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This trend was great news for Cadillac, a brand that had long been about status. The company's first ad in 1903 showed the car driving up the steps of the Wayne County Courthouse and boasted of “new principles of engineering and perfect mechanical construction.” A dozen years later, the company ran its “The Penalty of Leadership” ad in
The Saturday Evening Post
, pitching the Caddy as “the standard of the world” and really laying the groundwork for making the brand synonymous with quality and luxury. The ad remains one the ten best auto ad campaigns ever, according to
The New York Times
. In the 1950s, a “Universal Symbol of Achievement” ad featured a photo of two distinguished looking couples, dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns, walking out of a hotel toward a waiting car. The copy read:

The New 1959 Cadillac car speaks so eloquently—in so many ways—of the man who sits at the wheel. Simply because it is a Cadillac, for instance, it indicates his high level of personal achievement. Because it is so beautiful and majestic, it bespeaks
his fine sense of taste and his uncompromising standards. Because it is so luxurious and so regally appointed, it reveals his consideration for the comfort of his fellow passengers. And because it is so economical to own and operate, it testifies to his great practical wisdom. The magnificent 1959 Cadillac will tell this wonderful story about you.

Along with striving for the perfect white picket fence, Americans were spellbound by the promise of the future, so advertisers gleefully compared cars to jets and promoted the modern look and conveniences of the contemporary automobile. The photo in the “Magic Touch of Tomorrow” ad for the 1956 Dodge showed a woman effortlessly changing gears by hitting a button on the dash with her gloved fingertip.

Weirdly, regardless of any earlier progressiveness and despite the huge number of women who had entered the workforce during the Second World War, many advertisements displayed a decidedly pre-feminist image of women. “If you look back at the ads in the 1950s, they were in some ways a shameless throwback to earlier attitudes in the ways women were depicted,” pointed out the Chrysler Museum's Barry Dressel. “It's strikingly sexist stuff and you always see sexist ads, but it suddenly flowers in the 1950s. It seemed like they were trying to put the genie back in the bottle.” Indeed, the “gals” were often little more than glorified hood ornaments. “Since men were the primary purchasers of automobiles, ads of the mid-century invariably featured a winsome female. The code was not hard to crack,” notes James B. Twitchell in
Twenty Ads that Shook the World: The Century's Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All
. “It was the same code that informed the selling of beer or aftershave: buy the product, get the girl.”

THE IMAGE
of the diminutive Volkswagen Beetle sits in the corner of a vast blank space. The headline is “Think small,” and the copy starts off in a self-deprecating manner before extolling virtues
such as good gas mileage, the ability to park in tight spaces and the small size of the repair bills. Part of a campaign that started in 1959 and remains one of the most famous and influential in advertising history (making it to Twitchell's list of twenty ground breakers), such ads took for granted that readers were intelligent. “What is happening here in the VW ads is the effacement of the fourth wall in advertising,” argues Twitchell, noting that playwrights and novelists had already used this technique. “You were not being lectured, you were being included.” The “Think small” ad, which first appeared in 1962, is probably the most famous example in the black-and-white series, but others included “Lemon”; “It's ugly, but it gets you there”; and “If you want to show you've gotten somewhere, get a beautiful chariot. But if you simply want to get somewhere, get a Bug.”

After the social oppressiveness of the post-war era, America was finally beginning to loosen up—a trend the admen of Madison Avenue (and their cousins in Detroit) were eager to both reflect and promote. While ads continued to play to consumers' emotions, transformation and rebellion 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 middle
of 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 agency
MacLaren 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 of the city. Originally from Vancouver, Johnson is a twenty-five-year GM veteran who, despite his training as a mechanical engineer, moved over to “the dark side” for the company in 1986 and is now Miami-based regional director of sales and marketing for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. He brought along Diego Felices, GM's marketing manager in Argentina, and we started off talking about what the car means to Argentines. Felices, a slight man with short reddish hair and a goatee, pointed out that it's difficult to sell cars with automatic transmissions in Argentina, “because people here, they like driving.” Even in Buenos Aires, where many residents don't need a car to get to work, they keep one just so they can go for a drive on weekends. “A car is status,” Felices assured me.“If you buy here in Argentina, you buy it for the style of the car, trying to show off what you have achieved. It's definitely not an appliance.”

