The first thing that jumped into my head when I saw any of
the Alfa Romeo ads was: “Wow, Alfa Romeo is trying to break into the American
market? Great! It’s worked well for fiat, so hopefully it will for them too.”
I like Italian cars. They used to be a joke like English
cars, but both are now very reliable and such, I think; I hope, anyway.
This is basically the kind of high concept montage story
lifestyle whatever else you want to call it ad we’ve seen a lot of over the years, and for me
they never get old, because I love cars, and I love ads when they’re done well,
and this one is, visually, conceptually, etc.
And yeah, we’ve got a great visual metaphor here, with the
idea of riding on the back of dragons, but for me this is where this ad conceptually
starts to disintegrate somewhat, because they show us these neato-looking cars, then
they say they’re bringing us flying cars. (They said: “…So that when we got the
chance, we could deliver that flying car.”) Only there are no flying cars, not
in the ad, not in the dealerships. Flying cars means cars that fly in the air.
So that seemed like a false advertising claim to me. I mean, yes, they “fly”,
as in fast, but when people say flying cars, they mean cars that fly through
the air, like we were promised by science books and magazines when we were
kids. And we still don’t have any flying cars. Claiming to make them when they
still drive on the ground on tires is not exactly honest, and maybe they
shouldn’t use those words if they don’t want to disappoint people.
Here’s the dragon back ad:
