by Tim Falconer
THE IMAGE of the diminutive Volkswagen Beetle sits in the corner of a vast blank space. The headline is “Think small,” and the copy starts off in a self-deprecating manner before extolling virtues such as good gas mileage, the ability to park in tight spaces and the small size of the repair bills. Part of a campaign that started in 1959 and remains one of the most famous and influential in advertising history (making it to Twitchell’s list of twenty ground breakers), such ads took for granted that readers were intelligent. “What is happening here in the VW ads is the effacement of the fourth wall in advertising,” argues Twitchell, noting that playwrights and novelists had already used this technique. “You were not being lectured, you were being included.” The “Think small” ad, which first appeared in 1962, is probably the most famous example in the black-and-white series, but others included “Lemon”; “It’s ugly, but it gets you there”; and “If you want to show you’ve gotten somewhere, get a beautiful chariot. But if you simply want to get somewhere, get a Bug.”
After the social oppressiveness of the post-war era, America was finally beginning to loosen up—a trend the admen of Madison Avenue (and their cousins in Detroit) were eager to both reflect and promote. While ads continued to play to consumers’ emotions, transformation and rebellion replaced social status and conformity as dominant themes. A 1968 Mustang ad opens with a woman, her hair in a bun, leaving a lab as the voice-over explains, “They respected Liz in the lab—she was a Ph.D.—but no one knew how much fizz there was to Liz until …” The scene cuts to the woman, her hair now loose and blonder, driving a Mustang to the strains of a jingle that claims, “Only Mustang makes it happen.” Another in the series shows a matronly woman leaning down in her convertible, but when she sits up she’s an attractive young blonde. If the admen were to be believed, Americans could transform themselves just by buying the right car.
Nothing epitomized the shift from the dream car of the 1950s to automobiles that appealed to the increasing desire for individuality in the 1960s more than the rise of the muscle car, and much of the advertising shamelessly focused on speed and performance. In one example, the copy warned, “I wouldn’t stand in the middle of the page if I were you … it’s a Pontiac GTO” while the photo showed a 1964 model aiming straight at the reader. And an ad for the 1966 Camaro announced: “A word or two to the competitors: you lose.”
Not surprisingly, the individual remained central to advertising in the 1970s—or, as Tom Wolfe dubbed it, the “Me Decade.” But when the domestic industry began to suffer from a reputation of poor-quality products in the 1980s, companies looked to ad agencies to help solve the problem. In 1932, Walter Chrysler’s photo graced ads that urged buyers to “Look at all Three!” The slogan was an attempt to convince people to compare the new Plymouth Six to cars from Chevrolet and Ford and led to a 50 percent jump in the low-priced model’s market share. Five decades later, with Chrysler on the verge of bankruptcy, CEO Lee Iacocca asked consumers to compare the company’s products to the competition’s. Pointing his finger at the viewer, he said: “If you can find a better car—buy it.” The line became a trademark for the celebrity executive and the ads helped save the company. Meanwhile, Ford tried to rehabilitate its reputation with ads that boasted, “Quality is Job One.”
In the 1980s, the American car hit its design nadir and the advertising began to mirror that lack of creativity. A 1987 Rolls-Royce ad in Architectural Digest did offer a sniff strip that allowed readers to smell the car’s leather upholstery and, more successfully, Nissan tried to tap into the psyche of those who love speed with a spot for the 300ZX created by Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner, but most campaigns relied heavily on brand recognition and financing deals. “In 1904, the Oldsmobile was urging the customers to buy it mainly because it was an Oldsmobile,” according to Advertising in America: The First 200 Years, by Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple. “By the final decade of the century, ninety percent of the cars were using the same theme.”
Even people in the ad business are now unimpressed. Dave Kelso, a former creative director with Toronto ad agency MacLaren McCann who spent ten years working on the GM account, praised Volkswagen for fifty years of consistently good campaigns around the world. “The brand is so figured out internally, it doesn’t matter who the agency is,” he said. “I mean they’re the guys who did ‘Think small,’ which invented good advertising.” In general, though, Kelso is disheartened by the state of auto advertising: “As time marched on, all of them got more conservative,” he said. “There’s nobody doing anything exciting.”
At least not in North America. The summer before I left on my road trip, my wife and I visited Argentina. While in Buenos Aires, I met Don Johnson for a drink at the lobby café of the Hilton Hotel in the Puerto Madero section of the city. Originally from Vancouver, Johnson is a twenty-five-year GM veteran who, despite his training as a mechanical engineer, moved over to “the dark side” for the company in 1986 and is now Miami-based regional director of sales and marketing for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. He brought along Diego Felices, GM’s marketing manager in Argentina, and we started off talking about what the car means to Argentines. Felices, a slight man with short reddish hair and a goatee, pointed out that it’s difficult to sell cars with automatic transmissions in Argentina, “because people here, they like driving.” Even in Buenos Aires, where many residents don’t need a car to get to work, they keep one just so they can go for a drive on weekends. “A car is status,” Felices assured me.“If you buy here in Argentina, you buy it for the style of the car, trying to show off what you have achieved. It’s definitely not an appliance.”
