New Buick, check; handsome man, check; Modern House - of course!

Not knocking it, but I think we can all agree that there is a formula here, and every car company is doing it, or they are missing the boat. If you want to sell your snazzy new car you better have a modern house to pose your handsome man in front of. But handsome men are a dime a dozen. Its the modern house that sells the car. Because we all know if you want people to think your new car is cool, you better park it in front of a modern house.

Matthew McConaughey is the guy with the cool modern house, says Lincoln

Yup, for the record, when Matthew McConaughey is not driving a Lincoln  or talking to his dogs, he's living in this cool Modern House. Because Lincoln knows its not enough to have a huge star hawking their cars, they have to prove he's cool by showing that he lives in a cool modern house. Isn't it always the case?

Cadillac brings the car, douche-bag brings the modern house.

In probably the most extreme example of the genre here we have Cadillac's entry into the Cool People Rock Modern House cannon. Its not enough for them however to just show their shiny car in the driveway of a beautiful modern house, no they have to have the supposed owner expound on why we Americans are so full of ourselves, and work harder than the rest of the world, and have our materialism as payback. Well, whatever, Mr. Tightpants is not making a convincing case here.

But one thing is for sure, the douche-bag is not camping out in a colonial, and he's not nesting in a McMansiony chateau. No, he has a full blown balls out killer modern house. Because Cadillac knows, when you want to make somebody look cool and successful, nothing better to park your product in front of than the modern house.

I'll take the house, throw in the car if you like, but next time spare us the pretentious lout.

some things never change

1955 Lincoln ad. Nuff said.

via Roger Wilkerson

Lexus has the fever, and the only cure is more modern house

Lexus has been consistent in their use of the modern house to sell their cars. Why would they stop now when it obviously is working for them.

I'll never grow tired of making this point, so here it is again. When Lexus creates a context around their product in their ads they want it to make their cars look as desirable as possible. So how do they do it? Time and time again, they choose to show the owners of their cars as also owners of beautiful modern houses. Not just any kind of house, but the modern house. Because they know, and we all know, that this will immediately signify that owners of their cars have impeccable taste, and that if you purchase one of their cars it will signify that you have impeccable taste, just like the modern house owners in their ads.

Lexus knows this, you know this, I know this, we all seem to know this. But our housing industry here in the US does not seem to know this. Instead of offering the kinds of houses that we all know that we admire and ascribe to good taste, they offer an unending parade of mediocre wishy washy sort of old fashiondy historicish looking mcmansions. Sigh. Maybe some day they will wake up and start offering what we all know is the real good stuff. The modern house.

Tip of the hat to Chad for the tip. And the house has been ID'd, thank you Mike:

The Bridge House by Stanley Saitowitz

Cadilac's big comeback starts with the Modern House

Just as all the other auto manufacturers, when it comes time to show your product in front of a house, they choose the modern house.

Cadilac has had to come a long way to win back the confidence of auto buyers following the near failure of GM. They needed to show their product in the best light, backed up by a setting that made their cars look like the choice of successful and tasteful owners. So of course they put their product in front of the modern house. Its clearly come to be the only choice for shedding good vibes on your automobile product.

Yet the housing industry seems to be missing this widely understood fact. Every ad agency serving every auto manufacturer knows that the modern house equals desireability. Yet the housing industry fails to offer the modern house as a choice. Hello? Is anybody home?

Here is the video:

chrysler's path to recovery stops at the modern house

We all know where Chrysler has been in recent years. Bankrupt, bailed out, taking a stab at it again, turning over a new leaf, chasing quality, reinventing themselves. This time they are going to do it right, freshen those designs, build that mystique, park their cars in front of the modern house.

Same old cars perhaps, but they have trimmed them up, new headlamps, new logos, new look. And to put that new image across to car buyers, this time they are going to do what works so well for those other car companies. They are going to show us that the kind of person that owns a modern house is the kind of person that owns their car. They are successful, smart, and cool, and Chrysler's products are one of the things that cool people gather around them. Everyone knows that, except maybe those mcmansion builders...

the modern house is no stretch for Nissan

In Nissan's new commercial for their Maxima sedan, the happy couple expecting a baby live in, what else - the modern house. Because, what other kind of house would this hip, yet successful young couple live in? A colonial? Nope. A giant McMansion? Uh uh.

