Crossposted from grist.org.
Is it me or were the Super Bowl commercials this year unusually ugly, misogynistic, and, worst of all, unfunny? Some of America's biggest corporations seemed to be trying to play to Teabag America, and the results were as bitter as the teabaggers themselves. Amidst the dreck was a commercial from Audi featuring the "green police." Here it is:
At first blush this seems like more teabagging -- appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins. If you check in the comments under the video, that perspective is well represented. Says Metallicafan6611, "You guys all laugh. But this is really going to happen. Wake up people! Stop being sheep!" Enviros are predictably irritated (see, e.g., A Siegel).
The more I've thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn't quite fit. The thrill at the end, when they guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police -- not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards. The authority of the green police is taken for granted, never questioned. If you're looking to appeal to mooks who think the green police are full of it and have no authority, moral or otherwise, why would you make a commercial like that? Why offer escape from a moral dilemma your audience doesn't acknowledge exists?
The ad only makes sense if it's aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police -- people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.
Now go back through the ad. Notice that everyone who gets busted is a man? There are lots more urban and suburban professional males in Audi's target market than there are teabaggers.
To scratch one layer deeper: what is Audi's message to these guys who want to be good but find the effort anxious-making? Here's a way to meet your green obligations and still have a bad-ass car! The Audi A3 is both green and desirable -- indeed more desireable because it's green. Buried deep in this ad, in other words, is a bright green message: prosperity, pleasure, and sustainability can be achieved together.
Anyway, not to overthink it (ahem), but the ad is not just another pot shot at greens. It's an appeal to a new and growing demographic that isn't hard-core environmentalist -- and doesn't particularly like hard-core environmentalists -- but that basically wants to do the right thing. Audi's effort to reach them, however clumsy, is actually a bit ahead of the curve.
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YouTube - Audi 2010 Green Car Super Bowl Commercial
Audi: Green Police - 2010 Super Bowl Commercials -- NFL FanHouse
Heck, I learned in high school what is apparently lost on the writer. That when someone must resort to name calling (Teabaggers) it's a sure sign he's either unable to debate an issue honestly or has already lost the debate.
Good show, Mr. Roberts. It's pretty obvious that you simply used the premise of an advertisement review to vent frustration of the Tea Party movement. In addition to being shallow and transparent, it was fairly humorous as well. But not nearly as humorous (and on target) as the ad itself.
It is coming this way:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/audi-e-tron-electric-car_n_378738.html
Enjoy.
And what uses batteries. Electric hybrids and PHEV's. Were are we going to dispose of all those batteries and the resultant metal wastes from making them if a single household battery should be properly disposed of?
This is a "reductio ad absurdum" theater piece about Green philosophy. This is Al Gore's dream for our society! (As long as he is allowed some sort of loophole, as he always is.)
Makes perfect sense coming from a German company, they witnessed it first hand, and see the same pattern from the green movement, in there fascist assertion that there way is the only way.
In Austin, our city council (one of the greenest around) chose a single stream recycling contract because of so called cost savings with the separation/collection process. However, they chose an international firm (over a local firm) and their yard was almost to San Antonio, and so all the profits to be gained were lost in transportation fuel costs so far away from the source point. Political favoritism won out over the most efficient/greenest execution of single stream, and it still wins today, right or left.
Thinking Green is different from acting green. It's a difficult process, and anything that increases awareness improves the position.
Your skin needs to be a little thicker
And who might that be? No one I know. At least not the way they are portrayed in this stupid ad. This commercial is wrong on oh so many levels. Poor marketing, not funny, playing into the Neocons and teabaggers worst and false fears of environmentalism. Notice I said POOR MARKETING. If you want to see an effective ad from the Superbowl- see Google's ad which did as much right as this ad did wrong.