The other night I was watching TV for the first time in ages and happened to catch a pair of car ads that gave me a bit of a chuckle. Apparently, in February of this year, Nissan Motor Co., Japan’s third-largest automaker, launched a new ad campaign to promote the excellence and design of their model line and encourage people to visit their neighborhood showrooms to experience for themselves the fine quality and the feel of the materials used in each Nissan vehicle.

Staying true to the common practice by Japanese car companies of using English slogans in advertisements, Nissan created the following tagline for the new campaign:

(Wait for it. . .)

“Touch your NISSAN”

That’s right, seemingly innocuous yet potentially teetering on the edge of risqué (depending on how dirty one’s mind is), Nissan has provided the world with another Engrish gem. While it’s possible that no one at Nissan recognized the giggle-potential of their tagline, it certainly caused me to do a double-take, and I somewhat doubt that I was the only one.

Touch your NISSAN is actually strongly reminiscent of the Nintendo DS Touch! campaign that has been ongoing since October of last year. (Nintendo has recently taken the pun one step further with their new “My First Touch!” promotion featuring video clips of people’s first experiences playing the DS.) I, for one, would love to see the explosion of a trend featuring the use of double entendres in ad copy. Perhaps other automotive companies can follow suit with similar suggestive slogans of their own. Wouldn’t be great to flip through a magazine and see ads featuring lines like these?:

Feel your Mazda
Caress your Mercedes Benz
Squeeze your Suzuki
Pet your Volkswagen
Fondle your Honda
Stroke your Toyota
Rub your Mitsubishi
Palpate your Oldsmobile
Spank your Jaguar

Okay, I admit that those are incredibly lame, but I think the world definitely needs more of this. But, then again, I am the guy who was admonished by the teacher in my grade 12 Economics class for creating an ad for a fictional top-of-the-line luxury pen featuring a scantily-clad model above the tagline “I love a man with a big pen,” so perhaps it’s best that I not be listened to.