I am a sucker for tongue in cheek ad campaigns. The recent champion in my opinion is VW’s marketing of their minivan, the Routan.
The ‘claim’ of the ad, presented with the greatest of deadpan seriousness by Brook Shields, is that there is an alarming baby boom happening in America spawned (he-he) by couples’ desire to have a family with which to fill a Routan. I’m sure there are those out there who don’t get it and thus try to take it seriously. Watching them try would be funny in its own right.
“Have a baby for love, not for German engineering,” the ads insist.
And the ads work. I now know what a Routan is. I think I’m even spelling it right.
If you’ve not seen the ads (because you are not, like me, obsessed with the American League Championship Series) you can get a very satisfying taste here.
And while you are there, you can try their BabyMaker 3000. I’ll not even begin to try to explain that. I keep thinking of fun things to say, but this is a family blog and not all of you understand my sense of humor.
*****
FOOTNOTE: for the first eight or ten years of our life in Florida, we drove a VW Vanagon, the granddaddy of today’s minivans (and thus the direct ancestor of the Routan). When we had our fifth child, we joked that that was our limit because, as everyone knows, Psalm 127 says regarding children, “blessed is he whose Vanagon is full of them.” The Vanagon, you see, would only seat seven – a mom, a dad, and five children.
We eventually exchanged the Vanagon for a full-sized van, and proomptly adopted another child to fill it.
In retrospect, I’m awfully glad we laid off the fifteen passenger van….
TulipGirl
Ha! That was hilarious! (And, I’ve been known to squish four growing boys in the backseat of my Honda civic hatchback. . .)