Since the agency involved is part of the government of the United Kingdom, it’s not really any of our business, but come on! According to The Sunday Times, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has declared—for the seventh time in a year—that a BMW video advertisement promotes “unsafe driving.”
This time it’s a commercial for the new M4 Convertible. As near as we can tell, the left-hand-drive M4 was driven on a road course that looked a lot like Laguna Seca, so it wasn’t even on a UK track or roads. In scenes where the car was driven hard, with smoking tires and such, the driver was clearly on a race track and wearing a racing helmet and fire suit. Likewise, in scenes in which the car was being driven responsibly and “safely,” the driver appeared in normal street clothes.
This implied to us that when you’re driving the new M4 Convertible on the street, you should drive it safely; and when you’re driving a new M4 Convertible on a road course, you may drive it like the high-performance sports cabrio that it is.
Apparently, it only takes one complaint to trigger an ASA investigation. In this case the complaint was that the M4 ad was socially irresponsible. We have no way of knowing whether the complaint came from a concerned citizen, or a concerned competitor.
The ASA said that in parts of the video, they couldn’t tell “whether the car was on a track or public road” and that “the intercutting of the footage drew clear links between the road and racing use of the car, and therefore condoned the use of the car in the manner shown by both drivers.” So they concluded, “We considered that the majority of the advertisement focused on the way the car was being driven, and its performance and speed. The advertisement encouraged unsafe and irresponsible driving.”
BMW responded, “The advertisement differentiated clearly between the sedate cruising of one M4 on public roads, where the Highway Code was obeyed at all times, and the on-track element.”
The ASA was not persuaded. Not only did they ban the commercial, but they directed BMW to create no more commercials that linked race driving and road driving in a way the focused on speed or irresponsible driving.
From their actions, we can infer that the UK’s advertising standards people aren’t capable of mentally processing fast-edited moving images, or they are not smart enough to know the difference between track driving and street driving, or they don’t think the British motoring public is smart enough to know the difference, or they just hate hot cars.
Like we said, the ban on this commercial only applies to UK media, so it shouldn’t bother us; but it does. This kind of Big Brotherishness has a habit of popping up in other places. We hope it never pops up here.
So what do you think? View the video and see for yourself whether this commercial could lead to blood on English streets.—Scott Blazey
[Photos and video courtesy of BMW M.]