Nothing but the modern house will do when Nissan wants you to understand that their product is owned by cool people. And a sure fire way to make yourself cool is to own their product too. So when Nissan sets out to make sure the owners of their car in the commercial look cool, well they have to be sure to put them in the perfect modern house. Not too big, not too fancy, but 100% modern. The message comes through loud and clear to us. How about the housing industry? Hello? Anybody home?

chevy goes modern for the volt intro

Over on the Chevrolet web site the new Chevy Volt has been rolled out, the hope of an ailing industrial giant, the Prius killer, the Hail Mary Pass, the last chance to get it right - call it however you see it. When GM closed its eyes and swung for that home run they did what any self preserving Fortune 500 company would do. They put their product in front of a modern house to make it look good.

Because we all know that the cool folks, the smart folks, the folks we want to be like, the folks that GM wants us to copy and buy a Volt, all live in a cool modern house.

But not the housing industry apparently. You remember the housing industry, don't you? I may disparage GM, but GM did not drag the rest of the world economy into the dirt with their own self indulgent out-dated relationship with their own dinosaur, the SUV. However the housing industry did manage to crash the world economy by encouraging us to flip ever bigger McMansions. Where is the Housing Industries Volt? Hmmmm? Where is its smart, green, efficient, and modern product to turn around its fortunes?

hyundai gets a taste of the modern house

In this Edmunds Inside Line article the brand new and shiney Hyundai Genesis sedan is posed in front of the modern house to good effect. Its not clear if the photos were shot by Edmunds, or stock material provided by Hyundai. But either way the intention is clear. The car is the newest and greatest. If you want to emphasize that you show it in front of a house that everybody looking also understands is the latest and greatest - the modern house.

See it at Edmund's site.

Thanks to Jim for spotting this one. Reader contributions greatly appreciated.

acura strikes back at lexus - proves acura doesn't get it

Acura is running a commercial about overindulgence at the holidays which appears to aimed at the Lexus campaign featuring modern houses and cars as gifts. Only they don't have any objection to cars as gifts of course, they just want to try to make modern architecture look silly.

Nice try, but it backfires. The fool in the Acura commercial may be a fan of fancy gingerbread, but he's holed up for the holidays in a traditional house proving once again that in advertising only the cool people live in the modern houses.

lexus holiday campaign casts the modern house

Every year Lexus makes a holiday pitch to give its vehicles as Christmas gifts. As improbable as that seems for most of us, never the less they have something to say about who might be able to so casually gift an expensive automobile.

And surprise - our generous gift giver is a family with a modern house. And why not. Lexus wants us to envy these folks, they want us to want to be like them - buying a new Lexus by Christmas time. And who do they think will make us feel that way? The guy with the modern house, of course. They know the modern house will make their product look more desirable. Yet the US housing industry doesn't get this, do they? What's with that?

lexus uk also has the modern house as its ideal

In this Lexus UK as from 2007 once again the driver takes their car home to a severely modern house.

The UK is similar enough to the US to make our case. When Lexus wants to make their vehicle enviable, they show it parked in front of a modern home.

land rover comes home to the modern house

In a TV commercial for the Land Rover Discovery we see a wide range of settings, all with traditional architecture, that is until the driver comes home. And they come home to none other than the Modern House.

Of all the places the driver encounters none but the home are modern - including an Art Museum. Even an Art Museum is a perfect candidate for modern architecture. But why not? Well, its simple. The driver does not own the Art Museum. The driver owns the house.

If you want the house to cast good vibes on your product, to make your product look desirable, to look like a possession of somebody who knows "the good stuff" to own, then of course you want to show your car owner pulling up to a modern house. You want viewers to desire your product, then you show them as the choice of people with good taste, people you want to be like. The thing that everybody seems to know is that we want to be like the guy with the modern house. Almost everybody knows that. Everybody but the housing industry in the US it seems.

Much thanks to Preston at Jeston Green for this one!

lexus says the modern house is natural

In this new tv spot for the Lexus RX suv the modern house makes an appearance.

The incredbile thing is the theme of this new ad is "Act Naturally". Through a number of examples Lexus shows us how the operation of the technology in the RX is familiar, the same as using the mouse for your computer, pushing the button for the elevator, and even turning on the lights in your house. Yet the "Natural" example for a house is this very nice looking Modern House.

