Cars'n'bras – a result

Sexist it may be, but the Motor Show advert that so offended Patricia Hewitt certainly achieved one thing: massive publicity, says Mark Wnek

Many will argue that posters of women in bras selling cars should, if you absolutely must have them, be confined to the wall of the mechanics' toilet, over the sink, partially obscured by a giant tin of Swarfega. Otherwise, there is always the danger that they may come to the attention of an unsympathetic audience, such as, say, the Minister for Women.

Nevertheless, the people who produced, last week, the poster of a woman in a bra with the headline "The other way to your man's heart is down the M6 and off at junction 4", as an advertisement for the British International Motor Show in Birmingham, not realising (or, even better, entirely realising) that said minister, Patricia Hewitt (who doubles up as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry), was to be a speaker there, will be having mixed feelings today.

As their heads clear from the ringing induced by several lusty swipes of the minister's handbag, they may feel that they've had what car salesmen call a result: short of the woman in the bra in the poster in question being the minister herself, it's hard to imagine how the Motor Show could possibly have got as much publicity as it now has thanks to Ms Hewitt's intervention.

If that was the poster's creators' intention, then, putting all else aside, you kind of have to take your hat off to them for pure, dead-eyed ruthlessness.

That aside, personal transport involves primeval psychosexual forces. There was a time when you could be hanged for stealing a man's horse. In Britain, you can still have your head kicked in just for giving some bloke's car a funny look. All over the world you will find men and women who call their car/motorbike/jet-ski "her". Last week my sister burst into tears when a pigeon defecated on her brand-new Peugeot 206.

While, in the ordered, pink and fluffy Nirvana that is the modern world that some politicians would like us to be moving more quickly toward, these primeval forces need careful handling, that is not to say they don't exist.

And in the complex war that selling anything is today, manufacturers and their communications agencies deploy all forces available; otherwise, cars don't sell, plants close and communities disappear.

I've tiptoed close to the "sexy or sexist?" line myself with past car ads: because car ownership, driving and maintenance is on some level a psychosexual experience, and ad men and ad women try to communicate that, clumsily sometimes, subtly usually, photographically always.

Every now and then, some of our number cross the above line with both feet, as the creators of the Motor Show poster have done. The poster has a hamfisted shirt-riding-up-back wrongness about it reminiscent of the bit in Four Weddings and a Funeral where James Fleet delivers what he imagines to be a best man's speech every bit as witty as Hugh Grant's was at the beginning of the film.

Thanks to Hewitt's efforts, it now also has a similar folkloric status: few, if any, of the 50,000 female science, engineering or technology graduates she says she wants to point in the way of the car industry could have been put off from doing so by the poster, had not the minister, through her outburst, pointed them so expertly in its direction. Can't think the Minister for Women is in the Secretary of Trade and Industry's good books at the moment.

Mark Wnek is the executive creative director of Euro RSCG Wnek Gosper