Perfume ads are limited in what they can do because they’re selling a scent. And we don’t see or hear the scent. The sniffing television has been invented in Japan, but it’s still in the prototype stage and will be more of a curiosity. In a real perfume advert, the sense of smell is represented by the proximity of the skin. The camera is so close to the naked skin that the cameraman has to be able to smell something. A series of glamorous shots and associations ends with a pack shot in which a woman’s voice whispers the name of the brand.
You can’t have a perfume in a perfume ad. But why aren’t cars in car ads? Like perfume ads, car ads are similar. In a real car ad, you see anything but a lot of cars. You might see a car, but it’s usually driving down an empty street in an unfamiliar city that looks like it’s from March 2020. Or a car speeding down a country road somewhere that looks like a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape with no civilisation. Very often the car will appear in a place where no car can appear, because there is no road or it is behind a no-entry zone. You will see the car on the beach, in the woods, on the shore of a frozen lake, in front of a baroque castle, in deep snow or right on the Charles Bridge. In a car advert, on the other hand, you don’t see where you are actually experiencing your car. It’s not standing in traffic, it’s not baking in a hot car park in front of a department store, it’s not crammed into an old garage, it’s not standing half on the pavement because there’s no room elsewhere, it’s not being refuelled.
Car manufacturers admit in their ads that the ideal world is one without their product. The world of car advertising is one where nobody has a car but you. You need a car to get to where there are no cars. The problem is sold.