Amazing. So why the Modern House? Why not a traditional house, as we are sure that most Lexus buyers have? Its simple really. Its because Lexus knows as well as we do that the Modern House makes their product look better. It makes its technology seem more advanced, it makes its style seem better designed, it makes their product more desirable. Yet home builders in America have not caught on that the Modern House will do the same for their product. How come they don't seem to understand what the rest of us seem to know for sure?

volkswagon jackpot at MidModRedo

Blogger & Reader Lesley has compiled all the Volkswagon commercials featuring the modern neighborhood on her blog. Here they are:

The minvan - growl - commercial

The Top Safety commercial

The Diesel vs Hybrid commercial

Thanks Lesley!

audi cuts and pastes its way to the modern house

This is from Audi's German web site, but hey - we're not that picky when a company wants to leverage the modern house. And in this case Audi is shameless about it. Cut and paste that modern house right into that landscape, yep they'll all be able to tell and that's ok because we all know its all about the cool jive coming off that shiny house. And in this case the house is the Loftcube prefab, an interesting German proposal for a small relocatable dwelling. Obviously when Audi wants a backdrop to make their cars look good, they know they need to add a modern house to the landscape to prop up their product. They know it, we know it. American home builders? Hello?

Thanks to Domitype for spotting.

meet the volkswagen's modern house

Volkswagen has been running a new series of tv ads all set in the driveway of a peculiar modern house. Aside from the talking cars being unusual the house has garage doors all the way across the front. But if you look closely behind the garage doors you'll notice that the house appears to be an iconic modern Eichler house. This is confirmed later in the spot when the car rolling down the street passes a never ending line of Eichler modern ranch houses.

So what gives? What kind of message is Volkswagen trying to send? Why not show their cars in front of ordinary McMasiony like houses since that's what most of their customers have anyway? Right? But no, instead they show their cars in front of perhaps the most iconic of modern homes, the Eichlers. Why would that be? Well, we all know that Volkswagon wants their cars to come across as smart, modern, and desirable. And so they want to place them in a setting that reinforces that. If they put them in front of an ordinary house, then their car would look, well... ordinary. So instead they put their cars in front of a house that looks cool, and that makes their cars look cool. And they rightly assume that everybody out there in TV land is going to understand that. They get the message that the car in front of the cool house is also cool. So then since we all understand that the modern house is cool, WHY CAN"T YOU GO OUT TO ANY PLACE IN THE COUNTRY WHERE HOUSES ARE BEING SOLD AND BUY A MODERN HOUSE? Because the idiots that build and sell the houses are the few people in the country that don't get it. Dopes.

A shout out to Robert McLaughlin for spotting this one.

Lexus pitches container based houses

Lexus is running an campaign for their hybrid technology cars called the The Power of H. It includes several short documentary type videos which are hosted on their web site. One of these shorts focuses on the use of reclaimed shipping containers to build houses, of course they are overtly modern houses.

Its very interesting. There are more than one traditionally styled house project out there that was built with shipping containers. I can call out one in Charleston, and one in Tampa off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more. Yet Lexus choose to highlight 3 architects creating very progressive houses with this recycled building block. Why would that be? Well, wrapping up a shipping container in traditional garb so it looks like every other house would not really make much of a statement when you want to wear your environmental status on your sleeve. So modern houses that wear their containers proudly are a much better selling point for a hybrid car that does the same.

Power of H video page

Audi says progress is beautiful & the modern house = progress

During the opening ceremony for the 08 Summer Olympics Audi ran a new commercial. It starts with a scene of a traditional living room, well appointed, affluent. The camera starts panning around the room, and as it moves the scene starts transforming to modern. The objects on the shelves, the furniture, the wall surfaces and floors all transform, the plaster fades away, then the studs and the solid wall transforms to a glass wall with a view to the garden, and a Mercedes sitting in the driveway, which blinks away to an Audi! Very well done, obviously with computer animation. Clearly Audi is trying to make a statement about their product representing progress, and replacing the product of one of their prime rivals. And clearly they believe that the modern house contributes to the progressive spirit they wish to imbue their product with. When they want to paint their cars as desirable they apply a healthy coat of modern house. Makes you wonder why America's big home builders are missing this message. For now you can also see the new spot on Audi's home page in a higher resolution flash movie.