Hopefully, you’ve kept up with our recent posts about Aston Martin’s attempts to get into the world of viral marketing. If you haven’t, you can catch up on them below, or visit this page on the Aston Martin website and watch all three parts together, as they were meant to be seen. After that, you can wince in recollection every time you drive past an Aston Martin Dealership.

The videos may have been bad, but they do raise some interesting questions about how manufacturers such as Bentley, Porsche, Ferrari and so on are use the internet to promote their cars. Whereas you can see banner adverts all over the place for offerings from more affordable manufacturers like Ford or Vauxhall, you don’t see Porsches chasing each other across the top of a web page in a garish flash advert.

Part of this is obviously because of the way these companies expect to do business. They can use top car shows like Top Gear to get their latest models shown to an interested audience, but past that they rely a lot on the image of their brand and the price of their models to draw in customers.

Product placements in Bond films are all well and good, but there are whole new realms of media that they can exploit with the rise of the internet. Except they haven’t. Apart from Aston Martin’s poor voyage into viral videos, the largest online presence these companies seem to have is their Facebook pages.

Will we see more attempts to create content like this, which furthers their image whilst also drawing more mass attention, or do the companies believe that doing so ruins the image of exclusivity? After all, walking into a Bentley Dealership and getting a glass of champagne when you buy a new car is very cool. Sitting at your computer reading a blog post about the latest Porsche’s performance simply isn’t.