The 80's in Car Advertisements

It was a zany time, a decade before I was born, but I read the stories afterwards. I saw the flourescent workout clothes and heard the synthesizers that backed up a moody Phil Collins. The 1980s were a time of discovery, and the decade sticks out in history as a time of life in color.

Car advertisements, of course, reflected that time. New, exciting, red, fiery, a blast to drive--these words could've been used to describe a Pontiac GTO or Pontiac Fiero.

One of the first things I noticed about these ads, which are lifted from 1985 and 1986 issues of Road & Track magazine was the sheer amount of information still present in ads at that time. Often, several paragraphs touted things like the oddball Peugeot 505's lackluster 0 to 50 time (it was still measured in that before the national speed limit was upped). Instead of slow, they said their customers cared more about just the power anyways.

Sadly, though, the 505, like a lot of strange cars for sale in the United States at the time, didn't sell very well at all. But those bad sales numbers weren't just limited to imports. This was a time when the auto industry in our country was having a bit of a struggle.

Japan had swept over the United States like a Kevin Bacon Footloose number. Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and even Subaru had started to make a name for themselves here and in Europe, because buyers realized they could have a car that sipped fuel, was inexpensive to maintain, iron-clad reliable, and inexpensive to buy in the first place.

Echoes of the fuel crisis were still being felt in the late 80s, and American carmakers simply couldn't adapt as well to the small car market. Think cars like the Ford Grenada, the AMC Pacer, and the abysmal Cadillac Cimarron. Advertisers touted these cars' abilities like you wouldn't believe, even going so far as to suggest buyers were somehow "un-American" for choosing a car from an overseas maker.

Muscle cars were where the US held strong, though. The ad agencies knew this of course, and plastered the magazine with scenes of bikini-clad women surrounding a guy in a Camaro, edgy, almost Tron-inspired ads for cars like the Dodge Daytona, and slick spots for the fox-body Mustang that touted its handling prowess.

Indeed, this time in history marked a bit of a shift back to the gas-guzzlers that were alienated in the late 1970s. No longer was it as unwise to own a Corvette or a big Cadillac or full-sized pickup, but the market had certainly expanded further. Cars like the Plymouth Conquest, a six-cylinder turbocharged hatchback coupe, represented a new age of affordable sports cars that could hold their own on a road course.

Of course, the Conquest jumped into the ring with Japanese sports cars like the Toyota Supra, the MR2, and even the Isuzu Impulse, which all offered affordable, forced-induction performance.The high-pitched whines of those engines combined with the constant squealing tires must've meshed pretty well with the Miami Vice soundtracks of the era, I imagine.

And the Vice was certainly an inspiration for many an ad agency as well. BMW mixed that with James Bond to appeal directly to the types of folks they figured bought BMWs--slick, business types who liked to party. And of course, they were right.

Truthfully, though, most of the ads were pretty straight-laced. One or two pages, they usually featured a visual that took up 50-75% of the page, accompanied by quite a lot of text, as mentioned before, and usually a catchy slogan that went with the campaign. During this time, Dodge used "An American Revolution," which would interestingly enough be used by Chevrolet in the mid-2000s. Toyota liked the question: "Who could ask for anything more?" And  my favorite, from Hyundai: "Cars that make sense." Although, at the time, Hyundai's cars weren't doing very much more than that.

You can catch more of my vintage automotive advertising finds on my newly-minted Tumblr blog, Car Advertisements in Print.