By Bertel Schmitt
July 12, 2009
There is a lot of funny money flowing to dealers: Holdbacks, incentives, carry-over-allowances, packs and countless others. All in the name of moving the metal. Did you ever hear of a car company that sent the dealer cold hard cash, and then sent it again and again, if the dealer just asked for more? No single car sale involved? Never? You’ll hear it now, in this week’s installment of the Autobiography Of BS ©. Also in this episode: On the inside of roadside assistance.
Autobiography of BS ©: How I Drowned Dealers in Free Cash
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By Bertel Schmitt
July 5, 2009
We left
the first chapter of this episode with BS at the southern tip of Spain. He had to produce a launch movie for the Audi 80. He had run out of time, luck, and, most embarrassingly, of film. BS was in deep dung. What will happen to him? Will he finish the mission? Or will he and his bunch of mad men rot in a Spanish cell? Join us today for parte dos, part two of the great Spanish spectacle . . .
Editorial: Autobiography of BS ©: How I Nearly Blew the Audi 80 Launch. Parte Dos.
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By Bertel Schmitt
June 28, 2009
You know what I loved most about car advertising? There was never a shortage of money to play with. I'm no longer tracking these things, but in 2007, GM spent $3 billion on what we call "measured media" alone. Measured media is defined as television, print, and outdoor advertising. The unmeasured expenses, what's called "below the line," in the vernacular, are usually just as huge, maybe bigger. Above and below the line, GM must have spent the GDP of Mongolia on advertising.
Volkswagen's budget resembled the GDP of a much smaller country, but I thoroughly enjoyed helping them to put it to good use. Sometimes, the money was thoroughly wasted. This was one of these times . . .
Editorial: Autobiography of BS ©: How I Nearly Blew the Audi 80 Launch
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By Bertel Schmitt
June 21, 2009
Did you ever hold a 70's vintage Volkswagen car catalog in your hands? You know, the ones without a picture of a car on the cover? Just "The Rabbit," "Der Käfer," "Le Golf?" One distinct color per model, that's it? Yes, those were the handiwork of yours truly. You think car advertising is a killer job? It sure is, as this installment of the Autobiography of BS illustrates.
Autobiography of BS ©: How Car Catalogs Killed Creatives
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By Bertel Schmitt
June 14, 2009
It was November 1989. After a long into-the-evening meeting with Volkswagen execs in Wolfsburg, after the usual after-meeting festivities and after a very short night, I sat groggily behind the wheel of my Audi V8 (as it was called at the time) and headed back to Düsseldorf. Little did I know that what happened that night would gain me the company of sixty near-naked women. Others would gain even more . . .
Autobiography of BS©: How I Corrupted Communist Cabarets
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By Bertel Schmitt
June 7, 2009
This one has less hilarity. But it is German, I mean germane to The Truth About Cars.
1973, at the tender age of 24, I defected to the enemy. BS, the former muckraking journalist, became a copywriter in a hotshot advertising agency. As the saying went, I didn't sell out, I cashed in: As a junior copywriter, I was paid twice as much of what I had made before as the editor in chief of a muckraking journal.
Raking muck had paid shit. Advertising was paradise. Work was easy, no more nerve-racking and downright dangerous undercover research, just sit and write. Powered by pilsener. Soon, my salary multiplied. Times were good.
They put me on the Volkswagen account. I didn't have the vaguest idea about cars. I didn't even have a driver's license. This qualified me as an utterly unbiased and unbelievably gullible tool of automotive propaganda.
One of my first jobs was to launch a new Volkswagen with a funny name: "Golf."
Autobiography of BS©: How I Lied about the Golf
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By Bertel Schmitt
May 31, 2009
For more than ten years, every word a certain high executive of Volkswagen uttered in public was pure BS. I wrote his speeches. I wrote articles under his name. I even ghostwrote a book for him. I studied his mannerisms, his way of thinking and talking. He slowly but surely slipped into the role for which I wrote the script. He's retired now but still a sought-after speaker on the conference circuit.
He liked to live and work on the edge, and I gladly walked him there. We had a strange symbiotic relationship. His trust in me bordered on the obscene. Even before major strategy announcements, his brief for the speech usually amounted to: "You know what to write." He rarely did read the speech before giving it. He always delivered it with great aplomb and usually to thundering applause. I could put practically any word into his mouth. Power that had to be used wisely. Tell that to a usually reckless BS . . .
Autobiography of BS©: How I Violated the One China Principle
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By Bertel Schmitt
May 24, 2009
From 1973 through 2005, my job was to create excitement for Volkswagens in the hope that people would buy them. The job had its ups and downs. We loved facelifts and hated totally new cars. With a facelift, we could travel to attractive and warm places for the photo shoot. "Because of the sun." Not to mention the beach. And the nice amenities of the Hotel Negresco in Nice. With a facelift, we could tool around in broad daylight, and nobody would bat an eye or even think of snapping a picture. Which magazine would publish the spy shot of a re-designed bumper? Totally new cars were top secret. Not allowed to travel outside the confines of the VW factory. Even there, constantly under tarps. The only places we could photograph them were at the in-house photo studio or at the VW proving grounds in
Ehra-Lessien.
Autobiography of BS© Part 2: The World’s Most Elaborate Duck Trap
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By Bertel Schmitt
May 17, 2009
In the late 70s, after Volkswagen had launched their new worldwide dealer network
under the mysterious V.A.G. moniker. The V.A.G. dealers received a strong voice, their own national advertising campaign and a renewed focus on the importance of service. No wonder. Then as now, after-sales is the VW dealer's number one profit center. The profit contribution of parts was often 30 percent or more. In 1979, for the first time, VW invited the service guys to the IAA auto show in Frankfurt. The suits asked me to come up with a spectacular concept for their debut. My first idea: fix cars live, Formula 1 pitstop style. Everybody liked it---until someone found out that the maximum height of the booth was 2.5 meters, way below the heights of the lift. Scratch that idea. Then I had an odd thought: Why not do it virtually?
Autobiography Of BS© Pt. 1: How I Invented Interactive Video
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