“Ugly? I think so. Running in publications like The Economist in the spring of 2019 it says something nasty, not just about the brand but about the current state of our society.

What’s going on here becomes clearer if we look back at BMW ads and see how the brand message has changed over the last few decades. In the 1980’s and 1990’s ad agency Wight, Collins, Rutherford, Scott (WCRS) followed a simple principle that they described as “interrogate the product until it confesses its strengths.” Once their interrogation uncovered a strength they turned these little grains of truth into brand pearls.

Over the course of many years they created a long line of ads like this:

The subhead on the SHAKEN side reads Rival 4 cylinder two litre engine at 2500rpm. The subhead on the NOT STIRRED side reads BMW 6 cylinder two litre engine at 2500rpm. The copy then explains how the BMW engine is better balanced and produces less vibrations.

Lets get touchy-feely

The world, and marketing, has changed since then. Brands have tended to switch their focus from truths about the product to insights about the target audience. From how things are designed and made to how they make you feel. BMW certainly followed that trend. Hence this ad from about ten years ago, part of another long running campaign.

One of the TV commercials from this campaign has the line “we realised that how you make people feel is as important as what you make.”

The brand, previously rather cold and Germanic, also developed its soft and feminine side with ads like this.

Fast forward to today

In this ad for the BMW 7 the warm colours, the fresh air, the countryside have all gone. Replaced by a beast of a black car in a dark, gloomy and bleak cityscape. The people have gone too. All of them – the windows of the car are blacked out and there’s nobody on the street. The blank buildings, the great black girders of the bridge, most of the light coming from street lamps. It’s an environment that has been entirely dehumanised and denatured. Every aspect of the look and feel is deliberately hard, dark, threatening and brutal.

What’s going on here? The tiny headline STATUS. WITHOUT THE QUO is the clue that unlocks this riddle.

The world is full of aspirational brands that sell status. But they tend to do it in a subtle, oblique and understated way. This ad sticks it right in your face then rubs your nose in it.

When most of the world is espousing inclusivity, empathy and equality this ad is saying “**** that, let’s celebrate exclusivity, selfishness and inequality”. They are unashamedly selling this as a car for Russian Oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, kleptocratic dictators, rapacious CEOs and all those with a ruthless disregard for anyone or anything other than their own ego, wealth and power.

It’s an ugly ad, in every sense. But the fact they are running it, with impunity, says we now live in an ugly society where a brand can openly appeal to the desire of an egomanical few to dominate, bully and exploit the many. The expression “greed is good”, uttered by character Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street”, was shocking back in 1987. Now we just accept it as the way the world works.