Go Canada Go!

My wife is amazing. She doesn’t work in advertising but she is completely supportive of me – the late nights, stress, job insecurity and everything. Of course she doesn’t actually understand the business. She thinks it’s crazy. I try to explain but with limited success.

It happened recently while we watching the TV around the time of the Olympics. This Audi ad came on said Canada was “Land of Quattro”. This is the sort of thing that gets my wife riled up.

“But Audi’s a German car. Why are they saying they're Canadian? Is that allowed?”

Before she got on her phone to email the ASC I explained that the ad wasn’t saying it was Canadian just that it was built for Canadian conditions. She looked dubious but I might have got away with it if I hadn’t decided to try to push my point home.

“Besides it’s part of a worldwide campaign. They’re running similar ads in Britain and other countries”. And I pulled up the UK version on my iPad to show her. It was a mistake. (By the way there’s also Jamaica, Italy, Germany, china, Finland etc.)

“So it’s not even made for Canada. It’s made for everywhere. It’s worse than I thought. I hate it when foreign companies pretend to be Canadian. Take Target for example. I love Target. You know I insist we go to one when we visit the US. So why do they want to wrap themselves in Canadian imagery in their ads. I just reminds me I can’t get the same choice and the same prices here. And then there’s that Samsung ad….”

I admit I started to tune out here.  I did catch a something about how it was OK for Tim Horton’s. I was going to mention that Timmies Canadianness wasn’t quite that straightforward but decided I’d leave that to another day.

“Oh look the match is about to start”. It was Canada – USA in women’s hockey. At least that turned out OK.