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.

"It's kind of a win-win-win situation," said Lucian James, a pop culture expert and founder of the Agenda marketing agency in San Francisco. The video is reaching the Sportka's target market even though Ford disavows responsibility, he said.

"It's all very kind of illicit. The ad is not supposed to be released and not seen, however it is seen and it's creating buzz."

The "evil twin" campaign for Ford's Sportka got its start last summer. The Ka is a miniature hatchback that sold about 52,800 units in 2003, according to Ford, and the Sportka is a jazzed-up version with a more powerful engine and sporty styling. Ford cast it as the "evil twin" of the Ka to try to reach young males, said Ford of Britain spokesman Oliver Rowe.

The campaign kicked off with a Ford-approved Internet ad only marginally less extreme than the cat spot. In that one, a pigeon swoops out of a tree toward a parked Sportka, presumably to dive-bomb it, and suddenly the car's hood pops up and whacks the bird, which plops to the street in a spray of feathers.

Animal advocacy groups didn't like that one much, either.

"There were some mutterings," Rowe said. But Ford stood by that spot, he said, because "it was not intended that the pigeon died. It was stunned. It was temporarily flawed."

When a creative team at Ogilvy presented the concept for the follow-up ad featuring the cat, he said, both Ford and Ogilvy management rejected it. "We said no. It was not something Ford wanted to be associated with," Rowe said. But "without Ford's knowledge it went on to be developed. There is an investigation at the agency going on as we speak."

Ogilvy & Mather finds the "unofficial 'advertisement' totally unacceptable and reprehensible," a spokeswoman said in a news release.

Although the cat in the ad appears lifelike, Rowe stressed that it was a product of computer animation. "There was no real cat involved," he said.

A Web site touted at the end of the spot, www.the-eviltwin.co.uk, was not online yesterday. Rowe said he did not know why the site was down. It had touted the car in a spoof of horror movie ads, and featured a link to the pigeon spot.

Representatives of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals blasted the cat ad in British news media. "Using highly distasteful depictions of animal suffering to sell a product is abhorrent," an RSPCA spokesman was quoted as saying on the news site www.telegraph.co.uk.

But James said he thought the spot, while shocking, was effective. Other carmakers have tried to be edgy with online-only viral ads, all in Europe. Mazda, for instance, had a 30-second clip in which a woman parks a car in a narrow spot to the surprise of two men, and Volkswagen had one featuring a little girl using an off-color term repeatedly. But none has been as extreme -- as truly viral -- as Ford's for the Sportka.

"It's a great idea to have a car with an evil personality," James said. "I think it's working very well for Ford."