New Project! Promote!
My next project for the advanced design course is called promote. We are given a company and need to create a positive ad campaign and a negative ad campaign for this company. The company I was given is Volkswagen. The first stage in this project is to do research into the company’s previous ad campaigns.
The Think Small ad is not only one of the most important ads Volkswagen has ever created, but it also changed the advertising world.
Previous ad campaigns in the advertising industry prior to the Think Small ad, which came out in 1959, focused on explicit advertising. This means showing exactly what the product is. Additionally, ads used bright colors and illustrations, rarely any photographs.
With the Think Small ad that VW created, they took honesty of the critique of how small the car is, and embraced it. The rest of VW’s ads for the following decades used the same formula of photographs as the center, and honesty as their title.
The above ad, The Lemon ad, is also a very well known ad. A “Lemon,” usually refers to a car that has a bad part and needs to be fixed. Volkswagen decided to take that phrase and turn it into a positive phrase to show how unique the VW bug is.
This is another example of an ad that VW did. It has a very cheeky title and catches your eye because of how odd it looks.
Another selling point of Volkswagen, was that it was easy to fix the cars on your own and in your driveway. This is, sadly, no longer the case because most parts have to be bought from Germany. However, at the time the ad came out, everyone loved how simple the VW bug looked because all the parts were right there.