Although Johnson had been in his new job for less than a year, he’d already noticed some significant differences between the two hemispheres. “You can be much more subtle here and therefore more creative,” said Johnson, who believes South America has some of the most creative art directors and copywriters. It’s not just the artistry of the ads that is different, though. “It’s a much more emotional message to consumers here. It doesn’t mean you don’t have rational messages too, but you can reach consumers better when you talk about things that matter to them, whether it’s family, friends or what the vehicle means to them in their life,” he explained. “In North America, the message to consumers has become much more rational, much more about features and benefits, and prices have become more competitive.”
The appeal to the rational is in some ways a throwback to the ads of the 1920s and 1930s, when an automobile wasn’t a given for most people and didn’t yet possess the entrenched symbolism in the American psyche it does now, so companies spent more effort selling people on the idea of owning a car. Today, a car isn’t necessarily the status symbol it once was—and to some people it’s just a glorified appliance—so increasingly beleaguered American manufacturers plug benefits such as safety and fuel economy.
Safety hasn’t always been the most effective theme to base advertising on (though it has been a consistent winner for Volvo). In Iacocca: An Autobiography, the one-time Ford executive admits that when the company pitched safety rather than performance in 1956, “the campaign was a bust.” He quickly came up with an alternative approach that promoted a financing deal, and sales took off. But that didn’t stop others from trying again. “With SUVs, you see a lot of print ads or TV ads with rainstorms and swerves and stuff like that to impart that sense of safety,” noted MacDonald. And GM has promoted the safety features of its OnStar system. In one radio ad, OnStar staff contacted emergency services for someone who has been in a collision; in another, the driver received a “check-in” call after an air bag had deployed. More controversially, children in a 2005 TV ad asked their parents a series of “Would you …?” questions such as, “Would you put my little brother in a car without a car seat?” ending with, “Would you drive me without OnStar?” Some people found these spots offensive because they seemed to suggest that people who didn’t pony up for the expensive service didn’t care about t
he safety of their family.
Fuel economy also comes and goes as a selling feature. A print ad for the 1953 Chevrolet touted the car’s “sensational new gasoline economy” and opened with: “The smiling people in this picture have been traveling since early morning; and, much to their pleasure, they are having a remarkably thrifty trip.” It did not, however, cite any mileage figures. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the OPEC oil shocks, many ads did include those statistics—numbers that may once again become more prominent as gas prices rise and concerns about both the environment and oil dependency increase.
These appeals to practicality aside, many commercials still play on nostalgia or childhood dreams, while others suggest that a car offers a way to control life, brings families together, allows people to escape the chaos of family life, or simply acts as a trusted companion, there through good times and bad in life’s journey. And sex is always a temptation, though the European ads tend to be more adventurous in that regard. In one Porsche spot, a beautiful woman in a long coat walks down an alley to a 911 Cabriolet. She admires it, caresses it and then flashes it—revealing nothing but bra and panties and causing the spoiler to rise. The ad did not run in North America. We’re not the only prudish people, though. In New Zealand, normally a country with liberal attitudes toward advertising, Nissan responded to viewer complaints by pulling a raunchy 2006 commercial that featured Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall uttering double entendres such as “Why didn’t you tell me it was so big? I just wasn’t prepared for it,” and “The all-new Nissan Tiida makes you feel really, really, really good inside.”
Perhaps inevitably, the jingoism of car and country has been another common theme in auto advertising, especially during the Cold War and after September 11, 2001. The famous Chevrolet ads of the 1950s sold both the automobile and the nation: “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call,” sang Dinah Shore. “Drive your Chevrolet through the U.S.A., America’s the greatest land of all.” In the 1970s, GM employed a jingle about “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.” The more the domestic automakers struggle financially, the more likely they are to reach for the flag. In the 1980s, the GM tag line was “The Heartbeat of America.” And nine days after the World Trade Centre fell, the company launched its “Keep America Rolling” campaign, complete with zero percent financing: “Now it’s time to move forward. For years, the auto industry has played a crucial role in our economy. General Motors takes that responsibility seriously.” In 2004, the automaker started using “An American Revolution” as a tag line. GM wasn’t the only one playing the patriot card: Ford promoted its own post-attack discount financing deal with its “Help Move America Forward” campaign. And a commercial for the 2005 Ford Mustang told the story of a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. After a melodramatic tale that ended with the father, who owned a classic Mustang, giving the son a new model, white print on a black screen proclaimed, “We at Ford wish everyone in the Armed Forces a safe return home. For your service, you have our gratitude. Brought to you by Ford.”
Flying the flag isn’t always free of controversy, though. GM may have gone too far when it created a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Silverado that flashed images of Rosa Parks on a bus, Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s resignation, the Towers of Light memorial in the Manhattan skyline and Hurricane Katrina while John Mellencamp’s “Our Country” played in the background. Finally, a truck appeared from out of a wheat field as the voice-over announced, “This is our country. This is our truck.” Some people were upset that GM exploited Parks and King to sell trucks. Others were appalled at the inclusion of September 11 imagery. Still others bristled at the apparent parallel between the country’s darker moments and the company’s financial struggles. The suggestion seemed to be that once again what was good for GM really was good for America and vice versa. But it didn’t matter: the market share for America’s Big Three automakers continued to decline.
