove it”
The fact that someone thought it clever enough to have it circulate publicly so that it could- and did- reach Paul and CC speaks everything there is to say about the ad business (and some of you already have in the comments above).
I’ll just add one thing; Israeli ad people have a name for being the best in the world for what they do. That’s because they have no hung ups over anything they think is selling material. I don’t know if that’s the “tough” Israeli character (of which I’m proud to say I lack very much), but most ad agencies people here would sell their mother if they thought it would make for a “brilliant ad”. It’s sad for me to admit it, but it’s true. And it has nothing to do with Israeli American relations. Just a “clever” pitch.
This is the agency, by the way: http://bbrexpert.com/
It appears you didn’t quite get the point of my post.
This is not a pitch to the client (Mazda). This is an “ad” that has been registered at a public site, which is a verification of the ad’s creators and certifying that it as an “ad” so that it can be used to compete for awards in the ad industry (“scam ad”). I made that quite clear.
Scam ads are sometimes published once or twice in obscure publications, sometimes not at all.
Please follow the links in the post that explains all of this in greater depth.
My article was mostly about the practice of scam ads, not about the likelihood that this ad would ever reach Mazda’s eyes, or be used extensively.
I may give these idiots a call to give them a piece of my mind. Whatever it is, it should have never left the office.
Adding that, to be fair to be BBR, it is possible it might have been placed in an unauthorized manner by whomever (e.g., disgruntled ex-employee). That is a somewhat different matter.
Well, they know now so they have the chance to respond.