Earlier I posted a proposed Mercedes ad featuring Julius Caesar to demonstrate the great safety features that help drivers avoid accidents. Well, this Road Warrior-themed spot works every bit as well. This ad is wonderfully inspired, and it’s the best of the Mercedes safety features ads, as well as the best of the Road Warrior-inspired car ads I’ve seen on television. (I wrote a proposed Road Warrior ad a while ago for Tesla, but that was showing the virtue of electric vs. gasoline, so it’s an entirely different concept and selling point.)
So this ad shows a woman driving in her silver Mercedes SUV, and she’s being assailed by Road Warrior-type characters trying to wreck her and such (which is funny, because where I live, the people driving silver Mercedes are the most dangerous drivers on the road!), just like in the movie The Road Warrior, but her car’s safety features keep saving her by braking automatically, swerving to miss objects, etc. It’s a totally brilliant way to demonstrate and sell safety features! (I should have thought of that, but I was too busy thinking about how electric cars would free you from fighting over gas resources, personified by the Road Warrior villains.) Great job!
And the tag for this ad is brilliant, in my opinion, which is unusual for TV ads in general. Usually TV ad tags are annoying or superfluous or deflate the ad’s humor through overkill, but not in this case. Here, the tag ads a whole new joke based on what we’ve seen, and it’s actually fun and welcome. And what we see is that the woman has made it home safely, but then one of the Road Warrior brutes drives into the driveway next to hers, so they’re neighbors (!). And so this tag tells us, in a funny way, that she has to go through this stuff every day. And, it suggests that her neighbor’s job is to try to wreck her car, so she really needs the safety features.
This tag reminds me very much of those old Warner Bros. cartoons where the coyote and the sheepdog punch in timecards in the morning, and then the coyote tries to steal the sheep, and the sheepdog stops him and beats him up. It’s the kind of cleverness that a tag really needs to work, and this one has it in spades.
Great ad, great tag: great job!
http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7rsj/2015-mercedes-benz-ml-350-the-worst-of-the-road
And here’s my Mercedes Julius Caesar ad, for those who are interested:
http://unconditionedresponse.blogspot.com/2014/08/mercedes-julius-caesar-ad-proposed.html
And here’s my Mercedes Julius Caesar ad, for those who are interested:
http://unconditionedresponse.blogspot.com/2014/08/mercedes-julius-caesar-ad-proposed.html
