Volvo channels its philosophical side in this nearly three-minute spot featuring found voiceover from everyone's favorite counterculture zen master Alan Watts. The lecture, recorded in 1959, asks us to reexamine our priorities. We're conditioned to always look ahead to the future. Doing well in kindergarten to make it to middle school. Studying all night in high school to get good grades for college. Going up the corporate ladder always looking ahead to the next rung. "Live fully now," the spot tells us at the end.
All well and good. Except in order to afford a Volvo you kind of half to play the game Alan Watts is talking about. They start at $33,000 and go all the way up to $104,900 U.S.
I wish copywriters would start living in the present, get off Youtube, and start writing something original again instead of reliving their high school reading lists. I find the whole tendency to be conceptually lazy.
Agency: Forsman & Bodenfors
Client: Volvo
Production: Park Pictures
Director: Vincent Haycock