Bonnets, boots and Y-fronts

Budgets for car promotion used to buy top directors and supernova effects. Now, writes Malcolm Clark, we're stuck with a man in his underpants

Pity the designers of the stunning new Vauxhall sports car, the VX220. They did everything they could to make it cutting edge. They gave it an aluminium chassis that sucks the ground like a crazed leaf-blower, an interior so full of bare metal it's almost skeletal and, for people who know about these things, a performance apparently as good as a Lotus. But they couldn't dictate how it was advertised.

A year ago, they might reasonably have expected a naked supermodel wriggling behind the steering wheel - ironically, you understand. Or at least an aerial shot of their silver creation stirring the dust in some remote corner of Morocco. Instead, they got Griff Rhys Jones in his blue underpants. Something very unfunny is happening to car advertising.

The profits of car manufacturers in Britain are tumbling - the result of the startlingly successful campaign against "rip-off" car prices in this country, and the consumer boycott that it inspired. In the month when the new X registration comes on stream, even the grandest names in the industry are falling over each other to offer discounts. As for ads, both budgets and quality are being sacrificed.

Television ads, the flagship of car marketing, have been the first to feel the pinch. For a start, there are just fewer and fewer of them, as manufacturers switch to cheaper press ads. But even where the TV advertising is still running, there's a new emphasis on keeping costs down. Take the current ad for the Ford Focus. It appears to have been put together by a group of film students who ran out of money. You know the one, with the assorted rejects from a tapas bar who rubber-neck uncertainly as a Focus drives past in a badly lit studio. The Focus deserves a closer look, we are told. I hope the copywriter isn't rehearsing an acceptance speech for an award. Welcome to the Euro-ad.

Whereas in the past, Ford advertised in separate markets, with distinctive campaigns tailored to the nuances of different nationalities, now it is advertising across Europe with just one ad. Bland, lowest common denominator, sure, but it would be strange if a car manufacturer wasn't attracted to large economies of scale. Other companies are following suit. Nissan, Fiat and Peugeot have all announced plans for more pan-European campaigns.

Expect fewer distinctively British ads in the future. A tragedy if you're a fan of this year's funniest - the self- deprecating plug for Skoda, where the creative team on-screen cannot believe the car they are looking at hails from Prague. There's some compensation, however. We may never need to see that plonker with the talking Megane again.

As for those specifically British ads, puritanism is now the order of the day. Three years ago, when Vauxhall launched its "Raising the Standard" campaign, it threw money at the ad, with Astras dangling from helicopters in a lunar landscape. It was meant to look expensive. As was the Florida location for Ruby Wax's rather improbable emergence from a small Corsa. Both would send all the wrong signals for a company facing complaints about overcharging. So, instead, we have an amateur mad scientist - yes, Griff Rhys Jones again - who appears so talentless we can't help but suspect that it is he who is paying for the privilege of being on the box.

The definitive example of this new ethos is last week's press ad for Rover, which has a scrawl at the top, apparently written by the client, that reads: "Let's put the money into the offer, not the ad. Run it as it is." Even when spending money, manufacturers are keen to suggest that they aren't, so unstoppable is the backlash against excessive profits.

A mere 12 months ago, it was all so different. Then, the advertising spend by the top ten UK car manufacturers had risen an astonishing 10 per cent in a year to an annual total of £475m. It was the climax of more than a decade of increasing budgets. The rise was fuelled by the large profits to be made in Britain. However, some changes in the process of car manufacture also initially worked in favour of the advertising agencies. New, more flexible production technology allowed companies to produce very different models from the same factory platform. That meant more models and an endless stream of new, highly specific campaigns.

Generally, ad agencies don't have to try hard to convince car giants to increase their spend on promotion. That comes as naturally as emissions to the internal combustion engine. They like doing it. They know that, in an increasingly crowded market, the way to success is to differentiate their brands - if the money is available.

Brands are that most indefinable commodity of consumer capitalism. You don't get much movement in the perception of a brand that has been around a long time, such as a car marque, by spending peanuts. Cars also need more promotion than run-of-the-mill household products, because the choice of a car works on a pretty mysterious level. It isn't as rational as that of, say, a washing machine or a fridge. We are swayed by many more questions of social status and self-esteem. Few people worry seriously about having a Lec rather than a Hotpoint in the kitchen, and most of us are yet to be convinced of the extra value in a galvanised purple or yellow dishwasher. But nothing other than high-dose therapy would drag us towards a Daewoo.

