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. Hi. I’m Joe Isuzu. (he’s lying)
    Here in my factory, we’re equipping Isuzu I-Marks with millions of standard features, like a breakfast nook.

  2. Not a car, but features a motorcycle, but for beer? Does that count? The Rainier beer commercial with the sounds of the motorcycle ringing out the name of the beer while going around corners. Raaaaiiinneeer beeer!

  4. I’m am kind of stunned no one has yet mentioned it, but my absolute favorite bit of automotive marketing has to be “Cog”, the two-minute mini-film from Honda. It’s about a deconstructed Honda Accord with the parts arranged in a wonderful Rube-Goldberg setup that doubles as pure asmr before that was a thing. No CGI either – it’s still a delight to watch:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl2U1p3fVRk

  5. Anything by Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman for Pontiac in the days where Pontiac ruled. The artwork is stunning, and there’s a terrific coffee table book about it too. (P.S. they also did mid fifties Buick and seventies Opel.)

    1. Okay, so I went print to everyone’s television. But I also remember the extravagant 1964 Chevy TV commercial where they helicoptered an Impala convertible to the top of a butte.

  6. Funny, I don’t remember any car ads that made an impact on me as a kid. I love car ads but I only really started getting interested in them after youtube made on-demand video streaming commonplace. One of the ads that I like the most is this 1966 Renault 4 ad for french-speaking African countries (sorry, I am physically incapabale of being unbiased when it comes to the Renault 4).

    Sometimes, when I pop my Quatrelle’s hatch open, I sing “Idéale, idéale, idéale, idéale!” in my mind.

  7. Really obscure: A Subaru campaign I think in the late 70’s or maybe early 80’s. The gag was having groups of people who had a car name associated with them doing a jingle about why their group buys Subarus. All I remember is something to the effect of, ” Rain or snow, it’s go, go go – that’s why Cadillacs buy Subarus!” Cadillacs in this case was a singing group. Another group was a family with the last name Honda, I think.

  9. I don’t have to go back to olden days. Toyota Jan saying, “Imagine yourself in a Toyota” at a time when imagining is all you can do because the dealers don’t have vehicles.

  11. Radio commercial in Alabama, mid/late 90s: “Do YOU! have a job? Do YOU! have 99 dollars?”

    Listening to the radio after moving to Georgia: “Do YOU! have a job? Do YOU! have 99 dollars?”

    Listening to the radio after moving to freaking Arizona: “Do YOU! have a job? Do YOU! have 99 dollars?”

    Those goddamn Kia commercials were inescapable.

    As for a great ad for a great car, I’ve always loved “Little GTI”: https://youtu.be/3zcm4oS9IaM

  12. Well I’m not much of a TV watcher but the Audi Quattro ad they did somewhere around 2007 which involved driving up a ski jump just like the original 80s ad did always stuck with me. The sheer ability was clear but how German of them too: let’s do something pointless with our engineering because we can.

  13. The Crocodile Dundee Subaru Outback commercials were successful, though the Legacy wagons were/are my style (I own two).

    I grew up in Volvo 145/265 wagons and remember the print ad that stacked a bunch of Volvos to show the strength of the roof. There was a TV commercial I don’t quite remember seeing:

    https://youtu.be/s9NRDfDIxcc

    This Volvo commercial comparing the tidy size of the 145 to large American wagons seems classic to me, though I was probably too young to see it:

    Every morning, men leave their little women to struggle with the biggest, heaviest cars on the road – station wagons (husband takes off to work in his TR6, leaving wife with land barge station wagon) Then switch scenes to parking lot in heavy rain, with large station wagons getting in each others’ way while the small tidy 145 wagon drives off.

    https://youtu.be/FAgmQzC7rV0

  19. Two that spring to mind as car ads I genuinely respect are the Golf V GTI ad “The Original, Remastered” which was an excellent capturing of how the motoring press and VW itself viewed the mk.5 as a return to form through a remix and modern dancing of Singin’ In the Rain, and Toyota’s eventually banned ‘The Real Deal’ scene of a CGI guy breaking out of a dull artificial world in a real GT86 – again a brilliant summary of the spirit of that car.
    But really, it’s the Audi R8 V10 on a rolling road with its rear bodywork removed. I saw that in a cinema a couple of times and nothing will top that.

  22. —Wow, you’re reading this? Thanks! If you’re into RC cars and I seem vaguely familiar, it’s because I spent over 25 years writing and editing RC car news, reviews, and tech articles in print and online–

    Any chance on a 40 year retropective on the Associated RC-10, as that anniversary is coming up?

    2. Guess what, the vintage RC scene has gone bonkers, like everything else to do with Gen X (are we the new Boomers?).

      A lot of people are paying a lot of money to have original cars sitting doing nothing on the shelf, or unbuilt in boxes. Madness.

    3. I’m writing about full-size cars and trucks full time, so I’m afraid that one won’t be coming from me! A worthy topic to be sure, though. Certainly someone will do it, if not Team Associated themselves.

  25. The old VW ad asking, “What does the snowplow driver drive?”

    >as I wrote that , I realized it may have been only print, and the fact that I had a framed page carefully cut from a magazine on my wall for a couple decades may have convinced my brain that it was broadcast. Still love it

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