Remember Audi ‘Green Police’? ‘Voltswagen’ Is A Worthy Follow-Up

One last thought on “Voltswagengate” before it fades into American advertising-history trivia: VW North America’s self-inflicted black eye over a failed April Fool’s joke brought to mind another major marketing misstep by the company that arguably makes its cute little fiasco last week pale by comparison.

Ironically, both gambits supported the automaker’s decades-long efforts to go green, but only the most recent one had fundamental truth behind it. A by-all-means-brilliant marketing executive, Scott Keogh, was in charge in both cases.

For, long before last week’s “Voltswagen” chicanery was foisted on conventional and social media, there was the “Green Police.” That was the title of a one-minute ad for Audi during the Super Bowl in 2010. Keogh was Audi’s chief marketing officer then and had done a brilliant job of helping Audi of America chief Johan de Nysschen turn the brand into a household name in the American luxury market, posting years upon years of monthly sales gains.

The point of the “Green Police” ad was to use humor and wry commentary on environmentalism run amok to underscore how Audi’s— and parent Volkswagen’s — “clean diesel” technology could give vehicle owners a sense of green achievement without having to turn themselves into carbon-emissions groupies.

Germans had just revolutionized dirty old diesel, you see, producing the technology’s traditionally eye-popping fuel economy while also, for the first time, whacking emissions down into insignificance. Memory says the method involved urea tanks somewhere.

Sympatico critics of the global-warming religion howled at “Green Police’s” depiction of an overzealous contingent of ideologically crazed law enforcement. In the commercial, which got great ratings by Big Game viewers, after a customer requests a plastic bag instead of a paper one at the supermarket checkout, he’s cuffed by a Green Police member who says, “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, Plastic Boy.”

The spot continues. Orwellian, green-shorted cops driving golf carts go down a city street rummaging through curbside trash bins. A man is throwing a fruit skin away at his kitchen sink after a midnight snack, when suddenly a helicopter in the sky shines a spotlight on him, and a megaphoned Green Policeman says, “Put the rind, down sir — that’s a compost infraction.” A country-club Republican type is arrested at his front door for installing incandescent light bulbs. And so on.

(Actually, reviewing the ad from 2010 inevitably is a reminder of today’s quasi-tyranny. Simply substitute, “Pull up your mask!” for the closing scene from “Green Police,” in which an officer stops a driver, walks up and asks him, “Are those Styrofoam cups you’re drinking from? … Please get out and put them on the hood.”)

Keogh hardly can be blamed for “Green Police,” because his perspective was so brilliant given what he — and most everybody else — believed about “clean diesel” at the time. He didn’t know that, behind his back, engineers and some very top executives of Volkswagen AG in Germany had concocted a big lie about “clean” diesel, supported by falsified emissions tests, that would end up not only obviating the “Green Police” theme but also causing billions of dollars of damages in lost sales and a cratered brand reputation for his company.

Of course, Voltswagengate is on Keogh, who rose to chief of Audi in North America, to president and CEO of Volkswagen of America in 2018. “I feel bad” about the April Fool’s joke he just played on the media, Keogh told Automotive News last week. “The intent was not to embarrass a journalist, to make a journalist look bad. The intent was to have a little bit of fun and get us focused on electrification.”

And actually, truth be told, Volkswagen may not end up regretting what Keogh oversaw in both cases. “Green Police” actually was a sensible entry into the zeitgeist of the time, effectively underscoring the danger that overzealous pursuit of the mitigation of climate change easily could infringe on our basic freedoms.

When it comes to Voltswagengate — sure, Keogh and his company are still facing outrage from automotive and marketing journalists who clearly got played and are embarrassed by that fact. Keogh knew that VW wasn’t playing by the usual rules of April Fool’s “jokes” in the media, but he didn’t care.

Yet a new survey of American consumers by Harris Poll, for Advertising Age, indicated that American consumers — the actual target of VW’s April Fool’s stunt — weren’t so dismayed.

“It appears the campaign was a wash,” Harris said: “59 percent said it didn’t change their opinion of [VW], and while 20 percent said it made their opinion change for the better, 21% said they now hold a worse opinion of the brand.”