Julien Feldman is director of marketing for Mercury New Media, a marketing and software company providing interactive customer service applications for the newspaper and financial services industries, telephone and entertainment distribution companies. He can be reached at (514) 842-3762 julienf@connectmmic.net

Volkswagen Canada’s ‘Tasse-toi, mon oncle!’ Quebec campaign to promote its 1995 Golf GTI winds down next week, but not before the accident-prone print, tv and outdoor ads drove into a storm of controversy that refuses to go away.

The initial phase of the campaign, created by Montreal ad agency palm, first raised critics’ hackles last spring, sparking a lingering public ire against Volkswagen, and more debate about social responsibility in advertising.

Patrice Letendre, a road safety officer at the Quebec Auto Insurance Board, says the board’s response to what it finds to be ‘irresponsible’ advertising has become automatic: ‘We go straight to the Advertising Standards Council and we have a pretty good batting average.’

The tv campaign featured a graying bureaucrat in one spot, and a fuzzy-dice muscle-car character in another, stating quite firmly that the Golf GTI is not their type of car. A quick run-down of its road-hugging abilities, however, show the model appeals to hip, well-educated 18- to 34-year-olds.

The print campaign framed a frontal close-up of a red Golf GTI underneath the campaign’s tagline ‘Tasse-toi mon oncle!’, originally conceived as a humorous play on a common slang phrase, ‘I’m coming through!’

But loosely translated, the campaign’s slogan can also mean ‘move over, buddy,’ or ‘outta the way, old man’ and elicits visions of a teenager stoked on hormones, pedal-to-the-metal, and in an awful big hurry to get to the burger stand.

Letendre said the tv spots were deemed ‘humorous’ by the standards council, but that the print and outdoor campaign, removed from the humorous context of the tv spots, could be seen as promoting aggressive driving. The print ads were yanked, but the tv spots remained. ‘We won a partial victory, but we still believe the entire campaign should have been pulled,’ said Letendre.

Unfortunately, last month near Montreal, a 16-year-old speeding in a red Golf GTI bought for him by his father – with three of his school friends along for the ride – lost control, then crossed the highway divider into oncoming traffic where the Golf was mangled under the tires of an 18-wheeler, killing both driver and passengers.

Controversy over the ad, which had abated during the summer, again exploded onto the front pages, and in another incredible coincidence, the red Golf tv spot actually led into a story of the accident on Radio-Canada’s supper hour news show.

The ads were temporarily taken off the air, but not before public agencies and service clubs began organizing once more against Volkswagen.

Paulette Arsenault, palm’s executive vice-president, creative director, argued publicly that the parallels between the accident and the campaign merely are coincidental and unfortunate, although admittedly in an ugly juxtaposition. She contends that the campaign set out to reach an older target audience than the dead driver, and with a humorous rather than aggressive message.

But the following day, 200 schoolmates mourning their dead comrades mounted a spontaneous protest against Volkswagen and the Golf campaign, compounding a growing pr nightmare. A few days later, 150 Quebec Optimist clubs mounted their own protest against Volkswagen.

Letendre says he is disturbed by the attitude of palm, which ran a successful ‘speed kills’ campaign for the insurance agency two years ago. ‘They wrote us a letter telling us their target (for the Golf campaign) was the 18-34 age group of confident and well-educated drivers, and not high-risk drivers. What they don’t seem to understand is that is the highest-risk group of all,’ he says.

According to Letendre, drivers in the 16-24 age group make up only 12 per cent of drivers, but are responsible for 25 per cent of all accidents and moving violations, and more than half of all highway deaths. In fact, says Letendre, the better-educated they are, the more likely they are to hold the conviction that speed limits are set too low.

But Letendre said car manufactuers must also shoulder most of the blame (‘They’re the ones ordering up these campaigns’) and he’s opened a dialogue with auomakers to press his point. In addition, Letendre says the advertising standards council will remain the first line of battle ‘against socially irresponsible advertising.’

In the past two or three years, campaigns for gm’s Geo Metro, BF Goodrich tires and the Pontiac Grand Am have all been stopped in their tracks by the Quebec insurance board.

In the wake of the recent fatal accident, the angry debate over palm’s Golf campaign has many in the Quebec agency community wondering whether the limits of public acceptance in advertising are rapidly closing in on them.

Several months ago, Quebec advertising analyst Bruno Boutot, publisher of Info Press, a marketing trade publication, and an advertising columnist in La Presse, warned that agencies will increasingly be forced to deal with ‘politically correct’ government agencies and public interest groups demanding oversight or even censorship of the media tools used to sell consumer goods.

‘There is no doubt that the censors’ paranoia stems from good intentions,’ he wrote in a La Presse column, ‘But their paranoia is bordering on the absurd.’

Letendre said regardless of what the ad community thinks, he’s watching closely: ‘We don’t find some of their campaigns funny at all. There’s got to be a better way to sell cars than on the backs of the highway dead. 824 Quebecers died in road accidents last year.’