Man, I love this ad’s concept: showing everyday people talking about the new BMW i8 as though it’s a UFO or something. But filming it so that it looks like old film footage from the 1970s? Brilliant! It makes it seem like interviews from UFO documentaries, or maybe a scene from that movie The Fourth Kind, only this time, the aliens are friendly, like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And that line: “It’s out there…” Perfect. Like The X Files.
The “found footage” trope is wearing very thin in movies, and it’s used because it’s an easy way to save money: film it with a camcorder and say it really happened. Not original anymore, but it works to bring in lots of moviegoers on a low budget. But using this trope in an ad to get that feel we’re so used to seeing in these “found footage” movies: wonderful!
I have a gripe with some of the new BMW ads message-wise (The “Respect” ad rips off a RAM pickup truck ad from last year, and it also references an ugly true-life incident, so I think they missed the mark by a mile on that one; and the one where the woman is racing a truck from a freeway entrance ramp: doing that can and does get people killed, so another strikeout there, I have to say. {Just because you have a high-performance car, it doesn’t make you a racecar driver. Too many people find that out too late and die, and can take others with them.}), but the ones for the new BMW i8 and their compact electric: slam dunk!
Here’s the sightings spot:
(BTW: Creative work is always hit-or-miss. I’m not knocking the creative guys who worked on the BMW ads I don’t think work; I’m sure they love them, and BMW does too, but I just see something perhaps they didn’t because they are too close to it, like how I always see other people’s typos, but somehow I constantly miss my own. That’s actually the whole point of most of my advertising review posts: showing where maybe things don’t work or could be fine-tuned, and hopefully they’re funny enough to be an enjoyable read. But like they say: You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Nobody can do that: not me, not the ad creatives, nobody.)
