Aiming to “change the face of luxury motoring across Europe,” this new Infiniti Europe campaign from TBWA changes the face of nothing when it comes to car advertising. With the tagline “Since now, the perfect line is a curve” – whatever the hell that means – the campaign is said to help position the brand as a viable alternative to Mercedes, Audi and BMW.
Explaining the campaign, TBWA European Creative Director MacGregor Hastie said, “With the launch of this campaign we are more than certain of having given Infiniti its proper place in the world of high-end luxury car brands and have found an extraordinary and distinguishing big idea that will allow us to create ever stronger and more creative campaigns in the future. Because, as every one knows, the perfect line, is a curve.”
Excuse us but the last time we looked, a perfect line was was a straight line but, in advertising, a line can be whatever the hell you want it to be be so lets not quibble with that seemingly minor detail. We will, however, quibble with the utterly boring, rote approach the TBWA team chose to take when creating this commercial. It’s like the agency took clips from 100 other boring car commercials, cobbled them together and barfed up a few tired platitudes. At least there wasn’t a winding mountain road.
With the copy, “everything you know about performance marketing is in the past,” we understand the campaign aims to say Infiniti is ahead of the pack and leaves the competition in its rear view mirror. We can see how this concept came to fruition. Sadly, like many advertising concepts, they sound great in the conference room but when they come to life in an actual campaign, many fail miserably.
There’s a line of thinking in marketing that says if you can easily swap your brand with another, the commercial is a failure. If there’s nothing that clearly sets the brand apart from the competition, there’s no point in saying anything at all. One could easily replace Infinity with BMW, Mercedes or Audi in this commercial and the results would be the same; a bland statement about performance marketing that could be applied to any luxury car brand.
If your goal is to set your brand apart from the rest then you actually need to do that. This work does not and fails to say anything of substance about, well, anything at all.
