My story today on changing out my incandescent recessed lighting for high efficiency LED units couldn’t have come too soon. I don’t have to worry now.
This video below is one of the most talked about Superbowl commercials today. You have to watch it more than once to catch all the visual gags in it.
Watch the Audi commercial featuring Cheap Trick, the Green Police, and the Audi A3 TDI® clean diesel, Green Car Journals 2010 Green Car of the Year®.
Here’s another variant with a styrofoam sniffing anteater:
There’s a whole series of these which you can see at the “Green Police” channel on YouTube here
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They’re trying to paint skeptics as conspiracy theorists who believe the green police will inevitably become a reality.
Meanwhile, a retired USMC drill sergeant searches through people’s trash in a rural Pennsylvania town to ensure compliance with recycling laws (USA Today article I found circa 2003). It already IS a reality.
Nice try, but I think Audi may have unwittingly helped us with this ad.
Urgent…from UEA CRU Super Bowl watch team to US partners:
Guys
Please don’t any of you tell the UK Government, local authorities or police forces about this data. They will only use it as a training video for all their jobsworths. Better to delete it first. Or could you not hide behind the Data Protection Act?
I will ask Mike and Tom to the same. Thanks, hugs, luvya, Go Hockey Team!
Phil
It seems to me that this advertisement works on three levels, the three levels of “climate awareness”.
Dedicated greenies will salivate at the thought of plastic criminals being brought to task for their wickedness and will see Audi as a valuable sponsor of the message the whole world must learn Choruses of Kumbaya will be sung as the tofu burgers circulate.
People with no interest in the topic will see it as an entertaining way to advertise a car.
Dedicated non-believers in the religion du jour will sigh with a pained expression signifying “if only it were a joke”.
Of course, it’s not a joke. The Green Police exist already. Here in the UK people face financial penalties for putting the wrong type of material in their (compulsory) recycling bins. Ownership of a large car rather than a small car attracts tax penalties. Businesses have to pay fees/taxes according to how much carbon dioxide their activities produce. Our electricity and gas billed rise ever higher because of green levies on energy suppliers.
The move towards pricing/valuing activities in units of carbon dioxide rather than in money gains pace every year. The further it goes, the more it will have to be enforced and the more Green Police will be required. It’s moronic, but it’s the way things are.
What are GREEN POLICE ? Are they some kind of official authorities?
I have no sound for youtube so I don’t understand what is happening.
REPLY: check the tag for this post “satire”. – Anthony
I think the ad displayed a lot of Audacity, myself
What am I missing? Audi skewering GREEN, but touting their “clean diesel”?
Hmmmm, I’m not sure what to make of this add… The first three quarters of it was set up to show how unbelievably nuts warmies are, whether or not it was irony. Then they try to sell a car??? What? Were? They? Thinking? The only thing I can guess is that they think that wacko greenie nut jobs are watching the superbowl, and will buy their clean diesel in droves. I sure hope that there are not that many of them that they are a target market.
It scared and revolted me. My thought? “I’ll never buy one of those cars or anything green ever. Unless I get a VERY good deal. A brand new Audi for $200 and it is Green too? Let’s make a deal.
satire?
Maight be not in the next generation…
http://www.climatecops.com/
To endorse Fat Bigot’s remarks.
In UK this is perilously close to reality.
Already failure to comply with recycling directives is a finable offence. Many local authority inspectors have the absolute right to enter your home or premises without warrants in search of evidence of this.
We have more public CCTV cameras per head of the population than any other country on Earth. New taxes are always presented as ‘green’ taxes, though the money raised is rarely spent on ‘green’ projects.
Our mid-term national energy security is at risk because of government dithering between choice of new coal power stations (bad – greenhouse gases) or nuclear (very bad – government ministers were all in CND when spotty youths), so have instead chosen to rely on wind power. We have juts had the coldest winter in many people’s memory where prevailing weather conditions meant that the wind didn;t blow. For three weeks. And so on ..and so on….
As a commercial, I felt it tended more to the UK sense of humour than the US…but with a dash of Police Squad thrown in. Very very funny, and obviously very well thought out. It deserves a wider international distribution
I guess I should mention that Cheap Trick is a home town band. And that one year the city car sticker featured them.
Loved the commercials – well done.
