VW Says Hello to the Light

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – You’d think by now, four years after its diesel emissions scandal broke, Volkswagen would be keen to change the subject.

That’s what makes its latest ad campaign so surprising – and so compelling, says Maryland Smith’s Henry C. Boyd III.

The automaker’s latest marketing push isn’t shying away from the scandal that erupted when Volkswagen was accused of using illegal software to trick emissions-testing technology. In fact, its “Hello Light,” the mini-movie commercial that debuted during the NBA Finals, opens with it.

A montage of newscasts about the scandal narrates as a VW employee arrives to his office in the dark. The news is clicked off, and the employee sighs and gets to work, designing a new electric vehicle with sketchbook and pencil, as Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” begins to play.

Hello darkness my old friend…

“In the darkness, we found the light,” the on-screen text reads, then promises a “new era of electric driving.”

“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Boyd, a clinical professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Boyd says it reminded him of his doctorate research at Duke University, examining the effectiveness of lecture ads versus drama ads, like “Hello Light.”

Lecture ads tend to be the typically informative spots, with a spokesperson narrating a sales pitch. Drama ads are a mini-play unto themselves. When they are done well, the viewer feels compelled to watch. “It’s inviting the viewer, drawing them in. They make the viewer wonder, ‘What is it all about?’ They have to watch and put it all together.”

This ad does that, Boyd says.

“It’s a little more sophisticated as a form of persuasion and it’s a bit risky,” he says. When a drama ad misses the mark, it can miss spectacularly.

In VW’s case, that risk involved reminding the viewer of its deception, of its scandal, of its lowest point in a half-century, and having that reminder serve as the lasting impression, alienating potential customers. Instead, the ad tells the story of a company that’s been deep in self-reflection, acknowledging its past and perhaps looking to earn the right to move forward.

‘The Sound of Silence’

Simon and Garfunkel released “The Sound of Silence” in 1964, when VW was in its iconic heydey. “It was anti-establishment. It was this really cool, hippie brand and it was doing really well,” Boyd recalls. It was the maker of the classic Beetle and the Microbus, or Kombi. “With this song, Volkswagen is taking you back. It’s embracing this nostalgia.”

But the song is more than that. It’s about the creative process, about innovation, says Boyd. And that makes the song and its lyrics resonant for those who remember the 1960s, and those who were born long after.

“Paul Simon. He is a genius when it comes to lyrics. Why can’t we write songs like this anymore? Have you listened to some of the songs that kids are listening to these days? Like ‘Gucci Gang’?” says Boyd. He quotes Simon’s lyrics.

‘Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again, Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping. And the vision that was planted in my brain, Still remains.’

“That beginning,” Boyd says, “it speaks to the creative process. If you create anything, especially in the realm of science, you’re going to try things, and things are going to fail. But the creativity – the innovation – often comes out of failure.”

For VW, the failure was the diesel emissions scandal. It meant criminal charges, lawsuits, some $25 billion in settlements, fines and penalties. It meant losing trust among consumers.

‘In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone.’

”It is a lonely journey for the creatives, for the inventor, for the scientist, for the designer,” Boyd says.

‘Neath the halo of a street lamp, I turned my collar to the cold and damp.’

“The ‘cold and damp,’ to me, is the old guard, the old way of doing things,” says Boyd. “As a creative, you have to turn your back on former convention. And at Volkswagen, that means turning away from internal combustion engines, away from diesel, and going electric.”

‘When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light, That split the night, And touched the sound of silence.’

After multiple scrapped drafts, the designer settles on a vehicle that looks strikingly like the old VW bus. But it’s modern, updated, smaller and electric. It goes from sketch to reality, or at least, concept car reality. The vehicle isn’t available for sale.

“Volkswagen, here, is telling the world, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re going electric. And we’re going to build on our brand, the classic image we had in the ’60s,’” Boyd says.

It’s why the ad works so well.

“When you’re done watching, you’re thinking, ‘Hey, I like that Volkswagen is turning things around. I like that there is this resilience.’”

A bonus chemistry lesson

Before Boyd studied marketing at the University of California at Berkeley and before he studied law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was a chemistry major at Princeton University.

“There was a part of chemistry lore,” he says, “about a German organic chemist named Friedrich August Kekulé. He was struggling with a certain chemical and trying to figure out what it might look like. And he claimed to have this dream, where he saw atoms interlinked and dancing in a circle. And from that dream, he found the structure of benzene.’”

The lyrics from “The Sound of Silence,” Boyd says, brought him back to the story of Kekulé.

“You see, I’ll bet that part of German culture, part of German science is in those lyrics. Those lyrics speak to someone. Some of the best ideas and discoveries come from when a person is in a dreamlike state.

“You’re wrestling with something. Maybe it’s tucked deep down in the subconscious. It’s got to bubble up into a dreamlike state, where you can find it and say, ‘Oh! Eureka! I get it now.’ They capture some of that in the ad as well. It’s Kekulé’s dream.”

Boyd pauses.

“There’s a lot going on in that spot,” he says, “in just 1 minute and 45 seconds.”