Let's not make it *too* easy for the chatbots to replace us, eh?

A car, for most consumers, isn’t an impulse buy. It’s a pretty big deal. Few people pop out to the shops for some onions and a Milky Way and come back with a showroom-shiny SUV. So the lack of effort that often goes into creating online ads for cars is baffling.

Yesterday I saw an exemplar of the not-giving-the-slightest-toss school of advertising. Rather than face an avalanche of #bekind hashtags, I’ve altered the details that might identify it. But it’s depressingly far from being anything like unique.

Main headline: The all-new Hubba-Hubba Ecomaniac KZ9.

Strapline: [Something about the wonderful, mind-expanding power of motion.]

Visual: Shot of a less-than-wonderful, mind-compressingly motionless car on what appears to be the cobbled top deck of a multi-storey municipal car park.

Secondary headline: The all-new Hubba-Hubba Ecomaniac KZ9, Car of the Year at the 2023 Drivies?.

Sign-off: Hubba-Hubba.com | The all-new Hubba-Hubba Ecomaniac KZ9.

There was no concept; no attempt whatsoever to dramatise the, ahem, 2023 Drivies? award, apart from putting a reference to it in a line that wasn’t even the main headline.

All that was evident in the ad was a deep conviction that repeating the car’s name three times was the most thrilling thing that could be said about it. (Please note that the name I've replaced it with is rather more attention-grabbing than the real one.)

We can do better. And we have to.

To pair a headline like “Introducing the new [car’s name goes here]” with a stockshot that resembles something the account exec might have snapped on their way to Pret A Manger in their lunch hour... that isn't beyond the conceptual capabilities of AI.

Hell, it was scarcely beyond the capability of this.