You’d Never See This

The television advert begins with a young man (early- to mid-twenties) bopping his way over to his car with groceries. He’s wearing the ubiquitous i-Pod that provides tunes silent to the rest of the world—except the viewing audience. He puts the i-Pod down on the roof of the car—a sporty, dark blue two-door coupe. He loads the groceries in the backseat then draws himself into the driver’s seat (on the right side of the car) and pulls away. The music from his i-Pod is now the soundtrack to his driving around town.

People on the street point and wave to him, trying to tell him that he’s left his i-Pod on the roof. He smiles and waves back, thinking people are just particularly friendly that day (or that the money he shelled out for the gym membership and his bleach-blond hairdo has paid off). He takes curves smoothly and quickly, as if his car is being driven by a professional driver on a closed course. The i-Pod sits calmly on his rooftop all the way, as if focused entirely on its job of providing music for the thousands, maybe millions of viewers watching this advert.

After some deft maneuvering through tight streets, the young man brings his shiny car to a halt at the curb and gets out. He glances over the roof of his car and spots his i-Pod, still resting on the roof, as if glued there by an enthusiastic prop-master. He smiles. The music comes to a jazzy climax. An announcer’s voice takes over the soundtrack:

“The new, German-engineered Ford Focus, blah-blah-blah . . .”

I stop listening to the car commercial and laugh. “German-engineered” and “Ford” are two things I never expected to hear in the same sentence. Not because they do not stand together in fact; I have looked under enough hoods to know that rarely does one company (or continent) have a monopoly on the inner workings of any vehicle. But to hear a Ford marketed as “German engineered” struck an odd chord in my ear. Like “Russian-made American flags” or “Boeing 747 proudly assembled in China,” the advertisement of an icon of American pride and labour sold as an outsourced product seemed paradoxical.

Than again, I’m in New Zealand, a country whose streets are dominated by an overwhelming majority of Asian-made cars; in the four weeks we’ve been here I could count the number of Fords I’ve seen on both hands, and the same for the European makes. So if you’re Ford’s marketing department trying to expand in New Zealand, what do you do? Play up the engineering of the Germans. And perhaps downplay the fact that it’s an American car company.

~emrys