“Inject some positive emotion” - from Liverpool with LV

In a 2012 television commercial for the British financial services company LV, a grey Volvo drifts from the centre of a bright suburban road and glances against the side of an older parked car. The door crumples and the driver’s side window shatters. In a subsequent corporate video reviewing LV’s rebranding from Liverpool Victoria, the advert is described as part of a campaign that is “hard hitting and price led.” Both cars carry British license plates, but the very presence of the red car, which carries a fake 1994 registration, is anachronistic. Never sold in Britain, and in fact designed and marketed to circumvent legislation that sought to protect the nascent South African car industry from British imports, in the abstract space of a television commercial, this seventies Austin Apache saloon is a filmic punctum. This paper explores the marketing transformation undertaken by a financial services company away from an existential fear of death to one of consumerist love. It examines the function of advertising, digital media and automotive culture in the realm of the postcolonial city.