Audi’s Green Police. Didn’t They say Hitler?

Januar 30th, 2010 • 3 comments Ads, Brands
Tags: Ads, Audi, Brands, Fail, Germany, Ideas, Philosophy, PR, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy

Let’s start an intellectual experiment.

Think about e.g. an ex-spouse in your life and now think about any object in your appartment. Can you associate it with him or her somehow? You probably can. Take the old vase in your living room and you will probably find a connection to your ex who loved flowers so much. Most likely you will be able to link the TV set to her preferences for ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and so on…But why should you do that? Especially since you will be able to link pretty much anything to pretty much anything after thinking about it for a while. Plus, simply put, while you actually might not want to think about your ex-spouse anymore at all?

Well, that’s what self-proclaimed guardians of Political Correctness do on the web 24/7. They love to think about all kinds of connections because there is not one thing which makes them as happy as making up a good old PR disaster.

One information in advance: I am German and I work for a digital agency with Audi International on the client list (not PR, not Audi USA). This is just accidental and not the rationale behind this article. I am professionally not at all engaged in any Audi project even though I like the cars. I simply react on this article by Danny Brown, entitled “Audi and the Super Bowl Social Media Shit Storm“.  This is the story: In an attempt to spearhead a social media intiative, Audi USA (keep that in mind, it is important) had invented the so-called ‘Green Police’. It comes with a Super-Bowl ad, a Youtube channel and the inevitable twitter account. This is the more or less entertaining ad:

Did you realize it? No? Audi has just committed a major act of Political Incorrectness, according to Danny.

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Audi Surface Configurator. Touch it, feel it.

Oktober 1st, 2009 • 11 comments Brands, Surface
Tags: Audi, Automotive, Brands, Cool, Creativity, Microsoft, Surface, Touch, visual, We like

I work for Neue Digitale / Razorfish, a Frankfurt and berlin based subsidiary of the Razorfish network. As part of our dedication to the digital ecosystem of our clients we are not only engaged in Social Media and Analytics projects but also in POP and digital sales activities. This configurator for our client Audi was staged two weeks ago on this Microsoft Surface Table at the leading automotive fair, IAA, right here in Frankfurt. Technologically it was quite a challenging project but it worked out quite nicely. Some call it magic. Read all about it on Razorfish’s Emerging Experiences Blog.

Audi Car Configurator on Surface @ IAA 2009 from Neue Digitale / Razorfish on Vimeo.