Advertising: Nissan pays lip service

You probably don't speak Micra, but I do. I recognise this Nissan language immediately – don't mess with the words, it's the visuals that matter – and it's the look-language of the late '70s/ early '80s. It's the language of Visage, of Gary Numan, now recognised as really original with those swelling Amstrad chords from Are Friends Electric?, sampled in a 2002 hit now. (He didn't get the credit then because he looked so un-smart with his terrible Joe 90 get-ups. And he could never do clever talk. Children are such snobs.)

I'm thoroughly at home with the new Nissan Micra commercial because it's so deliciously old-fashioned; it's like an old promo video sleeked up a bit, with some more disciplined filters. The early '80s London club aesthetic, and all the chancers who ran with it and got halfway famous for several minutes, had two big ideas: the anonymous night-time city; and androgeny, with lashings of make-up for all.

Well Micra's got that too – that endless pattern of lighting in Modernist buildings in The City of the Future (the city of the recent past now), and a glorious disembodied pair of full blue lips, mouthing sexy stuff about cars in Italian, Nissan's second language. Exactly why Nissan should take on Italian isn't 100 per cent clear, but it suits the look. You wouldn't have taxed Steve Strange for not being a real cowboy.

These blue lips, mouthing away about "space" and "speed" or "technology", drift all over the place. They're very slimy/shiny. And the Italian words move vertically up the page, or diagonally across it, for all the world like the cover of a Bauhaus book on The Architecture of Tomorrow. (Those early promo video designers loved all that.)

I haven't mentioned the car of course. What can you say? It's a Nissan Micra. It's a chubby little thing. They've done their best with it.

It's a cheapish car, a for-women car, and presumably they want to make it a for-girls one. But I'm not at all sure girls like this sort of approach. I don't think they'd bother. It doesn't make the car seem cute and it doesn't have much of a proposition. It seems better suited for the pervy old men's market; when those lips are on about speed and technology, the tone is actually "come on, Big Boy, do it to me one more time".

Peter@sru.co.uk