• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, February 10, 2011

There a disturbing film from the '80s, "How to Succeed in Advertising," I think it was called. The film stars Richard E. Grant as a creative director at a UK ad shop who hates his job and is teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

He is assigned an acne medicine account, the last thing he needs. In a fit of pique he comes up with this absurd notion, as a joke, of making acne fashionable. Tired of the clichés featuring kids with good skin, his ads show the real thing -- kids with zits. The creative attempts to make acne rebellious and cool. It's a gigantic success, much to his chagrin. Through the remainder of the movie he descends into an insane battle with a talking boil on his neck that becomes a second head.

But that's not important. The point is, there's a lesson here for the car business. Auto advertising avoids the elephant in the room: most car ads show people enjoying the hell out of driving because, after all, nothing is more liberating than driving on empty roads and mountain switchbacks. But most of the time driving sucks, let's face it.

More and more people live in urban, suburban or ex-urban areas and our transportation infrastructure peaked at about 1959. So for most of us driving means wishing you had those heart pills in the glove compartment because you are about to blow a coronary artery since you've just found out you were sitting in a queue of cars on the interstate for the last three hours because some asshole on the Turnpike Authority thought Saturday at 2 p.m. would be a fine time to close a lane for a game of quoits. Arrrgggh. You know what I'm talking about.

The fact is, most of the time driving is like -- and I've never experienced this personally but I've seen it and it reminded me of being stuck on the Garden State -- the last two hours of labor, when you (not me because I'm a guy, but like I said, I've seen it) are physically immobile, numb from the waist down and being told to push. That's driving: you are physically restrained, you can't go for a walk even though the car in front of you hasn't moved since Tuesday. I once actually did leave my car, climb over the median, went to the McDonald's on the opposite side of the highway for coffee. It was during that traffic jam last year in China that lasted for two weeks. It stretched all the way to 95 between The Bronx and Stamford.

I think auto marketers and their agencies should use the absurdity of it all as a marketing opportunity instead of avoiding it. Here's an example: Chevrolet has a new ad for the Cruze sedan, I think it aired during the Super Bowl, where a guy uses Facebook via OnStar to find out if the girl he just had a first date with actually enjoyed it as much as he.

Now, that's a cute spot, but what those guys at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners should have done is -- and they know this because they live in San Francisco and the traffic sucks there, too -- show a guy stuck in traffic. He uses the Facebook feature to do something unusual. I don't mean finding an alternate route, which has become the price of entry for telematics anyway and nobody uses it because the alternate routes usually take you through Guatemala. No, he should have used it to start a tailgate party right on the Interstate as a protest action against, well, just modern life.

Maybe -- since nobody's going anywhere fast -- he starts a traffic-jam speed-dating service right then and there. Or maybe he calls the OnStar girl, asks her to order him a coffee from the place across the highway and then read to him from Moby Dick until the traffic starts moving again.