Heritage wheels: Anything but old

I've been reading an article by Bernhard Rieger on the Volkswagen Beetle* this evening as I'm prepping for tomorrow's session of my "Cars, Culture, and Place" seminar at Tufts. I think I like teaching this class for the same reason I like teaching about tourism: car culture and the tourism industry just never fail to amaze me in their inventiveness in making darned near anything into a marketable product, and teaching a course on them is a great way to find out what they've been up to lately. Reading about the history of the Beetle made me decide to go see how VW is marketing the new, all-new, really new 2012 New Beetle on its website, where I found a great example of heritage marketing and how it performs the classic modern trick of selling us the past and the future simultaneously.

On the "Profile Update," just under where it says "Completely redesigned," there's an option for "Heritage wheels," which turn out to evoke the classic style of 1960s Beetle wheels. "Close your eyes and picture the classic wheels," the text says. "They're too iconic to forget, right?"

Then when you click on "Details," you get the having-it-both-ways message: "Now open your eyes and see how cool they look taking us into the future. That’s right, we redesigned the old wheels to be completely cool and anything but old." Old, yet new--what could be better than that?

One of the things that Rieger's article shows is that German VW executives at the home office in Wolfsburg initially resisted the idea of introducing the New Beetle in 1998, not grasping the potential appeal of a somewhat-nostalgic, somewhat-ironic retro-vehicle for American buyers. The roll-out ad campaigns capitalized on this highly postmodern blend, but it struck me that the current promotion for the 2012 model shows how hard it is to sustain the momentum of the nostalgic/ironic impulse over time. Despite the evocation of the Beetle's status as an icon ("Those crisp, clean, curved lines hark back to the original"), there's actually nothing playful, ironic, or--ironically--really new about the way the car is now being marketed.

That sense of playfulness was a big part of the novelty of the original VW ad campaigns, which became almost as iconic as the car itself, and the New Beetle was able to play off of some of that older creative energy. Based on my short cruise through the website tonight, though, VW has turned to a highly conventional approach to promoting the car at this point: emphasizing its cool features and posing it in dramatic settings. Even novelty gets old, I guess--or maybe the real irony is that novelty gets especially old. As Alfred Sloan showed a long time ago when he brought the model year and built-in obsolescence into the car industry, constant change is an essential ingredient of getting people to buy new cars before they really need them. Within that logic, invoking the past is a tactic to be used sparingly, when you use it at all.


*"From People's Car to New Beetle: The Transatlantic Journeys of the Volkswagen Beetle," Journal of American History, June 2010 (pp. 91-115).

If Ken Burns made car ads

Car ads are like little zeitgeist-meters. They’re amazingly responsive to all kinds of social anxieties, which they instantly repackage in ways that allow us to continue feeling good about driving. Feeling nationally or personally emasculated? Concerned about the transition into being a soccer mom? Worried about climate change? Fear not. You can buy a minivan and still be hot; owning a Nissan Leaf will cause you to be hugged by grateful polar bears. All is well in the world of the car ad.

Which is why Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” ad, which debuted in a two-minute version during the 2011 Super Bowl and has been running in a shorter format since then, is so striking. It brings the anxiety right into the frame of the commercial, using image, music, and association to evoke the long pain of deindustrialization and the resulting gutting-out of cities and economies. The full-length spot, which has topped ten million views on YouTube, features Detroit-based rapper Eminem driving through the city in a gleaming new Chrysler 200 (née Sebring) while a raspy male voice discusses the city’s ups and downs over footage of monuments, factories, athletes, homes. The opening riff of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself," a nervous insistent strumming, permeates the piece, giving it much of its edgy feel. Eminem winds up at the stunningly restored Fox Theater, where the guitar riff merges with a vocal crescendo from a black gospel choir on the stage, dropping to a reverent hush behind his somber delivery of the line, “We’re the Motor City, and this is what we do.”

I have no particular trouble finding things to critique about this ad, because, well, that’s what I do. There’s a subtle “othering” of Detroit’s industrial and postindustrial working people, in the “Imported from Detroit” tagline and in the images of past struggles—Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit murals, the gigantic iron fist of the memorial sculpture to Detroit boxing great Joe Louis—and present production of goods (the unseen workers behind the gleaming Chrysler 200) and services (the doorman who nods to Eminem as the car rolls past an upscale hotel). Despite the invocation of working-class heroisms and skills, the emphasis here is on luxury and the relationships that sustain it. The doorman’s brief nod seems to reinforce Rachel Sherman’s argument that these service-economy laborers become complicit in creating and sustaining the very hierarchies that limit their own options (see Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, University of California Press, 2007). This othering of the working class is subtly racialized, particularly in in the appearance of the gospel choir, which, as Douglas Harrison notes, is a kind of convenient shorthand in American pop culture for moral strength and resilient human spirit, appearing to transcend race while drawing on histories of racial struggle. The ad also plays with the romance of ruins, but very fleetingly, in a early brief shot of an empty building façade that is immediately superceded by more heroic and positive images. It hints at the struggle-and-recovery story even while it draws on the aesthetic fascination of decay and decline (the contemplation of which has become almost an industry in itself around Detroit).

