Perfume ads have it tough because they’re selling scent. And we can’t see or hear scent. They’ve invented scratch-and-sniff TV in Japan, but it’s still in prototype phase and will probably remain a curiosity. In a proper perfume ad, smell is represented by skin proximity. The camera captures bare skin so close that the cameraman must smell something. Like a Švankmajer film, just more polished. A series of eroticizing shots and associations ends with a packshot where a female voice whispers the brand name into our ears—audibly, but in a half-whisper.
There can’t be any scent in an ad for scent. But why aren’t there cars in car ads? Just like perfume ads, car ads all look alike. In a proper car ad, you see everything except cars. We do see one car, but it’s usually moving down an empty street in an unknown city that looks like March 2020. Or the car speeds at inappropriate velocity along some country road where the scene feels like an abandoned, post-apocalyptic landscape without civilization. Very often the car appears exactly where no car could ever appear—because there’s no road leading there, or it’s behind a no-entry sign. You’ll see the car on a beach, in a forest, on the shore of a frozen lake, in front of a baroque castle, in deep snow, or straight-up on Charles Bridge. In a car ad, you won’t see where you’ll actually experience your car. It’s not stuck in traffic, not baking in a scorching shopping mall parking lot, not crammed into an ancient garage, not parked half on the sidewalk because there was nowhere else, not overtaking or being overtaken, and not refueling.
Car manufacturers admit in their ads that the ideal world is one without their product. The world from a car ad is one where nobody has a car except you. You need a car to get to places where there are no cars. The problem is sold.