BMW bores us, then lies about it
Posted: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 3:00 AM by Allison Linn
Filed Under:
Cars and trucks
Here’s the thing about people living in the age of the DVR, the Internet and the cell phone: They don’t have much patience.
Why take two minutes to make a phone call when you can text in about 10 seconds, and save yourself some pleasantries? A 30-second TV commercial? Sorry, many people would rather pay extra to fast-forward through it. This article? We’ll try to keep it short and snappy, because we know that, at this moment, you are being distracted by all manner of other bright and shiny technology.
The makers of BMW apparently think that we have time for them, and lots of it. A promotion for the company’s BMW 1 Series takes the form of a meandering “mockumentary” about the German town of Oberpfaffelbachen’s attempt to help promote the new car.
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The elaborate ruse -- much of which is in German, with English subtitles -- follows a fake filmmaker’s effort to understand the existence of a large ramp that has been built at the outskirts of town. Since this is a car promotion, no one should be surprised to find out that the idea is to launch a car off of it.
The problem is that the joke is on the company, not us. “The Ramp” feels too much like an actual boring, meandering documentary, right down to the moody shots of farmers at work and extraneous asides not related to the subject at all.
BMW gets the details right: the dialect and feel of the small German town is spot-on, the translations are accurate and the mockumentarian even does a pretty good job speaking German. But getting everything right just serves to make the whole thing feel more boring, not more amusing.
BMW does have a shortened version of the mockumentary; it’s still not that interesting, but at least you get through it quicker.
And that’s really the rub about “The Ramp.” An elaborate joke is all well and good, as long as it sells cars. “The Ramp” doesn’t do much to make you care about the ramp, much less the car it’s seeking to promote.
That’s not all. After releasing the film this spring, BMW denied for months that it was behind it, only confirming it a few weeks ago in an article in The Wall Street Journal.
The Internet does allow advertisers to come up with new rules of engagement, and one can argue that there was little harm done in lying about this. Still, we’d like to hope that top-tier companies like BMW would adhere to a higher standard than blatantly misleading customers.
Click here to watch the full-length version of “The Ramp.” Click here to watch the condensed version.
