Volkswagen no longer keeps an official upload live, so both of these are third-party copies. Two links, because reuploads get taken down. This is the longer online cut, the one that did the damage. The broadcast version was 30 seconds.
Volkswagen was about to launch a mid-size family sedan into the most boring segment in the American car market, against the Camry and the Accord, with a brand most Americans thought of as small, European and slightly quirky. Nothing about a Passat generates a feeling. Nobody has ever had a feeling about a Passat.
So Deutsch LA stopped looking at the car and looked at the household. The thing that is actually happening in a family sedan is a parent and a small child, and the truth they landed on is one every parent recognises instantly: kids spend their whole childhood convinced they have powers, and testing the theory, all day, on everything. And a parent spends that same childhood quietly making a few of those tests come true.
The second insight is the commercial one, and it is the reason the ad is not just charming. The Passat had keyless remote start. That is a spec-sheet feature nobody would ever watch a film about. It is also, from four feet off the ground, indistinguishable from magic.
A small boy in a full Darth Vader costume spends a day failing to use the Force on his own house. Then he tries it on the car, and the car starts.
Not a word of dialogue. One sound cue everybody on earth already knows, and one turn at the end that reframes everything before it.
The structure is a run of failures. The dog, the exercise bike, the washing machine, a doll, a sandwich his mother slides in front of him. Each one is a small joke and each one lowers your expectation, which is what makes the last beat land. Lance Acord shoots it as domestic realism rather than comedy: flat suburban daylight, no mugging, a mother who barely looks up. The costume is doing all the work, which is why the boy never needs a face.
Then the turn. Dad pulls into the driveway, the kid throws everything he has at the car, and the engine fires. Cut to the parents at the kitchen window, one of them holding the key fob. And crucially, there is a half-second before the engine catches where the boy's arms drop. He has given up. Without that beat of defeat there is no joy, and it is the single most important piece of editing in the spot.
The distribution was the other half of the idea, and at the time it was the controversial half. Volkswagen and Deutsch put the full-length cut on YouTube days before Super Bowl XLV instead of guarding the reveal for game day. Millions of people watched it before kickoff. Every agency that had spent a decade treating the Super Bowl as a surprise reveal had to rethink the model by the following February.
The stupid: spend Super Bowl money on a family sedan and do not show the car until fifty seconds in. No dialogue, no benefit, no price, no offer. Cast a six-year-old whose face you never see, in a mask, being repeatedly unsuccessful. Then, having bought the most expensive sixty seconds in advertising specifically because nobody has seen it yet, give the whole thing away for free four days early.
The smart: the twist is not a twist bolted on for charm, it is the product feature. Remote start is the punchline, so the story only works for a car that has it. That is the discipline most emotional advertising skips, and it is why this is not just a nice film about childhood. Licensing Star Wars means the audience arrives pre-loaded: the costume, the breathing and the Imperial March do a minute of setup work in one second, for free. And the early release was not a giveaway at all, it was a read on how attention had changed. A spot people choose to watch and send to each other on Thursday is worth more than a spot people are ambushed by on Sunday, and it gets watched on Sunday too.
The steal: find the boring feature and ask what it looks like to someone who does not know how it works. Remote start is a bullet point to an adult and a miracle to a six-year-old. Almost every product has a feature that is unremarkable from the inside and astonishing from some other angle. Your job is to find who is standing at that angle.
The other lesson is about the pause. The half-second where the boy's shoulders drop is the whole ad. Every version of this idea that got made afterwards, and there were hundreds, skipped straight to the payoff and none of them worked. The setup is not the boring part you get through on the way to the joke. The setup is where the feeling is manufactured. If you are cutting anything for time, cut the payoff.
Pre-game view counts vary a lot by source, from roughly 1.7 million to over 13 million, depending on when and what anyone counted. What is not in dispute is that it was the first Super Bowl spot to become a hit before the Super Bowl. On sales: the 2012 Passat sold 117,023 units in the US, a rise of more than 400% year on year, and you will see that number quoted as proof the ad worked. Be careful with it. That Passat was an all-new, larger, US-built model at a materially lower price, launched into a recovering market, and the previous year's figure was tiny. The ad plainly helped. It did not do that on its own, and anyone selling you a 400% attribution is selling you something.
Client: Volkswagen of America (2012 Passat)
Agency: Deutsch LA
Chief creative officer: Eric Springer
Creative directors: Eric Springer, Michael Kadin
Art directors: Ryan McLaughlin, Craig Melchiano
Copywriter: David Povill
Production: Park Pictures · Director: Lance Acord
Licensing: Lucasfilm · Music: "The Imperial March", John Williams
Starring: Max Page
Max Page was six when he shot it and had never seen a Star Wars film, because they frightened him. He was born with tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect, and had open-heart surgery in 2012 to replace a pulmonary valve. He has since had more than a dozen heart operations and spent his teens campaigning for children's hospitals. Worth knowing about the kid who could not lift a sandwich.
Wikipedia, The Force (advertisement), with view counts and release timeline
The Drum, how the spot was made and released
TIME, how The Force changed Super Bowl advertising
Fast Company, anatomy of a Cannes contender
CNN, Max Page's heart surgery
GoodCarBadCar, US Passat sales by year
The device behind this one, from our library of ways in: