Ad Let Out of the Bag
Disavowed Video Riles but Reaches Audience
By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 16, 2004; Page E01

It's a scene that's hard to believe, and Ford Motor Co. says it didn't want anyone to see it in the first place:

A small black car is parked in a suburban British driveway, accompanied by the sound of birds chirping. A ginger-colored cat wanders up, and the car's sunroof suddenly slides open. The cat climbs up the hood and windshield to investigate, pokes its head into the sunroof . . . and the sunroof draws shut, slowly beheading the cat.

The tagline says, "Ford Sportka, The Ka's evil twin."

The 40-second video is an Internet-only advertisement for a small Ford hatchback sold in Britain. Except that Ford has disowned the ad, claiming that it rejected the spot as too extreme and did not approve its release.

How the video wound up e-mailed around the world over the past few days is something of a mystery. Animal rights advocates in the United Kingdom have condemned it in the British press, and Ford's ad agency -- Ogilvy & Mather -- is conducting an internal investigation to figure out what happened.

But in the world of Internet "viral" advertising, which aims to reach Web-savvy young people with offbeat messages that are so funny or shocking they'll spread through e-mail like viruses, the cat spot is already considered a big success.