The Volkswagen ad campaign seeks to turn the page on the diesel crisis, which will turn 4 years old later this summer, with a little help from Simon & Garfunkel and their classic "The Sound of Silence." The ad, titled "Hello Light," also gives viewers another glimpse of the I.D. Buzz concept, due on sale in about two years, following the bulk of other I.D.-branded electric vehicles.

Seeking to promote a new era of electric driving, the ad attempts to connect two different eras through a redemption story, while looking to the past for inspiration and actually finding it.

The ad is notable for a few reasons.

First, it references the diesel crisis itself as a part of recent VW history, a crisis that is very much ongoing in the German judicial system, but one that is distant enough at this point to put into some sort of context. Second, the ad paints VW as once again looking to its past for inspiration, something it had done with the New Beetle exactly two decades prior. Third, the ad showcases Volkswagen's efforts to start a new chapter, as it has done with developing electric cars and a new electric sub-brand, the first vehicles from which will go on sale in Europe later this year.

The ad also attempts something very rarely practised in the U.S advertising and legal world: admitting a wrong and making a change.

The latter part, making a change from something that was demonstrably wrong and telling others about it, happens infrequently because it's the same as admitting culpability in the legal world. Which is why companies rarely advertise making changes to a product or a range of products when a prior version of a product was harmful or regrettable: making the change itself is an admission that something was wrong with an earlier version, especially in product liability cases. But even aside from that, admitting that a company was doing something wrong in the not-so-distant past is rarely publicized, because that injects uncertainty or adds negativity to a company's image. So when radical change in a product is publicized, it's almost always because something was great in the past and is even greater now.

"This campaign is for all of those we disappointed, all of those who stayed with us, those who worked like crazy to keep us moving forward and for all of those who stopped caring," said Scott Keogh, president and CEO of VW Group of America. "We have a responsibility to do better, to be greater and we intend to shoulder that responsibility."

Volkswagen - Hello Light

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