What Car Advertising Campaigns Have Stuck With You (For Better or Worse)?

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Back in the pre-internet days, when television and print ads were king, car manufacturers (or more accurately, their ad agencies) worked tirelessly to develop campaigns that would stick with potential customers by relentlessly pummeling them with relevant slogans, jingles, and tag lines. It worked: Many of us find ourselves recalling long-defunct commercial themes without even trying, and surely we’ve all dropped car-ad catchphrases as pop-culture references a time or two. Oh what a feeling, Toyota, anyone? Or maybe it was a high-concept presentation that did the trick. Ford really went in for this type of thing, with insane truck demonstrations and stunts like the Tempo loop.

Coordinated marketing is still very much a thing, of course, but the brain-searing effect is blunted by the mind-boggling number of platforms and channels and personalities we consume media from – not to mention the ability to skip ads entirely when we do encounter them. So we expect you’ll respond with oldies for this edition of Autopian Asks, wherein we query you thusly:

What car advertising campaigns have stuck with you (for better or worse)?

Also, have any commercials and/or ads ever influenced your buying decision? Consciously, that is– who knows what kind of subliminal hijinks are going on!

To the comments!

[Editor’s Note: For me, it’s gotta be the Ford Commercials showing F-Series machines carrying and towing the competition up a boulder-hill (Peter alluded to these in his lede):

I just haven’t been able to get that image out of my head for over a decade! -DT]. 

Autopian Answers Transp

Yesterday we asked for your feedback on car-feature subscriptions, and lot of you are not fans. Surprise level: zero. However, mature adults that you are, concessions were readily made for the idea that some updatable features do require time and expense to be updated by the manufacturer, and thus a subscription plan for a reasonable fee makes sense. But paying to turn on physical components already in the car? Do Not Want.

ExParrot nails it quite succinctly:

Hardware should never be a subscription, unless it too is regularly changed out.
In short, if I’m going to continually pay a subscription, the manufacturer should be continually incurring cost for the service that is provided.

Or, if you prefer a little more color, Granulated MC is less restrained. GTFO indeed!

Software is expensive to write. Paying something after I bought the car for a new application running on the same hardware is fair … [but] paying to activate equipment that’s already in the car and completely disabled until I subscribe? GTFOtta here. That’s 100% profiteering. The hardware is there. You paid for it. Charging me extra for something you disabled because you can is a protection racket.

Ruivo will not haul your junk, you hear that manufacturers?!

Don’t paywall stuff that I can’t remove, change, or use an alternative. Want to charge me for the equivalent of an ECU remap? Open that platform to competitors, so I can have a choice. Charge me for heated seats? Allow me to remove your hardware – or, better yet, allow me to operate the thing myself. If I have the hardware on my car, that I paid for, but I’m not allowed to use it, it isn’t really mine, it is the manufacturer’s – so please collect your junk, I don’t want to haul it around.

All you responses were and are great, of course. Keep ’em coming! And special extra thanks to Members! If you haven’t joined yet, please consider becoming an official Autopian Member today.

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230 thoughts on “What Car Advertising Campaigns Have Stuck With You (For Better or Worse)?”

    1. Okay what the fuck youtube? I have to watch a commercial before i get to watch a commercial? That is seriously messed up. Also ax is in Spanish so the song sucked and i couldnt understand a word.

    2. Every three row SUV is a Canyonero to me and probably always will be. Most of my friends get the reference, so they just let me use that to refer to their Explorers or whatever.

  6. Good memorable: Any early 00s Mitsubishi ads.

    Indifferent memorable: Though I was young I do remember the Toyota “Everyday People” campaign. That tune would have been amusing to splice over the video of the dealership employees fighting a couple weeks ago.

    Bad memorable: Buick having the same Matt & Kim song in the background for years. Do something different already! Really it’s not as much the song’s fault, it’s just the cherry on top for the overly frequent ads and the annoying cheeky attempt at humor.

    Does product placement count? IIRC New Girl had lines written in the script about Fords they were in that was pretty cringey. I never watched Bones but I think there was a similar thing with the Prius.

    1. If I recall, New Girl spent some time trying to sell the Flex, which Ford was I suppose trying to sell to young people that liked being the designated driver? Instead of marketing it to families? Pretty weird.

      1. I do think Schmidt had a Flex at one point, which seemed a little out of place but whatever. The most egregious one was an episode that might have aired after the Super Bowl where they went to a party or something and were talking about the Fusion Hybrid they were in. That was my first exposure to the show really and might have delayed my actually watching it for a bit.

    2. I like when a show’s pilot doesn’t have any sponsors, so characters drive whatever, but then by the time it gets picked up and there’s a second episode, everyone jarringly has new cars.

      The Hawaii 5-0 reboot memorably did this. McGarrett’s Mustang suddenly changes to a Camaro, his old Mercury Parklane Brougham (supposedly his dad’s old car, the same model the original McGarrett drove) is downplayed, and every other cast member is driving brand-new Chevys.

      1. Sorry the awesome show Eureka was without a doubt the show with the most plugs, placements etc so much so it was campy. Like Star Trek with product placement

    3. Terminator III had serious Toyota product placement. The female terminator steals a Lexus SC430 and gets pulled over with “hey you in the Lexus,” and the good guys drive the crap out of an unbreakable Tacoma.

