Audi has a tie-in ad for The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, but it doesn’t work very well. Sadly, like most movie tie-in ads, it just shows the Avengers, and then it shows the product, and then it says they’re both exceptional, blah, blah. Not very convincing, and Audi has nothing whatsoever to do with the Avengers, so why bother?*
But Audi has a currently running ad that shows a bunch of drones attacking people and they use the slogan: “Technology doesn’t have to be intimidating.” Well, this ad has a good slogan, but the ad itself is unconvincing because it shows a bunch of people attacked by drones as they walk to their cars in a parking lot, however, the Audi owner is unafraid, because he has a car, like the rest of them also have, so, um, actually, it defeats its own argument. Oops.
But this slogan concept is a good one, and it could be so easily illustrated using the character of Ultron: a super robot. (They already paid for ad tie-ins, so why not?) Simply show Ultron fight and defeat the Avengers with extremely fearful abilities, and then show Ultron walk over to his car (an Audi), get in, and drive away. Then Ultron would use the technology in the Audi, and the slogan about technology not always being intimidating would work especially well, because Ultron is technology that is intimidating, but the Audi is technology that is not intimidating.
Here’s the Audi drones ad, but this is misleading, as it’s twice as long as the TV version I keep seeing, and it makes a little more sense story-wise, although still not so good at making the point about why we should buy an Audi. I mean, the concept is cute, but does it make you want to buy an Audi? If not, it fails. In any case, here’s the spot:
And here’s the Audi Avengers ad (Again, this is misleading, as it’s 3 times longer than the TV ad I keep seeing, so it’s hard for you to judge the points I’m making, which are about the TV version of the spot):
* (Movie tie-in ads are almost all like this, which is such a shame. They pay through the nose for the rights to tie a product into a movie in an ad campaign, and then they spend a fortune on the ad production, but there’s so little concept going into them to justify such an expense, and the ads rarely make any kind of persuasive point, simply mentioning the movie and then the product, so I kind of doubt they even work. If they’re going to do this, there really should be a significant way to tie the product into the movie such that we remember it.)
