The Christmas hype has come and gone, little Conor has broken half of his new toys and got bored with the rest and now his mum and dad are looking forward to getting their new toy, a spanking new car.
This year the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) estimates that around 185,000 new cars will be sold. When asked how much that is in money terms, the society's chief executive Cyril McHugh says his calculator "has run out of zeros". After fetching a bigger calculator and allowing for an average new-car price of £14,000, he says the estimate for this year's sales is around £2.5 billion.
Forty per cent of these will be sold in the first three months of the year, so car companies are hitting us hard and fast with expensive glitzy ad campaigns. "The gestation period for the decision to buy a new car can be anything up to three months," says Ruth Payne of Javelin Young and Rubicam, Toyota's advertising company. Toyota, even before this period had started, had spent almost £1.5 million on advertising in Ireland alone. From November onwards, therefore, the airwaves were full of our four-wheeled friends.
Sean O'Sullivan, a media planner with Opel's agency, Universal McCann, describes January as "a make or break month" for car dealers. No one wants to buy a car in December when in one month it has last year's plate and this month the 00 plates should be particularly sought after. An additional factor will be the introduction of the National Car Test which will force some vehicles off the roads for good.
"January is about selling cars. For the rest of the year the focus is more on branding," O'Sullivan says. This means that at the moment much of the emphasis in ads is on the nuts and bolts of car sales - such as prices and the interest rates of finance packages - while at other times companies are concentrating more on conveying images of their cars. Professor Garel Rhys of Cardiff Business School in Wales is an expert in the field and says that television adverts are only the first stage in a long process for potential car buyers. After that they go on to read magazines and brochures and use the Internet long before they go near a showroom.
"Even competent TV ads are easily forgotten. Price, quality, service back-up and finance are what sell a car, not puff advertising," he says.
If this is the case, then why do companies bother with high-cost TV advertising? One reason is that cars in the mass-produced section of the market have a lot in common. "They all have four wheels, they all take you from A to B so what you have to do is make them stand out by association with an image," says one industry source. "The idea is that if people are driving around in their hatchback they feel special because of the gloss that has been put on its image." Rhys agrees, saying that "a good ad has to have a strong image that even if forgotten - and it probably will be - is easily triggered when people see the car in a showroom or magazine." This is not enough, however: even at this stage people are interested in the technical side of the car. "It doesn't have to be very technical but they want to know something about it," he says. Two examples of current advertising show how advertisers are achieving these twin aims. The new Spirito di Punto ad campaign for Fiat, in which a man and a woman describe the car by use of insulting sexual stereotypes, is one. This manages to combine a humour which resonates with both sexes while at the same time illustrating many of the features of the car.
Another ad along the same lines is "Size Matters" for the Renault Clio. Here again there is a his-and-hers dialogue about the car, albeit couched in sexual innuendo.
IN THE RACE to establish their car in our minds as something special and to bring to mind images of speed, freedom and excitement, some advertisers have come in for criticism. In Britain, particularly, there has been a great deal of concern. Last year, a House of Commons committee, the British Advertising Standards Authority and the RAC all linked the depiction of driving in advertisements with speeding, particularly among young people.
The RAC pointed out that speed was a feature of auto ads three times as often as safety. And the MPs noted that "too many ads feature images of cars being driven at high speeds on deserted roads and too much copy which accompanies such images emphasises only the top speed and the acceleration of the cars." In much the same way as violence on television is alleged to provoke violent behaviour, could shots of family cars shooting across open plains or zipping through empty Parisian streets be making speeding seem acceptable?
Paul Mulligan, RTE's manager of marketing and planning, doesn't think that ads such as this have much impact here. "There are a number of codes that have to be complied with," he says and these include not endorsing dangerous behaviour. If ads don't follow the code, "we won't accept them," he says. Mulligan accepts, however, that many adverts which appear on Irish television screens are transmitted by British TV channels, out of the range of our local codes of practice.
This multinational aspect to marketing runs through the motor industry, where most television ads are produced centrally for car companies' headquarters. In the case of Opel, for example, all decisions about advertising are made through a centralised office in Zurich, from which local advertising companies buy adverts.
Another way to increase a car's profile is by associating it with certain personalities, but these don't come cheap: Claudia Schiffer cost Citroen a reputed $1.5 million. Dennis Hopper and the late Steve McQueen have both also been used to great effect by Ford. The cinema also has a part to play in advertising, as car manufacturers queue up to have their vehicles "placed" in the next James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Thus last year saw Pierce Brosnan behind the wheel of a BMW and this year Audi will be over the moon as their new TT Roadster (aimed at women and by no coincidence driven by one) keeps up with Tom Cruise's Porsche.
Which just goes to show that in car advertising, where money is no object, reality need not be either.
