Crossing the pond for this week's instalment of what has now become a car advertising blog. The following ads were produced by David and Goliath, a creative agency which opened shop in the US with offices in LA but now have secondary bases in London and Frankfurt. Both of these ads are for the dubiously named KIA Optima; one of them works well within the confines of its own nature and the other droops off into not much. See if you can guess which is which.
The tagline 'One Epic Ride' is apt; the action shows the car in a light which does exactly what it says on the tin. But with such a large budget to play with I imagine it's all to easy to go for the big flashy execution rather than teasing out a more conceptually creative ad, and after all this is an American ad. But, and I say 'but' again, it's nice to see agencies run away with themselves capturing a spirit of giddy, simplistic excitement which is what's most important when you're trying to hook the potentially car-buying-family-life's-pecking-my-head,-I-wish-I'd-carried-on-surfing-male. Plus the wheels are cool.
This one was also given 5 stars by y'all YouTubers in the US. Well it's beautifully cinematographic, any suggestions for a shorter word welcome, in a similar way to the first its fantastical story aims to capture the imagination and I think it does it in a more emotive way by using the boy. Details I love: the Narnia style wardrobe right at the start, the Space 1999 style rocket ship at 0:15 and the kids model town at 0:19. Particularly I like the fact that certain fragments of the lad's dream are present in the bedroom reality; nice attention to detail showing reality inspires dreams, which is the central theme highlighted by the end VO.
And it's exactly the summarising VO which irks me most about this ad: 'No one ever dreamt of driving a mid-size sedan, until now.' I think there are a number of things which don't wash:
1) The technical language jars against the fantastical tone set by the video, maybe that's due to the.. 2) The American voice...okay not specifically because he's American, it's the sound of his voice...please don't make me go into detail regarding varieties of American accent...like, totally don't go there. 3) 'Until now' which makes me question who's having the dream. Is the boy dreaming of being a grown up so he can drive his dad's car?! Because let me tell you and this is the truth... no boys ever dream about driving mid size sedans. OR has this man's wonderfully surreal, adventure dream simply reverted horribly into his actual reality?
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