Wednesday, July 11, 2012

EOC Week 1: VW Lemon


“However, one campaign did much more than boost sales and build a lifetime of brand loyalty. It's the 1960s ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. It, and the work of the ad agency behind it, changed the very nature of advertising,from the way it's created to what you see as a consumer today.”


“What made the Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign so radical? Ads before it were either information-based and lacking in persuasion, more fantasy than reality, or reliant on the medium's ability to deliver repeated exposure.”


“Many great ads have come along since 1960. However, none made a greater lasting impact than the Volkswagen Beetle ad campaign. The industry trade publication, Advertising Age, named it No. 1. It gets an equally strong endorsement here as well.”


“Created by Julian Koenig and art director Helmut Krone, they set about to create an advertisement that would set VW out from the crowd. Doing something that nobody else was doing at the time. They had “simplicity in mind, contradicting the traditional association of automobiles with luxury”.
http://ateliertally.com/this-ad-was-not-a-lemon/



What made the Volkswagen Lemon ad so controversial? Well, one dire factor was that some people thought they were buying Hitler's favorite car only a decade and a half after the war. Some saw the ad as a joke when the page was half empty and the car was so small that you could barely see the product. And the famous Lemon ad described that the car has a flaw. It had a minor error on the dashboard of a car, hardly a lemon. This "bashing" ad was meant to give humor to its audience. That in itself is a new approach to advertising. Back then most of the ads were information-based and didn't really have a persuading intent. The beetle ads were simple. They were able to reach out and relate to the audience to an emotional level while showing what the product is all about. Everything about these ads changed the way advertising is today. Instead of putting a picture of the product and announcing its price, people now study the way advertising can inform, persuade, and promote in a whole new different way. A more effective way.

The different approach of the Volkswagen ad was something to talk about back in the 60's. Whether it was bad or good,people were still talking. Sometimes this can be the motive of an ad. to create controversy to try and sell their product. We see this today in many ads that try to show us controversial topics that relate to their product. And it was to no surprise that many other companies tried to copy Doyle Dane Bernbach's creative way of making ads. It was around this time in the 60's where creativity really exploded. There were a lot of other great ads during this time, but none really made an impact the way the Beetle ads did. In fact it was named number one by the Advertising Age.

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