Badvertising: Routan Boom

From the Fourth Reich comes this ad campaign for the new Volkswagen. Its a minivan, which seems a little odd at first coming from VW. My guess is that all the girls who grew up driving the "New Bugs" and the Jetta have now reached prime breeding age so Volkswagen decided to make the smart move of transitioning into the soccer mom demographic. So the product idea is good, but the ad campaign is a little weird.

Brooke Shields is the spokeswomen for this mock "awareness" campaign. The idea is that this new minivan is so seductively engineered that woman are all horny for it. And since only moms drive minivans they have become horny for something else in order to get into the motherhood club. There are a few different commercials and even a 5 minute mockumentary available for viewing online. For now we'll just focus on the actual TV commercials.





I think this is one idea that sounds good in a brainstorming session but didn't really translate well onto television. Its pretty clever to suggest that women are so taken by that sleek Prussian precision that they are eager to get knocked up just so they can jump behind the wheel of a minivan. But something is lost in translation. I can't really put it into words but it comes off as kind of creepy.

The thing that really strikes me as odd is the casting of Brooke Shields as the spokeswoman for this whole campaign. At first glance it seems like a great idea, associating the still scrumptious Shields with your product. She's beautiful but familar, appealing to both moms and dads.

But Brooke famously had a battle with postpartum depression after the birth of her first child. It was a big thing, she even had a feud with crazy Tom Cruise over it because she had the gall to seek medical attention and Maverick thought she was a bad person and all she needed was a nice Thetan Cleansing. She apparently recovered from her PPD, which is great, but she's still associated with the condition by many people. So why would any sane company stake their advertising budget on Brooke advising women not to have children? I know its all in jest, but still, its just weird.