“Green police” ad: good marketing for Audi?

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - Super Bowl ads have a reputation of pushing the envelope artistically and strategically. [Sunday] night’s extravaganza certainly lived up to that billing, as Madison Avenue presented the brilliant and the baffling to a nation of viewers. One ad in particular stood out in the latter category, with many wondering whether it meant to entice people to buy the product — or to fear the end result of an overreaching government on environmental issues:



The ad works for me far better as a warning of an overreaching government dictating choices — like incandescent lightbulbs, paper vs plastic in the grocery store, and choice of cars. Audi may convince some people to look into its clean-diesel offerings, but the ad itself is likely to elicit more concern over the direction of regulatory efforts, especially at the EPA, which declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant last year and has started the effort to regulate manufacturing as a way to get around the legislative hurdles to cap-and-trade bills in Congress.