As any first-year advertising student knows, Volkswagen has produced some iconic, and even just plain great, ads over the years. (My personal favourite is 1997’s ‘Sunday Afternoon‘ spot, mostly because I love the soundtrack.)
So it was with some dismay that I noticed their recent ‘Winter Relief’ campaign:
Now, I’ve been stuck at home with an 11-month-old baby for the past few months, so no one is more in need of some ‘winter relief’ than myself. And I always like campaigns which have been tailored specifically for the Canadian market.
However.
Go Google “winter relief”. Can’t be bothered? Here, I’ll help you: The first search return for “winter relief” isn’t Volkswagen – it’s the Wikipedia entry for Winterhilfswerk, described as
“…an annual drive by the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization) to help finance charitable work. Its slogan was ‘None shall starve nor freeze’. The drive was originally set up under the government of Heinrich Brüning in 1931, though Hitler would later claim sole credit. It ran from 1933-1935 during the months of October through March, and was designed to provide food, clothing, coal and other items to less fortunate Germans during the inclement months.”
Sounds okay, until you realize it was one of those Nazi programs that sounded good but was really just another excuse for Hitler’s Storm Troopers to terrorize people without actually helping anyone at all.
And of course it came with its own advertising materials, such as this one (which I’m almost reluctant to post here, in case someone does a Google image search for me and this thing turns up – I had problems with that Ramzpaul blog post and the resulting Southern Poverty Law Center piece. But when you censor yourself out of fear of these people, they win – and they shouldn’t):
Volkswagen already has a bit of a public relations challenge vis a vis its relationship with Hitler – choosing a campaign name or tagline that is reminiscent of a Nazi program seems like a bad idea. Yes, ‘winter relief’ is catchy and lends itself to all kinds of taglines, but it’s not genius and I’m sure that the creative team over at Red Urban (Volkswagen’s Agency of Record in Canada, if I’m not mistaken) could have come up with plenty of alternatives. (I myself like ‘Winter Solace’, since it sort of sounds like ‘winter solstice’, which is a phrase people are already familiar with. But maybe ‘solace’ is too fancy.)
So what happened?
Well, my guess is that no one bothered to Google ‘winter relief’ until the campaign was already halfway through the approval process and everyone was excited about it – and they just figured no one would notice the connection. And maybe they were right: I wouldn’t have noticed it unless Max (a history geek) had mentioned it, and I haven’t heard or seen anyone else talking about it, online or otherwise. Since Max and I aren’t in the market for a Volkswagen, maybe it doesn’t matter what we think.
I still think it was a bad idea.