Although Johnson had been in his new job for less than a year, he'd already noticed some significant differences between the two hemispheres. “You can be much more subtle here and therefore more creative,” said Johnson, who believes South America has some of the most creative art directors and copywriters. It's not just the artistry of the ads that is different, though. “It's a much more emotional message to consumers here. It doesn't mean you don't have rational messages too, but you can reach consumers
better when you talk about things that matter to them, whether it's family, friends or what the vehicle means to them in their life,” he explained. “In North America, the message to consumers has become much more rational, much more about features and benefits, and prices have become more competitive.”

The appeal to the rational is in some ways a throwback to the ads of the 1920s and 1930s, when an automobile wasn't a given for most people and didn't yet possess the entrenched symbolism in the American psyche it does now, so companies spent more effort selling people on the idea of owning a car. Today, a car isn't necessarily the status symbol it once was—and to some people it's just a glorified appliance—so increasingly beleaguered American manufacturers plug benefits such as safety and fuel economy.

Safety hasn't always been the most effective theme to base advertising on (though it has been a consistent winner for Volvo). In
Iacocca: An Autobiography
, the one-time Ford executive admits that when the company pitched safety rather than performance in 1956, “the campaign was a bust.” He quickly came up with an alternative approach that promoted a financing deal, and sales took off. But that didn't stop others from trying again. “With SUVs, you see a lot of print ads or TV ads with rainstorms and swerves and stuff like that to impart that sense of safety,” noted MacDonald. And GM has promoted the safety features of its OnStar system. In one radio ad, OnStar staff contacted emergency services for someone who has been in a collision; in another, the driver received a “check-in” call after an air bag had deployed. More controversially, children in a 2005 TV ad asked their parents a series of “Would you …?” questions such as, “Would you put my little brother in a car without a car seat?” ending with, “Would you drive me without OnStar?” Some people found these spots offensive because they seemed to suggest that people who didn't pony up for the expensive service didn't care about the safety of their family.

Fuel economy also comes and goes as a selling feature. A print ad for the 1953 Chevrolet touted the car's “sensational new
gasoline economy” and opened with: “The smiling people in this picture have been traveling since early morning; and, much to their pleasure, they are having a remarkably
thrifty
trip.” It did not, however, cite any mileage figures. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the OPEC oil shocks, many ads did include those statistics—numbers that may once again become more prominent as gas prices rise and concerns about both the environment and oil dependency increase.

These appeals to practicality aside, many commercials still play on nostalgia or childhood dreams, while others suggest that a car offers a way to control life, brings families together, allows people to escape the chaos of family life, or simply acts as a trusted companion, there through good times and bad in life's journey. And sex is always a temptation, though the European ads tend to be more adventurous in that regard. In one Porsche spot, a beautiful woman in a long coat walks down an alley to a 911 Cabriolet. She admires it, caresses it and then flashes it—revealing nothing but bra and panties and causing the spoiler to rise. The ad did not run in North America. We're not the only prudish people, though. In New Zealand, normally a country with liberal attitudes toward advertising, Nissan responded to viewer complaints by pulling a raunchy 2006 commercial that featured
Sex and the City
's Kim Cattrall uttering double entendres such as “Why didn't you tell me it was so big? I just wasn't prepared for it,” and “The all-new Nissan Tiida makes you feel really, really, really good inside.”

Perhaps inevitably, the jingoism of car and country has been another common theme in auto advertising, especially during the Cold War and after September 11, 2001. The famous Chevrolet ads of the 1950s sold both the automobile and the nation: “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call,” sang Dinah Shore. “Drive your Chevrolet through the U.S.A., America's the greatest land of all.” In the 1970s, GM employed a jingle about “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.” The more the
domestic automakers struggle financially, the more likely they are to reach for the flag. In the 1980s, the GM tag line was “The Heartbeat of America.” And nine days after the World Trade Centre fell, the company launched its “Keep America Rolling” campaign, complete with zero percent financing: “Now it's time to move forward. For years, the auto industry has played a crucial role in our economy. General Motors takes that responsibility seriously.” In 2004, the automaker started using “An American Revolution” as a tag line. GM wasn't the only one playing the patriot card: Ford promoted its own post-attack discount financing deal with its “Help Move America Forward” campaign. And a commercial for the 2005 Ford Mustang told the story of a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. After a melodramatic tale that ended with the father, who owned a classic Mustang, giving the son a new model, white print on a black screen proclaimed, “We at Ford wish everyone in the Armed Forces a safe return home. For your service, you have our gratitude. Brought to you by Ford.”