THIRTY-TWO PEOPLE in a sleepy Swedish seaside town bought Volvo S40s on the same day in 2003. Director Spike Jonze, best known for films such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, even made an eight-minute documentary about it. As hard as it is to believe that anyone would fall for such a hoax, the campaign—which featured an ad, the documentary and a spoof website that purported to debunk the story with a second documentary—worked, and more than half a million Europeans visited the Volvo website.
If car ads on television are increasingly stodgy and predictable, at least the internet offers hope for more innovative campaigns. And with new technologies such as TiVo that make avoiding commercials even easier, the carmakers and their ad agencies have little choice but to try going online to reach existing and potential customers. In what may have been an act of desperation as much as anything else, a floundering Ford launched its “Bold Moves” campaign in 2006. Along with broadcast and print ads, it included a website showing a thirty-part “behind the scenes” documentary series about the company’s turnaround attempt. Ford also announced plans to “develop and produce a new reality-driven TV series” that could include “anything from the design of a concept car to the development of a new high-performance Mustang, with unlimited opportunities for everyday customers to participate at one level or another.” If auto and ad industry blogs were any indication of the general reaction, most people would rather the company actually built bolder products than create bolder marketing campaigns.
While Ford may not have generated much excitement, at least it didn’t face a backlash. Volkswagen was embarrassed when an online British ad that appeared to be for its Polo created a stir early in 2005. The spot showed a man wearing a black-and-white kaffiyeh scarf—obvious shorthand to indicate he was an Arab— who stops his car beside a crowded restaurant patio. When he presses a detonator button, the explosion remains contained within the vehicle. The screen shows the VW logo and the words “Polo. Small but tough.” The video quickly became popular on YouTube, but Volkswagen denied any involvement in the creation of the ad and it soon came out that the spot had been made by an agency hoping to make a name for itself with an impressive show reel.
Volkswagen may have felt burned by the loss of control inherent in online sharing, but others keep trying. In 2006, Chevrolet unveiled a website that offered prizes for creating the best thirty second commercials for the 2007 Tahoe using the company’s video and music. The company hoped the user-generated ads would spread around the internet through email and on video-hosting sites. But many of the homemade ads mocked the SUV as a gasguzzler. Perhaps GM understood viral marketing well enough to expect the negative ads and didn’t care, especially since the campaign generated plenty of publicity in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere. On the other hand, the campaign didn’t do much to improve the brand’s reputation with the very audience it targeted: young people. Either way, carmakers will likely keep trying to take advantage of the internet, even if it means their ads become more scandalous and offensive—and risky.
IN 1915, TWO MEN on a cliff admire the beautiful gorge below while their car perches beside them and the copy reads, “The Hudson stands at the peak place in its class. It took four years to get there.” A 1949 Willys Jeepster ad urges: “Take off from the crowded highway, the mob is not for you. See the unspoiled spots and strange scenes.” Cars have always offered the promise of getting away from it all, even if we rarely do. In what must be a bitter irony for many environmentalists, automakers have long sold their products as a way to escape to nature. And now SUV commercials that show the ecologically ruinous behemoths in remote spots, including atop buttes or on the edge of mountains, are common. One spot ends with the driver sitting in front of a waterfall, his Tahoe beside him, while a 2006 Hummer H3 ad—a takeoff on the Steve McQueen film The Great Escape—shows three friends breaking out of their office cubicles and driving around rugged country; the tag line is “Escape Greatly.”
I’d escaped the Detroit suburbs—and was happy about it. The fall
colours were starting to appear and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so it was a great day for a long-distance drive. I headed west on Interstate 94, but was soon reminded that rather than freeing us to escape to nature, cars frequently collide with it. I stopped for gas near the town of Parma and exchanged pleasantries with the man behind the register. He seemed slightly awkward or unsettled, and I understood why when he said, “I hope my day ends better than it started.” Turns out he’d hit a deer on the way to work, crumpling his front end.
Large animals such as deer are a danger to cars and drivers, but most wildlife doesn’t stand a chance. Sprawl and road building destroy their habitats, and pollutants slowly poison their bodies. And if they survive all that, they may end up as one of the estimated one million mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians killed every day on American asphalt. Sure enough, I began to see a lot of roadkill: people pulled bloody deer to the gravel shoulder, but most of the other lifeless creatures—smushed squirrels and raccoons, for example—just stayed where they had died.
If I was going to spend the next couple of months on the road, I wanted to avoid two things: accidents (with animals or ditches or other cars) and speeding tickets. I’ve heard so many Canadians, especially those who’ve driven down to Florida, complain about getting tickets in the United States, and fear of speed traps always adds a smidgen of stress when I drive (though apparently not enough that I’d actually slow down). But with a posted speed limit of seventy miles per hour, and the flow of traffic at eighty or so, I leaned back and cruised down the highway. I was enjoying myself—even if I wasn’t a professional driver on a closed course or even riding in a shiny new set of wheels.