#Advertising

This is not a test. Do not attempt to adjust your display. What you are watching is an advertisement for a new car. But before you hit the jump and find out what car this is supposed to make you want to buy (trust me, you won’t be able to tell by watching alone), see if you can guess the answer.

As Detroit was skipping a decade or two of car R&D by concentrating on packing increasing numbers of 128-ouncer-ready cup holders and faux-wood trim into big trucks, it became necessary to make it clear to the targeted buyer demographics that these trucks really weren’t, you know, trucks. In fact, they were more about protection from street crime and potholes than anything else, which is where slapping Mercury badges on the Explorer and Oldsmobile badges on the Blazer came in.

German advertisers of the 1950s turned the Volkswagen Transporter into some of the best rolling marketing art ever.

The Freep notes that

Sales of the “Imported from Detroit” Chrysler 200 were a modest 2,319 in February. But during the same month a year ago, Chrysler sold 3,160 of the 200’s much-maligned predecessor, the Sebring.

And though the 200 has been in production since December, Chrysler spokesman Ralph Kisiel insists

It’s still in ramp-up mode, and we’ll continue to build volumes over this month and the next several months

But with the updated Avenger selling 3,477 units in the same month (without the benefit of an endlessly drooled-over Super Bowl ad), surely something is afoot here. To the numbers!

Buster Keaton reached the height of his fame in about 1927, but Ford’s 1966 marketers must have figured that nostalgia for the allegedly wholesome silent-film era would be big, what with all the not-so-wholesome madness heating up in the United States at that time. How about we put Buster Keaton in the Econoline?

Chrysler got so much buzz out of its “Imported From Detroit” Super Bowl ad that it sold out of apparel bearing the tagline “within hours” and even had GM Marketing boss Joel Ewanick admitting

Yeah, we’re getting our butts kicked.

Now Chrysler is literally wrapping itself in the tagline, covering its Auburn Hills headquarters with the semi-ironic (what with ChryCo headquarters being located in Auburn Hills and all) phrase. And Chrysler’s ad agency is even exploring ways to remake Chrysler’s dealerships into “Detroit Embassies.” AdAge quotes the Creative Director for Chrysler’s ad agency Wieden + Kennedy as saying

One of things we’ve been working on for last couple of days is a dealer kit. How can we make dealers around America feel like Detroit embassies? How can we put this feeling about Detroit and its optimistic resurgence in dealerships? We’ll help them keep that stuff rolling.

But will it make a difference?

American car ads of the early 1980s came up short in several departments: Burning rubber, jet-engine-grade turbocharger sound, and blatantly sped-up film that made the cars appear to be going 300 MPH. Oh, and they also lacked James Bond!

One of the recent advertising trends we’ve seen is the comparison of a new car with something ridiculous… like an armored car or a sofa. Now, Nissan is inverting the “shooting sofas in a barrel” approach by taking on one of the toughest comparisons imaginable: making readers decide between a Juke and a swimsuit model. Here, the Juke and a model from Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition go head-to-head in a “curb appeal” competition… up next, “headlights,” “airbags” and “ride quality.” Then, testers will strap on their crash helmets and try to determine which model “slides its rear end out” in the most satisfying manner… plus whatever other dirty double-entendres you can come up with. Just the thing to get you into that romantic Valentine’s Day mood…

Sure, Internet video is mostly about dental-fetish porn (particularly the very stimulating “spit sink” subgenre), but when the novocaine wears off and the last vinyl-clad hygienist has put aside her last stainless-steel scraper, you’re ready to explore the other great thing about Internet video… old television ads for the Citroën AX.

This ad, for the Chevy Camaro, was the most-watched spot during the Super Bowl, pulling in 119,628,000 sets of eyeballs according to the ratings agency Nielsen. A Chevy Cruze ad took second place in the “most-watched” category, and Chrysler’s much-chattered-about 200 spot tied for fourth (with 5 other spots, including one for Bridgestone Tires), with 17.565m viewers. In short, cars and car-related products not only accounted for many of the ads, they managed to snag the time slots where the fewest people were taking bathroom breaks or grabbing more bacon-wrapped buffalo wings. But remember, there’s more to effective advertising than merely drawing eyeballs…

Back when I was semi-serious about photography— as in Pliocene Epoch photography with lots of chemicals and red lights— I scored a bunch of two-piece glass 35mm slide mounts at a camera store in Los Angeles. Most of them were empty, but a handful came with Chrysler dealership promotional slides from 1974.