  7. This isn’t a “campaign” — just a single ad spot. And it’s not an earworm like many commercials. But it’s meaningful to me, and as auto enthusiasts, I think it’ll resonate with many here as well. It’s an old Mercedes Benz commercial that’s comprised of photos of people posing with their cars over the decades. It ends with the simple tagline: “No one ever poses with their toaster.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ_euljNc38

    It really emphasizes the special place cars have in our hearts. They’re not just machines. They’re more than that.

  11. Only Mustang Makes It Happen from 1968. Also Ford racing jingle. “When was the last time, you drove the kind of car that brings the road alive?” Find them on YouTube. Try to get them out of your head.

  13. We Build Excitement…Pontiac.

    An ’80s classic: lots of neon, always synth/guitar music, urban night shots with reflections from standing water, and usually black with red accents cars.

    The Michael Mann aesthetic applied to a car company. Coooool.

  14. The Plymouth Turismo Duster cocaine factory ad has possibly the catchiest song ever written referencing an ’80s Chrysler and this is a category with “If I had $1,000,000” in it.

    5. That was amazing – thanks for sharing! I can’t believe I never saw it. My first “real” car was an ’85 Turismo Duster, and I can emphatically say that sport-look K-car did not live up anywhere near to the promise of this add. It was in fact, glacially slow, and shit broke on it weekly. At least this appeared to be manual version. Mine had the three-speed auto. Out of the 70+ cars I’ve owned, it’s still one of my least-favorite. It’s replacement was a ’79 Volare Duster with a slant-six, and it was a massive improvement on the ’85.

    1. Yes, the VW Milky Way ad featuring Nick Drake’s Pink Moon is perfection.

      VW’s ad agency was really firing on all cylinders during that time. Amusing commercials featuring the New Beetle or one for the Jetta where the music synch’s up with everything happening around the car as a couple drives through town.

    2. Yes, there for a while in the early 00’s there was a trend across OEMs to have car commercials with very good music in them. In those heady Napster/Kazaa days, I even had a folder in my music downloads library labeled ‘car commercial music’. Pink Moon was in there, as well as ‘horn dog’ by Overseer (Mitsubishi commercial) – and I know there were more besides that I’m now forgetting.

  18. Chevy, Chevy, Astro, Astro

    An Acura commercial showing an Integra on an orange Hot Wheels track. Not since Hot Wheel have cars been this much fun. Track sold separately.

    As mentioned in the article, the Oh what a feeling Toyota and Ford trucks towing anything and everything up a mountain.

    Joe Isuzu. I drove this up here.

    1. Oh, gosh—if local dealerships count, count me in as an ABSOLUTE HATER of the Scott Elder ads here. It went from being a sketchy buy-here-pay-here kind of lot to being the only local Mitsu franchise left, and I still have not done business there because the commercials are just too damn irritating. They’re all Scott Elder yelling. They’re frequent as hell. They’re not even original—I think there’s a John Oliver segment about scripts that dealerships use all over the place for ads—Scott Elder’s yelling voice is just uniquely grating. I hate them so much. I need Mitsubishi parts, too! The Lancer is not immune to problems! It’s a 13-year-old car now! But I would rather order offline or from another dealership than bother with Elder. The commercials are THAT annoying.

      The only thing that comes close in sheer throw-my-radio-into-the-lake irritation are the parody Dubya/Bill Clinton radio scripts that dealerships use en masse. Talk about dead memes. Those parodies are so dead Elon Musk won’t even retweet ’em.

      On the bizarrely memorable but endearing side, there was also a weird one that ran when I lived in Wichita Falls that tried to do a take on the Budweiser frog ads. In practice, it was four dudes in frog (…maybe even Ninja Turtle?) masks individually saying “Four” “Star” “Auto” “Mall” in kind of a low, ribbity voice. It was so low-rent, low-effort and corny that it was weirdly great. It became a running joke in my family for a little while. If anyone could find that commercial from the mid-’90s, gosh, they’d be my hero right about now.

      1. And getting ca. 22 tons of sand dumped in the bed from 50 ft in the air, with the camera cutting just in time so you don’t see that the truck was totally crushed and totalled

    2. I keep seeing a current ad in the same vein where a woman sings about having a heart like a truck… Such a weird image. It reminds me of when there was a song that was apparently about a guy singing to a woman having a body like a back road, but I always heard it as “a body like a backhoe”

    4. The film shot across the front of the truck has the absolute perfect amount of vibration, like a massive weight that is just slightly perturbed by the chaos around it. Kudos to the videographer.

  25. For me, it is the longevity of Toyota’s Jan. Laurel Coppock really scored a great role here- she’s a comedic actress who is now forever the face of Toyota. I have this weird pattern recognition glitch that makes me recognize commercial actors way too often, and when they are integrated into a long-lived character, it’s kind of amazing. Yeah, Progressive’s Flo is a more realized example, but Jan just won’t go quietly into the night, no matter what.

    1. There’s a whole cadre of Flos/Jans out there. “Lily” from AT&T is the obvious one, but also the whacky Wendy’s crew featuring yet another dark brunette. And now Flo has a whole entourage of fellow apron-wearers like “Jamie” and “Mara”.
      Don’t even get me started on “Doug”, who I’d beat up instantly just for being so damned annoying.

      1. I held hope that the ad execs would make Mara the sarcastic voice of Progressive, burnt out and shitting on every positive insurance message. Maybe someday we’ll get Dark Mara spreading dystopian advertising across the airwaves.

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