Where did the zeitgeist go?

As Mr. Spock would say – fascinating. This morning, as ESPN drones away on the TV over on the right side of my big desk, I see another Nitro commercial that must have been done by a completely different team. I am guessing that BBDO has assigned a few teams to work on the Nitro account, and while I loved the work of the team that created “The Planet”, which I surmise is assigned to capture smart old bastards like me (why, I don't know, because there's not a chance in hell that I would ever buy this little Rav4-with-a-hemi), I find the 20-something-targeted ad which I saw this morning to be a juvenile betrayal.

By the way, the fabulous The Planet ad is best seen in the 60-second version, where the real artistry is obvious. In an earlier post, I mistakenly linked to the 30-second version which is OK, but missing too much. The absolutely perfect touch is when the weird little Easter-island cone-creature pops up at the end. That’s a moment that for me, hearkens back to the brilliant, profound use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll meet again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, a truly great moment that summarizes and ties together one of the very greatest movies ever made.

I can’t find a link to the disappointing new ad, but it shows a carload of post-college “cool people” (straight from Central Casting, as stereotypical as can be) in a Nitro, as the driver squeezes it into a narrow space next to an idiot whose car is parked at an angle. To make enough room to open the car-door, they open their windows and blast some hip-hop on their Sirius satellite radio – and look at that, the car next door starts to vibrate away. The last shot shows that this blast of sound has pushed all the nearby cars away, not just the offending angle-parker, so that the Nitro has cleared a 15-foot moat of parking-lot space all around it.

Whoop-dee-doo. This ad is disappointing on so many levels, but here are three.

1) All the Sirius product placement in the ad is very un-cool, completely ruining the mood. I’m sure that Dodge and Sirius have a lovely corporate partnership, and had to do something, and the clueless suits probably thought this was great, but this ham-handed effort is just awful.

2) The WHOLE POINT of the “The Planet” was that stupid CGI tricks are stupid – that everyone under the age of 100 is unimpressed by fake backgrounds and stupid visual effects. If I see another ad with a baby or a dog's mouth spouting a lot of cute adult comments, or with a car driving upside-down over an impossible landscape, I'm going to throw a brick through my TV screen. The Planet dealt with this jadedness by going all out; by creating a symphony of visual effects and perfectly selected music; a beautifully orchestrated fantasy sequence that was shockingly well executed. The whole point was that it took one from a bored “more of the same crap” impression all the way up to a standing-alone-in-the-living-room-applauding huzzah for its breathtaking creativity.

But this parking-lot piece just goes back to stupid visual effects… Oh, my, the loud radio in the Nitro is making the car next door bounce away – how interesting! Oh, look at that, now all the cars have been pushed away, making a ring of empty space around the Nitro – how amazing! No, it’s not interesting – it’s the same old stupifyingly dull same ol. It’s background noise. I find it really hard to understand how the folks who green-lighted this trash did not get that this piece actually undermines the breakthrough positive impression created by The Planet.

3) The Planet was wonderfully rich – a tour de force of storytelling and texture; more like a haiku of a movie than a commercial. But this parking lot thing is flat and boring. I mean, what could BE more boring than a car full of vaguely cool, almost invisible, completely typical people with flat voices and flat clothes, parking a frikking car, with most of the visual and thematic attention paid to a totally plain and uninteresting satellite radio screen? The contrast is jarring.

I can only conclude that there are two separate teams working on the Nitro account, AND that although I clearly respond terrifically to The Planet and can’t stand the Parking Lot fiasco, there must have been a bunch of focus group clones and marketing suits who thought this latest thing was just as good or better for their target audience. Which makes me wonder what’s wrong with the target audience.