The cost of individual ads has itself been creeping up, partly because it is just hard to make ads that capture the imagination. The few directors, copywriters and producers who can do it really successfully want to push the boundaries of their art form, too. Then there are the special effects. Six years ago, "Fly Me To The Moon", a beautiful ad in which an astronaut takes flight in a Ford Probe, began a trend for the extensive use of what was then the relatively new Flame editing technology. This allowed directors to layer surface upon surface, giving their ads a startling dreamlike quality. In the Probe ad, an entire supernova emerges, exploding from the retina of the astronaut as he drives the car. By last year, Steve McQueen had been disinterred to take the Puma for a spin. These are the kind of special effects that keep Soho in business.

But all that was before the shock of this year's shift in public attitudes; before everything turned nasty for the car industry and its advertising executives.

It started slowly. At first, the manufacturers rebuffed the complaints of overpricing. But in December, Mitsubishi cut its prices by 10 per cent. Moreover, it accepted the validity of the criticism, admitting that it had been overcharging compared to other manufacturers in Europe. It has been downhill ever since for the firms. Two weeks ago, even Mercedes cut its prices by 20 per cent.

Now pundits are talking of a 30 per cent drop overall, and the manufacturers are in a panic. All their convictions about the need for high advertising spend and, in particular, evocative television ads have had to be forsworn as the herd moves off down the valley. And all that lovely grandiloquence on screen that we have come to love, or loathe, is being replaced by press bulletins on today's bargains.

So enjoy the few good TV adverts left while you can. The ad for the Renault Scenic people carrier, for example, in which a couple take off for India to open a guest house, while their friends mock round a dinner table, offers witty and poetic anti-consumerist rebel chic - for the cost of a small town in Kerala. As for VW, its take-off of the traffic jam scene from Fellini's 8f tells potential buyers that the firm is smart, so smart that it wouldn't fall for any of the music promo stuff that appeals to mere Peugeot 206 buyers. It takes a risk by acknowledging one downside of owning a car, and that underlines the specialness of the brand. But it hasn't been able to stop VW's recent fall in market share.

As for the price war itself, you can be sure that the manufacturers and their agencies know this is a dangerous departure. They've been brought up on the advice of the founding fathers of modern marketing, who warned them against competing on price alone - people such as Claude Hopkins, who, in the 1920s, prophesied a bright future for the "science of advertising". Its success, he said, depended on the exploitation of the techniques of psychology to reach deep into the human mind. Selling on price, he warned, was destined to prove counter-productive. But then, he wasn't dealing with a group of manufacturers widely thought to have been fleecing the public.

Nor does it look as if things will improve for the industry any time soon. There are other problems that are going to make car advertising an even more difficult proposition in the future.

In order to build global capacity, the largest manufacturers have been on a merger and acquisition spree over the past five years. This is blurring the edges of the old fixed brands. A Volvo is now a Ford by another name, but so are a Jaguar and a Mazda. Audi, Skoda and Seat are all owned by the VW folks in Wolfsburg. No surprise, then, that the rise in sales of Seat has almost exactly matched the decline in VW. Charging a premium for a higher brand when there's an almost equally good and cheaper alternative is unsustainable.

Then there's the new research, reported in this month's edition of Car magazine, which suggests that the car industry is beginning to follow trends in the British high street. Sales of mass-market models, the mainstay of TV advertising, are shrinking. Like M&S, which is caught between cheap discount shops and the top-end retailers such as Timberland, car buyers are leaving the mainstream middle ground behind. Some are finding it impossible to resist foreign imports, the likes of Kai or Hyundai, which now seem so cheap that they could be sold in bulk by WalMart. Others looking for a different kind of value are willing to trade up for the first time to sporty coupes, 4x4s and people carriers, now that they are more competitively priced.

The implications of these trends represent a nightmare for advertising agencies. They suggest that the revolt against price fixing might become a permanent phenomenon. We are in grave danger of developing the habit of demanding a bargain, and no amount of aerial photography, poetic fancy or even a silly man in underpants may change our minds.

Post this article to

• Digg
• del.icio.us
• newsvine
• NowPublic
• Shoutwire
• Reddit

We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.