Audi green police

Is it offensive or humorous? Does it support or mock environmentalists? Audi’s “green police” Super Bowl ad, ranked sixth best in USA TODAY’s ad meter, is stirring controversy for its portrayal of an eco-movement run amok.

In the one-minute ad, which you can watch above or by clicking here, ordinary citizens are arrested for using plastic instead of paper, throwing away batteries, not composting orange rinds, using incandescent light bulbs and setting their hot tub thermostats too high. All this happens while Robin Zander sings redone lyrics to Cheap Trick’s ’70s classic The Dream Police.

The “green police,” however, gives a thumbs up to Audi’s clean diesel A3 TDI, which claims to get 42 mpg on the highway and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30%.

It’s not just the Super Bowl ad, which the New York Times says puts “the “mental” in “environmental,”" that’s raised questions.Leading up to Sunday’s game, Audi created a series of public service announcements, one of which (seen above or click here) rails against “napkin abuse” and urges people to save a billion pounds of paper from landfills each year by using one napkin at a time.

“Is this all a fun way to get the message across or a cynical poke at environmentalists,” Treehugger asks in a post.

On its website, Audi says its fictional green police are “caricatures of today’s “green movement.”" It says studies show that humorous ads are most apt to grab 87% of consumers’ attention. It says:

Green Police are here to entertain and educate so our decisions regarding the environment are smarter and well-informed to make them a little easier.

Audi says the idea of a green police is not far-fetched:

Coincidentally, there are numerous real Green Police units globally that are furthering green practices and environmental issues. For example, Israel’s main arm of the Ministry of Environmental in the area of enforcement and deterrence is called; you guessed it, the Green Police.

New York has officers within the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation that are fondly called the “Green Police.” The Green Police is also the popular name for Vietnam’s Environmental Police Department and the UK (United Kingdom) has a group who dresses in green as part of the Environment Agency’s squad to monitor excessive CO2 emissions.

Audi’s ads are simply clever, says Grist Magazine’s David Roberts, in a commentary on The Huffington Post::

At first blush this seems like more teabagging — appealing to angry white men with the same old stereotype of environmentalists as meddling do-gooders obsessed with picayune behavioral sins….

The more I’ve thought about it, though, the more the teabaggy interpretation just doesn’t quite fit. The thrill at the end, when the guy gets to accelerate away from the crowd, turns on satisfying the green police — not rejecting or circumventing them, but satisfying their strict standards…

The ad is not just another pot shot at greens. It’s an appeal to a new and growing demographic that isn’t hard-core environmentalist — and doesn’t particularly like hard-core environmentalists — but that basically wants to do the right thing. Audi’s effort to reach them, however clumsy, is actually a bit ahead of the curve.