Guest Columnist: The Scottish hate inane car commercials

We are back this week with Bloggi Bag guest columnist, The Scotsman, to share with us his views of marketing. Of course we Americans are marketing whores so it's difficult for us to understand his distaste but try and sympathize- Europeans are more refined than we are!

Is it just me or has anybody else noticed that TV advertisements appear to be trying to appeal to, well, actually, I’m not at all sure who they’re trying to appeal to. Car adverts are particularly perplexing. That one on the frozen lake with the Citreon C4 morphing into a giant speed-skating transformer leaves me utterly baffled every time.( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_g_74Ug2zw) Who, exactly, is the target demographic for that nonsense? Fans of Transformers? Do kids still like them? But kids don’t buy cars anyway. Do you see why I’m baffled? Then there’s Audi’s claim at end of their latest advert:

“TO DATE NASA HAS FILED 6,509 PATENTS. IN DEVELOPING THE A6, AUDI FILED 9,621”

Well that’s super. So can the A6 travel through the cold vacuum of outer-space then? The short answer is “no”. In my opinion, Audi should be ashamed of themselves and I’ll explain why. The Audi A6 has been on the market since 1994. Let’s estimate that this car was in development for ten years before finally going to market. We can therefore state the following:

“ON AVERAGE, AUDI FILED ALMOST FOUR HUNDRED PATENTS PER YEAR AND ALL THEY’VE GOT TO SHOW FOR IT IS A CAR.”

NASA was founded in 1958. Let’s create a similar statement on their behalf:

ON AVERAGE, NASA ONLY NEEDED TO FILE ABOUT 130 PATENTS PER YEAR TO SEND PROBES ON A FLY-PAST OF VENUS (1962); PUT MEN ON THE MOON (1969); LAND PROBES ON MARS AND SEND BACK THE FIRST COLOUR PICTURES OF ANOTHER PLANET (1975); SEND PROBES TO INVESTIGATE JUPITER, SATURN, URANUS AND NEPTUNE (1977); DESIGN, BUILD AND LAUNCH THE FIRST SPACE SHUTTLE (1981); PUT THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE INTO ORBIT (1990); AND FINALLY, CONTRIBUTE TOWARDS THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION (CURRENT).”

So you see, the boffins at Audi are morons. All those patents, all that head scratching and all they could come up with is a car. A FUCKING CAR! In lieu of finding a better explanation, I can only conclude that their patents were crap. Complete and utter needless crap. If I owned shares in Audi I’d be asking some serious questions about how well my investment is being utilised.

Fuck off Audi. At least NASA did something worthwhile with their patents. If you want to impress me then put a car on the moon.