Drive by Tim Falconer Page A

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 middleof 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 agencyMacLaren 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