Well in Australia they are training our green police with building audits starting by the end of the year on commercial buildings and residential buildings later. I understand similiar systems are in the works for the UK and USA.
Already we have a system called BASIX (its on the net) where whenever I design any residential building over $50,000 I have to log in, put my design in the program and then tick all the right boxes on light bulbs, double glazing, water tanks etc Unless I get a certain rating or change the design to achieve a rating it will not be approved for construction. When it is constructed then it is checked to make sure all the green compliance measures are in place prior to occupation.
The future is here now!
Why an Audi ad, you ask? Great approach! The diesel-turbo direct injection (TDI) will knock you back into your seat, whilst also giving great mileage and emissions!
So, if you WANT to be a greenie, you can either splurge for a fun-to-drive rocket like the Audi, or spring for a Prius….oh wait, I forgot about the brake recall!
ha ha ha!! How many greenies are going through agony over THAT?
After the geriatric Who performed so poorly, I stopped watching a took a nap. Gray is the new green.
You couldn’t invent this if you tried
Keywords: big brother, predictive programming, familiarization, Edward Bernays (father of PR_opaganda)…
Just more psy-ops conditioning of the masses. I do not find this funny at all. My niece and I were watching the game and she was flabbergasted when she saw these ads. For the first time the issue came home to her. She had been oblivious to the whole issue till today. The add may have a whip-lash effect.
Wow – talk about over-analyzing! This campaign is freaking HILARIOUS… sorry if you have thin enough skin to see it as an insult.
Maybe you have to have been part of the target audience… ie. people who remember when Dream Police was about the biggest thing going in music. I swear, I got goosebumps when the music started, I instantly knew it was going to be “green police”…
What I got out of it was: the whole “green” thing is a ridiculous farce, but hey, buy our car anyway, it’s good.
Beautiful irony, Lucy… love the 100 watt bulbs. Luckily I can still get them here at the dollar store 🙂
It mocks the Greens (very Alinsky-esque) and at the same time portrays the Audi as a subversive means of beating the tyrannical greens.
I was thinking that Monty Python must have covered this several decades ago.
And then I rediscovered the Village Idiot Sketch
Watch for the absolutely priceless lines at around 2:40
“Mr Figgis was no ordinary idiot, he is a lecturer in idiocy at the University of East Anglia”
It may be funny but it’s bizarre. It surely looks like a commercial that is making fun out of the green policies. But why is it a commercial for an energy-efficient car? The viewers who like the fun are unlikely to buy “green cars” like that.
Let me offer you a possibility: they *actually* want to scare the green customers that there is a green police and they must actually buy green cars. And many of the green customers are talented enough to react exactly in this way. 😉
They should really have used the Dead Kennedie’s “California Uber Alles” as the song…
FatBigot (22:11:12)
“Of course, it’s not a joke. The Green Police exist already. Here in the UK people face financial penalties for putting the wrong type of material in their (compulsory) recycling bins.”
FatBigot is dead right, and this is simply not funny to anybody living in UK.
Some authorities are even putting computer chips in bins to check what goes in!!
This is the land of George Orwell remember, we have thought police, camera’s on every street corner, state broadcaster to keep us all “On Message”.
Wake up over there, it’s coming to you soon, and you are going to be very annoyed.
BTW little know fact of the day:- George Orwell:- real name Eric Arthur BLAIR.
Green. Why is green the color of nature? Looking at the earth, I see an awful lot of blue, followed by shades of brown, white, then green. Looking out… Black. A whoooole lot of black, with some specks of white to break up the monotony. Yet green is the color of nature.
That senselessness aside, if I were Audi, I wouldn’t be proud to be the car that kisses the Green State’s derriere. Heh, come to think of it maybe Audi and the Jolly Green Giant could team up and do a commercial where… never mind! Point is, I can’t stand this either, those companies who figure to get in on the good side of authoritarianism. Like the green color of nature, they strut around like they’re so big, important, and desireable when in fact they’re in the very small minority that most sensible people would as soon steer clear of.
So I dub this new car the Audi ‘Kisser. I don’t care if that’s what it isn’t called. It’s what it is!
I did not like this ad at all – do you know that there are people out there that WANT this type of patrol? Look at San Francisco – they’re about half-way there now.