Car Advertising: Can Eco-Fascism be Funny ?

The Audi 'Green Police' advert, screened during the half-time interval of the Superbowl is one ad that seems to have generated strong reactions – always part of the agenda of the marketer. Some people thought it was funny, some thought it was offensive, some thought it was just cynical "Greenwash", some thought it was counter-productive – and in Ken's case it mainly provoked an outburst of singing along, but that’s only because he is old enough to own an original vinyl copy of Cheap Trick's Dream Police, for those of you who can still remember that technology (and those hairstyles).



So, what to make of it? Well, in its defence, you could say it taps into the ideas that Stuart Rose and colleagues put forward (covered in Chapter 4 of our text book), that if you want to engage the 'outer directed' consumers (ie not the usual suspects in the green consumption world, but the people more worried about fashion, style and keeping up with the trend), then you need to make your communications cool, knowing and 'playful'. On a straightforward comedy level, a line like 'Hold it right there plastic boy, you picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem' is playful and funny, the production values are slick, and there are some nice touches (the ant-eater as sniffer-dog being a nicely surreal touch). You could also argue that any kind of advert suggesting that big cars, incandescent bulbs and wasteful energy use are a bad idea, and puts that message across to a global audience in the middle of one of the biggest consumer fests on the planet, has got to be a good thing. As one of the posters on YouTube called TheTrueHolyDarkness put it – "Hmm. This Green Police is a very smart and slick advertising campaign. Whether you are left or right, environmentalist or humanitarian, you can't help but like this commercial. To the right, it's a parody. To the left, it's a Public Service Announcement. To Audi, it's pure win either way."

The other side of the coin is that the ad portrays all the aspects of progressing towards more sustainable consumption that sustainability marketers have been trying to move away from (or at least mostly try not to lead with!). The reduction of choice (no plastic bags), new rules, more rules and persecution if you don’t follow them (compost infractions), the outlawing of convenience (batteries) and luxury (Jacuzzis) mean that the picture of the world the advert paints is of a consumer nightmare, not an ecologist's dream. The environmentalist as killjoy has been a recurring theme in the debate about sustainability as is something of a fall-back position for Fox News in the US or the Today Programme in the UK. We don't really want to save the environment for future generations, our real agenda is to spoil everybody's fun. Environmentalism as the new Puritanism is easy to make fun of, and easy to ignore, and if you complain that the advert works that way – well, you must just have no sense of humour.

Of course some of the comments posted on YouTube are as funny as the ad, if not more so – "Cool, Audi is celebrating eco-fascism. Idealizing oppression has never been so mainstream" from Zhokar seemed to sum up a lot of posters' feelings . Neuvie's comment of "Less than a 1oz plastic bag is not green, but 3,000 lbs of car is. What kind of thinking process can I have to accept this?” was also rather pithy. What was perhaps surprising was that, aside from the inevitable 'climate change is a myth contrived to oppress us' responses, a key theme was 'This isn't a joke, it's the future and we need to fight against it'. This is perhaps the most worrying aspect of the campaign. Audi's tongue may be planted firmly in its cheek, but if the response to the ad amongst mainstream consumers is to view it as a call to arms to man the barricades in defence of the consumer lifestyle, then the joke could fall very flat.