So there’s lots to question here. But what I really find myself thinking when I watch this ad is, “Damn, these guys are good.” Never mind that it’s difficult to tell what’s an “American” or “imported” car at this point; never mind that the real challenge for places like Detroit is to try to discover what they might become apart from the gigantic industries that dominated them in the 20th century. The ad works on the level of myth, implicitly tying together the histories of labor and racial struggle, industrialization and deindustrialization, Detroit and America, TARP and Toyota, in a way that asserts persistence and resilience on every level. Oh, and it’s selling a car, too. The fact that the car seems like an after-thought only makes the ad more effective. This is the “tragedy with a happy ending” that William Dean Howells famously said Americans prefer when they go to the theater. It invokes loss, but in a way that feels shared and thus ultimately unifying. It is, in short, a Ken Burns film.

If Ken Burns made car ads, he would work for Portland, Oregon-based Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is fully capable of making jauntier car ads; their popular “Hate Something, Change Something” campaign for Honda, aimed at improving the image of the diesel engine in the U.K., was chirpy and upbeat (and wouldn’t it be nice if someone would undertake a similar makeover for diesels in the U.S.?). But they’re also not afraid of sentiment, and they’ve learned a thing or two from Burns about evocative music and how to enlist the gravitas of difficult histories without allowing them to provoke too many questions that might disrupt that bittersweet sense of shared struggle. (Their recent ad for Royal Enfield motorcycles is really a hymn to the city of Chennai, arguably the Detroit of India. Watch it and tell me you don’t find yourself thinking of Burns’s Civil War series.)

Ken Burns moves historical materials into the realm of the mythic, and W+K is moving that powerful combo into the realm of advertising. It’s daunting to think about how to counter that technique. A few comments on the YouTube ad do take a critical tack, but the overwhelming response is emotive and supportive. The ad creates a kind of virtual vernacular memorial space for the slow disaster that is Detroit; people are asserting solidarity and pride in a way that seems directed at the city’s working class but that is really being stimulated on behalf of capital, not labor. What would a counter-myth for a post-industrial, less car-dependent society look like? When we find one, we may do well to take a leaf out of W+K’s book when we're ready to sell the public on it.

[NOTE: This piece is cross-posted from the NCPH blog "Off the Wall." If you feel inspired to comment, please do so over there.]

Neo-bohemia meets living history: the Dodge Challenger campaign

It's hard to know where to start deconstructing the recent "Freedom" ad campaign for the Dodge Challenger.  First aired during the World Soccer Cup meetup between Britain and the U.S., the central TV ad in the campaign is an incredibly rich and mythic little text, with three black Dodge Challengers (the lead one driven by George Washington himself) roaring out of the American mountains to scatter a waiting group of British redcoats.  American flags wave from the windows of the cars, as they did everywhere after 9/11.  A plaintive violin soundtrack clearly evokes the elegiac nationalism of a Ken Burns documentary, while the expressions on the faces of the panic-stricken Brits neatly invert the historical Native American experience of being overwhelmed on the open battlefield by a mysterious and vastly superior technology.  Guns, here, are no match for the internal combustion engine and the awe it inspires--it's "a f***ing black monster," in the words of one of the production crew in the "making of" video.  In the tag line at the end--"Here's a couple of things America got right:  cars, and freedom"--the emphasis is subtly on the word "America," a not-so-subtle poke at non-American car producers (are you listening, Toyota?).   

One of the many things that strikes me about this ad is the neobohemian ethos and location of the company that created it.  Wieden + Kennedy (and oh, how tired I'm getting of that plus sign as a shorthand for corporate hipness) is a design firm headquartered in Portland, Oregon and with outposts in several major cities around the world.  Like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Chevrolet's new ad firm which I wrote about in an earlier post, W+K projects a counter-cultural image  that's very appropriate for Portland's civic image of carefully-nurtured weirdness.  The firm's homepage includes nuggets from its corporate philosophy, ranging from the counter-intuitive ("Hire wrong") to the provocative ("Creativity comes out both ends").  Photos of W+K's personnel similarly emphasize artsy individuality and in-your-face funk.

