Fraud is in the air

Volkswagen, the brainchild of Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler and the mover of all kinds of tribes around the world, has recently kicked off an advertising campaign heralding the 25 year anniversary of the Golf.

The television advertisement features a boomer-aged couple who go parking in their original Golf on a hill top...only to be interrupted by doof-doof style Generation Y-types in a new Golf with stereo blaring (who, in the back-story, no doubt live at home and steal their parents’ credit cards).

On seeing their compadres in illicit amore getting grumpy, the Ys switch to a version of 'Love is in the air'. Oh, how the happiness ensues, everyone snuggles, no one gets pregnant and a G-rated time is had by all.

Which is all very well and good. It’s not, quite frankly, how I like my ads (my latest favourites are a dead tie between The Age’s guide to the Short Film Festival and the Cadbury ad featuring the words “And if you kick the goal and you’re a winner/When you get a trophy, it’s your dinner”). But what bothers me more is the subliminal repositioning of baby-boomers into a WHOLE NEW (younger) AGE BRACKET!

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the boomers pictured are “average” baby-boomers, supposedly echoed by the teenagers who pull up beside them. If they were considered “peak” boomers, they would have been born in 1947. This would put them in their late teens in the middle of the ‘60s. Even if they were late-boomers, they would still have been teenagers in the mid-70s.

'Love is in the Air' was released in 1978.

Now I’m not saying it’s not possible that boomers didn’t like that song, without their significant buying power, it couldn’t have made it as high up the charts as it did. But was it a defining song of their teenage years? NO IT BLOODY WASN’T. Not any more than ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls was for me (although I was a teenager when it was released, I’d rather claim ‘Berlin Chair’ or ‘Cannonball’).

And has anyone else noticed the other significant mathematical anomaly here?

Volkswagen Golf = 25 years old

‘Love is in the Air' = 29 years old

Here is my selection of other songs one could have chosen if appropriately celebrating 1982, based on their appropriateness for pairing with the Golf’s Anniversary/ads featuring so-called canoodling:

'Come on Eileen' – Dexy’s Midnight Runners

'Make a move on me' – Olivia Newton John

'Abracadabra'* – Steve Miller Band

Or if we’re feeling pluralistic and want to choose something German, perhaps

'The Model’ by Kraftwerk?

I'm also disappointed they passed over the intervening four years without resting on the obvious synergies between 'Too Drunk to F-ck' (released 1980) and our evolving respect for anti-drink-driving campaigns.

Either way, as I am led to understand it, none of us are now allowed to use the words “retirement” (see “lifestyle change”), aged care (ditto) “senior citizen” (???) or basically to allude to anything which might suggest that the boomers are getting older. Heaven forbid they might have to face up to it any time in, ooh, say the next twenty years?

See, this is what happens when you send some one on the cusp of X/Y to see a demographics presentation. It makes us** all grumpy***.




* Abracadabra, for those who aren’t aware, wins my award for worst lyrics of all time for rhyming the words “abra abra cadabra” with “I wanna reach out and grabya"

** Did I say us? I meant me.

*** Demographics, and the fact that I have been about as sick as I've been in the last couple of years to celebrate the long weekend. It's possible I may have spawned a rare new form of phlegm/mucous which can colonise otherwise dead planets.