Creative cotton candy from Infiniti.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

Detroit. There’s a race going on right now in the automobile business. No, not to create the fastest, most fuel-efficient car or the lightest, toughest, most fuel-efficient truck, but to create advertising that doesn’t look or feel like advertising. And though auto companies aren’t the inventors of it, or even the sole practitioners of it, content marketing or brand-driven entertainment has completely taken over the business.

You may remember the first notable foray by a manufacturer of note to go away from the usual 30- or 60-second TV commercial format, when BMW did a series of ten-minute videos for the Internet called The Hire back in 2001 and 2002. Directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Clive Owen, the videos drew tremendous amounts of attention in the ad and automotive worlds. It was new, different, special, avant-garde, etc., etc., etc., and it immediately became all the rage. (Advertising designed to not look like advertising certainly happened long before this, but the BMW Films project was really the first to take advantage of the Internet, and certainly the first effort of note by an auto company.)

Right then and there a seismic shift in the automotive advertising world occurred, and from then on it became an obsession for automotive marketers to engage consumers in different, more creative ways, especially if those ways somehow didn’t look or feel like traditional advertising.

This all made perfect sense with the current state of the nation too. After all, we’d become a Starbucks-fueled nation of consumer zombies gobbling content at a prodigious rate on any number of electronic delivery devices. And what passes for "content" can be anything from actual newsworthy information (although that seems to be rapidly fading in importance) to the mind-numbingly mesmerizing videos that seem to take hold of the Internet on a daily basis. It wasn’t enough to do “ads.” It became a battle for eyeballs, even if in this nanosecond-attention-span society we live in today a marketer could only really count on a three- to five-second glance, at best. And if they got more, it was a notable achievement.

But in this frenzy to get consumers to give more than a glance the pendulum has swung to the extreme, to the point that auto manufacturers will try anything to capture consumer attention. The latest foray into the realm of “let’s not do anything that looks like advertising even though it’s advertising” is from Infiniti, Nissan’s trying-so-hard-to-be-a-luxury-star automaker.

The Internet campaign is called Infiniti Déjà View and it is designed to complement a TV commercial for the new Infiniti Q50 called “Factory of Life.”

Suffice to say the TV spot is designed to make luxury intenders go their own way and choose Infiniti over the typical German makes. It’s the same kind of “march to a different drummer” tone in advertising that other automakers have employed with some success, most notably Audi. (For the record, you’ve seen this Infiniti spot before from other manufactures many times. It may have the Infiniti branding on it at the end but you’ve seen it before and it breaks no new ground, trust me.)

The Internet component of this campaign is something different altogether. Well, not really, but Infiniti and its operatives would like you to believe that it’s different. Yes, you the consumer can actually engage in the story using voice recognition technology that enable viewers to interact with the characters through phone calls. The plot then unfolds according to the viewers’ inputs, with myriad scenarios and responses pre-recorded so that the consumer actually thinks they’re really involved and engaged. And these videos typically run around just under 20 minutes.

Come again? Do Infiniti marketers actually believe that someone will devote 20 minutes to this? Really? Do they actually think that consumers – make that potential buyers actually shopping in the luxury auto space - will be lured in by a 20-minute video with a gimmick that makes it seem like they’re actually participating? And that this will lead to a favorable impression of Infiniti?

Oh, I suppose there will be a few consumers out there who will mindlessly go along with the come-on, but at some point they’re bound to say to themselves, “Really? I just wasted ten minutes of my life on this?” and then turn it off, never to return. I know advertising is the most self-absorbed world this side of Hollywood, but this really takes the cake.

Memo to Infiniti marketers: I just have to ask, what world are you living in? At what point did you convince yourselves that this was actually a good idea worth pursuing? Are you really that self-absorbed and desperate that you not only went along with this scenario, but you actually talked yourselves into believing that it constitutes true “breakthrough” creative? How in the hell can Infiniti marketers expect people with a modicum of intelligence to go along with this unmitigated bullshit?

And, where’s Mr. T. when you really need him? Because I pity these fools.

I was involved on the creative side of advertising for more than two decades so believe me when I say that I know how hard it is to push the envelope and come up with something really new and different and good. It’s an extremely difficult pursuit. But not everything is good and not everything is worth doing, and sometimes you just have to walk away. And this was definitely one of those times.

This latest foray by Infiniti should be a clear warning to all automotive marketers that credibility and brand integrity can’t be created out of thin air. You can’t really get there by creative association, either. It’s fun and it’s hip to do buzz-worthy stuff but it’s just so much creative cotton candy at the end, mouth watering for three seconds and then gone. Yes, you get invited to all of the award shows and the pats on the back are endless, but in the end, what are you left with? Has the needle really moved for the brand? Probably not.

Immersive, brand-driven entertainment is all well and good - as an accessory - but if you don’t have the product, and that product doesn’t have the fundamental integrity and in turn desirability to consumers, then you got nothin’.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.