But in their work for Target, Levi, Chrysler, and others, these creative types are neatly knitted into the circuits of global capital, perhaps in the kinds of ways that Richard Lloyd writes about in his great book Neo-Bohemia:  Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (Routledge, 2006).  Lloyd's book takes a detailed, ethnographic look at the music, art, and design scenes in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, and concludes that big-time capitalism has become very adept at mobilizing the talents and desires of economically marginal artsy workers, allowing for a workplace atmosphere that retains what is bohemian while enlisting the products of these workplaces in its own quest for accumulation.  What I love (in a perverse way) about the Dodge Challenger ad campaign is the way all of this is pulled together with a Ken Burns/History Channel/reenactor kind of sensibility.  It's as though we've reached the point where the forms of high capitalism truly can absorb and hybridize any and all cultural materials, from what I assume are the leftie and progressive artists of Portland to the gun-totin' centrists, conservatives, and libertarians of the reenactor world.  Now, that's an achievement to put fear into anyone trying to take a stand against it!

No room to maneuver

So last week Chevrolet made headlines for its half-hearted attempt to get its employees to stop using the nickname “Chevy.” Noting that the company has “a proud heritage behind us and a fantastic future ahead of us” (standard corporate rhetoric that always leaves out any mention of an inconvenient, contested present), the authors of a memo on the subject tried to make a case that good branding demands absolute—one might say totalitarian—consistency.

A startled worker leaked the memo to the New York Times and there was some predictable public pushback. One online commenter who goes by the monicker “JoeProBono” noted, “The people, not the company called those cars Chevy.” The people having spoken, Chevrolet quickly retracted the directive, which had included the hackneyed idea of putting a plastic can labeled “Chevy” in the hallway to collect a quarter every time the banned term was used (the memo-writers noted that the money collected would be used to fund “a team-building activity”).

There’s lots that could be said about this in relation to heritage, but one thing that jumped out at me was that the brand-alignment effort was one of the first projects of the corporation’s new advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which was recently hired after Chevy severed its relationship with Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald. That relationship had lasted, amazingly, for 91 years, since 1922.

Campbell-Ewald grew up with the Detroit car industry and was responsible for such iconic Chevrolet campaigns as "The Heartbeat of America," "Like a Rock," and "An American Revolution.” And its early history, while perhaps not as familiar, was hugely influential in shaping how Americans relate to cars. In the 1920s, under CEO Alfred Sloan, Chevrolet’s parent company General Motors successfully challenged Henry Ford’s dominance by introducing the idea that people should trade in their cars every few years whether the cars still ran or not—anathema to Ford’s frugal notion of keeping vehicles on the road as long as possible. Sloan, abetted by the growing advertising industry, positioned the GM brands in a way that quickly made annual styling and planned obsolescence the way of the American automobile, to such an extent that it’s still seldom challenged or even remarked on—truly, a legacy that most of us are affected by without realizing it.

I have to wonder whether the firing of Campbell-Ewald had anything to do with the embarrassment that resulted from the agency’s 2006 campaign promoting the Tahoe SUV. Somewhat clumsily embracing the world of social media, the campaign invited people to make their own Tahoe ad using a “Chevy Apprentice” program that offered a set repertoire of video clips and music. 20,000 ads flooded in, including about 400 that took advantage of the relative openness of the format to make spoof ads. One presented the Tahoe as a fetishized god and many referenced global warming (what in the world was Chevy thinking, including an image of the Tahoe on a glacier?).

400 out of 20,000 isn’t many—just 2%. But a 2% opening for challenging the hegemony of the car is still something. And it’s better than taking people to task for uttering forbidden words or trying to argue—as Chevy’s new ad agency Goodby, Silverstein does on its website—that “the sense of craft and surprise we associate with art” is fully compatible with the service of capitalism. In fact, that sense of surprise—the carnivalesque spirit that gleefully subverted the Tahoe ad generator and that creates at least some space for reimagining and revivifying aspects of culture—is deeply antithetical to the kind of corporate thinking that can’t possibly question the bases of its own existence. It’s easy to picture executives at bailed-out General Motors saying, “We desperately need fresh thinking—get us a new ad agency,” but almost impossible to envision them creatively engaging with the histories that got us to the oil- and car-dependent state we’re in now, let alone radically re-tooling for a different kind of future. The pathetic attempt to abolish the use of the “Chevy” name—pathetic because it was so unnecessary and so clearly doomed to failure—is a small but suggestive signal of a tottering industry, led by people who don’t dare utter big truths and so are reduced to little acts of control that are the managerial equivalent of patching holes in a wall that’s beginning to give way.