The Best Advertising Strategies of the 20th Century

The Volkswagen Beetle vs the American Luxury Automobile 

By the early part of 1960 the United States was performing nuclear tests in Nevada, Russia had launched the first man in space, and the cold war was getting a bit colder. It was an era of overblown advertisements glorifying the size, power, aerodynamics and stature that came with America the great. Not surprisingly, these powerful characteristics also came with owning the American luxury automobile.

With the Volkswagen beetle, the challenge that the New York ad agency Doyle Dane Burnback and writers Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig were up against was to convince the consumer about the advantages of owning a smaller vehicle. It was a bold attempt to lure consumers away from their luxury automotive so popular in America’s “big and fast” car market.

Enter the baby boomers. The postwar youth that came of age in that decade.

Against all that was established in that era, the Volkswagen beetle became a symbol for counter culture thinking. The young drivers embraced the funky bug as the way to show rejection of what they saw as the mainstream materialism of their parents and generations before.

Later in that decade, as the psychedelic era sprung into place, the cars were soon ablaze with flowers, peace symbols and florescent colors. Hippies became especially fond of the beetle-based microbus because it was so easily turned into a rolling bedroom. Not far from the car I searched out as a young teen –– the Chevrolet Vega. A car (like the VW bus) that easily fits two lying down with the back seats rolled flat. The VW Beetle was a car that was affordable, easy to fix and modify, that fit in well with the youth of that decade.

Take a look at the role of the women in the above ads. A clear focus of how a spouse was viewed during this decade. The ads read- “If you can sell her on this you can sell her on anything” and “Do you have the right kind of wife for it?”

This was retro advertising at its best! A history lesson of that era like no other that can’t be found in books or movies. The advertising tells all. Writers Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig established a calm but quirky voice in 1959 for a completely different set of values from the established norm in marketing. The “Think Small” campaign developed that year was to become what many consider to be one of the best advertising strategies of the 20th century.

In the hard sell advertising market of this time period, the Volkswagen wit described its product with the self-effacing humor tearing down the use of advertising space which, in turn, started a trend in simplicity. The ad design and copy were a comedy performance in minimalism and a very accurate mirror of the product itself. Take a look at these two facing pages of my August, 1965 Post magazine.

The amount of copy in the two ads gives you an idea just how far these writers went out on a limb to stand out with intense white space.

As a collector of all that is retro art in magazines and books, I’m often amazed how Doyle Dane Burnback ads pushed the pendulum in a completely opposite direction. These ads owned a tremendous amount of simplicity and white (or negative) space around their product. 

In doing so, the readers’ eyes are immediately drawn to the small car.

The tiny car becomes the complete focus of the page!

Set in a simple Futura font and printed at the bottom of the each ad, they quickly established a brand for the Volkswagon beetle that was both comical storytelling and clever writing. You couldn’t help but love a company willing to poke fun at their product. One ad depicted a slightly damaged beetle above the word “Lemon” explaining how Wolfsburg inspectors rejected the entire car because of one blemished chrome strip on the dash.

Doyle Dane Burbach and their advertising team increased sales throughout the 1960s to remain America’s top-selling foreign (and let us not forget post WW II, Germany) make.