I don’t watch TV like I used to, I simply just don’t have to time. Plus there is a crazy person living in my house, but that’s not really television’s fault, although she does work in… you know what? I’m going to start over.

I was watching the Golden Globes last night and between watching Rickey Gervais kill in front of an otherwise stunned crowd and Robert Deniro tell one of the more awkward jokes I’ve ever seen at an award show (the bit about the Martin Scorsese sex tape of him and a roll of 35mm film stock), there were a ton of commercials for me to either enjoy or hate.  Over the next week I’ll get to some of the hatred, but for now I wanted to call out something I’ve noticed in a lot of car commercials.

Back when I still attempting to become a copywriter, I heard my college professors say over and over again, “sell the sizzle, not the steak.”  The idea is basically that you’re supposed to sell benefits, not features.  Later on, when I was taking my screenwriting classes for no other purpose than to get my ideas laughed at by other failed screenwriters, I had another professor scream the mantra of “sell the sizzle, not the steak,” so, I know it’s still being taught out there.

However, to watch a lot of car commercials lately, I think there are a lot of copywriters who either never heard or forgot that sage advice.  The commercial that set me off was for a luxury hybrid of some sort (I want to say Cadillac, but I’m actually not sure), and twice within that 30 second spot I heard them refer to the car’s “40 gigabyte navigation system.”

In case you’re not feeling me yet, the mention of a “40 gigabyte navigation system” is selling the steak, not the sizzle. The sizzle would be what that navigation system is good for, such as not getting lost when you’re trying to find your drug dealer’s crash pad… or taking the kids to the zoo, I don’t know what you family folk do with your time.

The car manufacturer actually doesn’t matter in this instance because I hear this kind of shit all the time.  Trucks love to do this one and oddly it always has to do with the suspension for some reason.  Guys who buy trucks must just get off on being told that the truck they are looking at has some sort of “sport tuned suspension” because it comes up way too much. When it comes to suspension, I just need to know if it’s strong enough to hold my couch when I sucker a friend of mine into helping me move.

Here’s the rule when it comes to listing the features of a car, keep it to horsepower and MPG.  The first one is obvious. Sure, it’s at technical detail, but it’s one that just about everybody understands.  The latter is a new addition to the rule as everybody loves to chat up how fuel efficient their cars are these days.  If the feature isn’t one of these two things and you want to talk about it, you officially need to sex it up a little bit or I don’t need to hear it in the ad.

Let me be frank with you car manufacturers and copywriters, in these modern times, nobody knows what the fuck anything in their car does anymore.  When I was a kid, my dad took a lot of time to show me the basics of how a car operated.  He didn’t want to make me into a mechanic, but at the very least he wanted to make sure I could fill the radiator or change a flat when necessary.  But now, people think their cars run on pixie dust and good intentions.

You can rattle on all day and night about all the cool specs in a car, but you’re wasting your breath. All you need to do is be funny or sexy, fuel efficient, and have a place to hook up their iPod and you’ve sold them on your car.  Despite all your feats of engineering, people are just going to pick their cars because they like the color and it has extra cup holders.

Every now and then some douche bag tries to start the old “foreign cars are better than American cars” argument and it just pisses me off.  Not because I’m a fan of American cars or not a fan of foreign cars, but because it’s a stupid fucking argument.  I’ve had both of the years and have had wins and losses no matter where I go.  My first car was a 1977 Pontiac Grand Prix that is probably still running somewhere and my last two cars have been a Chrysler and a Ford and both of them ran like a top. I’ve been in accidents in both a Honda and a Saturn and both saved my life just as well.  I also had a Buick that slowly disintegrated before my eyes, but then again, I had a VW that did the same thing and an ex of mine had a Kia that was perhaps one of the most poorly built cars I’ve ever seen.

My point is, they’re just friggin’ cars.  We may do a little research into the features when we’re actually shopping for a new ride, but most of the time, we don’t even really understand what all the fancy numbers mean, so just save it for the showroom and show me the pictures of the mechanical wonder going really fast over the dry lake bed, I like that one…

J.

Related posts you might enjoy:

1. DTM Commentary: Jay Leno Says He’ll Quit Too
2. DTM Commentary: How to piss off a Brit chick in no time!
3. DTM Commentary: Chrysler, Focus On The Family, and the Superbowl
4. [COMMENTARY] On TV Commercials and Selective Racial Outrage