Volkswagen advertising
Throughout its history, the German automotive company Volkswagen has applied myriad advertising methods.
History
In 1949, William Bernbach, along with colleagues, Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane, formed Doyle Dane Bernbach, the Manhattan advertising agency that would create the revolutionary Volkswagen ad campaigns of the 1950s, as well as the 1960s.Bernbach's artistic approach to print advertising was innovative, and he understood that advertising did not sell products. The strategy was to keep customers by creating and nurturing them as brand ambassadors, rather than attempting to attract the attention of those who were uninterested in the product. Bernbach's team of "agency creatives" was headed by Bob Gage, who hired Helmut Krone, as an art director in 1954. Krone owned a Volkswagen before the agency pitched for the account. Krone, Bernbach and the first copywriter on the account, Julian Koenig, were impressed with the "honesty" of the car. Krone was an intellectual among art directors—seeking ways to lay out an ad campaign to stand-in for the product itself. He took the simple, straightforward layouts of agency principal David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather and adapted them for Volkswagen. Krone's repeated use of black-and-white, largely unretouched photographs for Volkswagen, coupled with Bob Gage's bold work for Ohrbach's, spawned consistently witty and unique print ads that met DDB's goal of making a stark departure from existing advertisement techniques.
The corporate headquarters and factory that produced Volkswagens was located in Wolfsburg, Germany. Because Volkswagen's advertising budget in 1960 was only $800,000, DDB’s bare-bones, black-and-white approach, coupled with a projected common theme of irreverence and humor, fit Wolfsburg's needs well. Each Volkswagen ad was designed to be so complete that it could stand alone as a viable advertisement, even without addressing all aspects of the automobile. Many of the ads deliberately highlighted, or made fun of the Volkswagen's perceived shortcomings and turned them into attributes.
Taken as a sign of the campaign's runaway success, research by the Starch Company showed that these Volkswagen advertisements had higher reader scores than editorial pieces in many publications, noting that Volkswagen advertisements often did not even include a slogan and had a very subdued logo. The Volkswagen series of advertisements were voted the No. 1 campaign of all time in Advertising Ages 1999 The Century of Advertising.
Following the success of "Think Small", the advertisement titled "Lemon" left a lasting legacy in America—use of the word "Lemon" to describe poor quality cars. The "Lemon" campaign introduced a famous tagline, "We pluck the lemons, you get the plums."
Fahrvergnügen
Fahrvergnügen was an advertising slogan used by Volkswagen in a 1990 U.S. ad campaign that included a stick figure driving a Volkswagen car.VDub
VDub was an American advertising campaign used by Volkswagen during 2006 for the Volkswagen GTI. Intended to parody MTV's Pimp My Ride, advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky created a series of three television commercials directed by Jonas Åkerlund, starring Swedish actor Peter Stormare as an effete German engineer named Wolfgang, and German model Zonja Wöstendiek as his assistant Miss Helga. In each ad, Wolfgang introduces a "contestant" and Miss Helga showcases and insults their gaudy and distastefully modified compact car of a competitive make - specifically a Mitsubishi Eclipse, Ford Focus and a Honda Civic. Wolfgang then excitedly announces that they are going to "unpimp" the contestant's car, in which he presses a button on a handheld remote and the car is violently destroyed as the contestant watches. Each contestant is then given a brand new Volkswagen GTI, a car that has been "pre-tuned by German engineers". Wolfgang uses gestures and expressions reminiscent of hip-hop culture throughout the ads for humorous effect, such as when he proclaims "we just dropped it like it's hot!" after crushing a Ford Focus. Most notably, he opens every ad with "V Dub in the house!" and ends every ad by recreating the Volkswagen logo in a hand sign accompanied with, "V Dub! Representing Deutschland!"The commercials began airing in late February 2006. Prior to the full launch of the TV campaign, the three 30-second spots became an early example of a viral video when popular automotive news website Leftlane News uploaded the ads to video distribution service YouTube. The ads became an early example of an Internet meme, as other YouTube users created their own parodies of the ads. By early March 2006, the ads had received over two million views on YouTube. Three years later, that number was over 10 million.
The ad campaign extended beyond the TV commercials. In one of the first examples of a company using social media to reach prospective customers, Volkswagen created a MySpace page for Miss Helga in which the character interacted with users. The advertised website, volkswagenfeatures.com, featured interactive videos of Miss Helga showcasing the car. The configurator on Volkswagen's website also allowed users to "test drive" their GTI around a test track while Miss Helga showcased the car's features from the passenger seat.