.” At this point Tinkerbell suddenly materializes and Peter Pan says, “Of course you can fly, it’s never too late to fly.” Magically the man is whisked into the skies and appears to be flying, but as the camera pulls back we see he is behind the wheel of the new Mercedes convertible. As he soars through the streets of London made to appear as scenes from Peter Pan, we flash back to his wife who wakes up and asks, “Michael? Michael?” The close for the advertisement lists the company name and logo with the word exhilaration printed at the lower right of the screen.
This advertisements relies on creating a desire and longing in the average male to ad some long-lost level of exhilaration to his life. It also has some underlying appeals, such as having a new Mercedes is like being able to return to childhood, and fly even. It also has an even mores subtle suggestion that by buying a new Mercedes the man is able to get away from his daily routine, including his wife as he whisks around the streets of London with a younger female Peter Pan. The entire ad also hopes to play off of public consciousness of the Peter Pan myth, in which children are able to live out their fantasies. This kind of advertising that promises an enhanced life from buying a product is nothing new to the advertising world, where anything from toothpaste to nail polish is promised as a panacea for whatever might be ailing one in their own life, “Even as they launched industry-wide truth in advertising campaigns, ad men argued that effective advertising had to go beyond the truth. It depended on the more playful and performative aspects of language, and on t
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