The automotive landscape is ever-evolving, but one element remains constant: marketing. And the use of Hollywood star power in vehicular promotion is, itself, a tale as old as time. But we can’t help but notice a certain shift in the way cars are being presented to us. Take this new short film from Mercedes-Benz as an example.
Titled “In Her Shoes,” it follows Antonio (de) Banderas as he spends a day in his real life daughter Stella’s Mercedes E-Class, learning a wealth of new information about his own flesh and blood that he somehow never knew before—from her car.
The tagline is “Knows your day. Drives your way.” The notion of the car as a four-wheeled digital assistant is heavy on the minds of marketers who have been sneaking the word “executive” into their copy for decades.
In the film, Mercedes demonstrates how the E-Class can “adapt [to] its owner’s habits” and “intuitively guides Antonio to familiar places.” We get it; these are convenience features. But if you peel the layers of that onion back, the reality is that Mercedes is essentially bragging about how well its cars “know” its customers. And that doesn’t come by way of tea and conversation, right? Mercedes is basically bragging about how much of your data it collects.
Maybe I’m cynical, but it seems like forever ago that the marketing suggested our cars were watching out for us, rather than simply watching us. Remember The Hire? It was an eight-part short film series put out by BMW in the early 2000s. “Ambush,” embedded above, is one of the best car films ever made (I wasn’t a contributor when that linked list was compiled, for the record) and it’s not even 8 minutes long. This little BMW marketing gem did every bit as much as any digital assistant to make the customer feel special—and it didn’t need to know your Starbucks order to do it.
The good old days, man. I miss ’em.
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