The best car ads ever | Axon’s Automotive Anorak

Aware of my Double Chevron soft spot, a French friend recently sent me some photos she’d taken of a series amusing local poster advertisements used across France for the domestic market launch of the innovative new Citroën Ami electric city car, backed-up by fully integrated marketing campaign with print ads and a social media programme, all bravely poking tongue-in-cheek fun at this diminutive new model.

Citroën has long been something of a master at self-deprecating advertising, using witty visuals and Herge’s familiar Tintin cartoon characters to promote its 2CV range in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, for example. During the 1980s, Citroën’s UK distributors created some memorable and amusing comparison ads for the charismatic 2CV form of basic, honest transportation, contrasting the simplicity of the model to a camel, followed-up by a ‘No wonder it’s so reliable. There’s nothing to go wrong’ promotion, praising the car’s lack of complex features, such as wind up windows, a radiator and cruise control.

It built on this amusing comparison theme with further print ads, wryly celebrating the 2CV being faster than a Ferrari (‘Travelling flat out at 71.5 mph, a Citroën 2CV will easily overtake the Ferrari Mondial travelling at 65 mph’) with ‘As many wheels as a Rolls-Royce’ and ‘More room than a Porsche 911’ added in for fun too. It also ran a ‘What’s yours called?’ ad, listing other car makers and models, such as Seat (‘Yes, we’ve got four of those as well’), Polo (‘We’ve got a hole in the middle too. It’s called a sunroof’) and Nissan (‘Nice huts, but will they last as long as a 2CV?’).

For its more ‘extravagent’ dual-tone 2CV Dolly derivatives, Citroën took its self-deprecating advertising a step further, depicting a customised 2CV fitted with spoilers, stripes and alloys, claiming ‘We couldn’t make it faster’, along with a spoof eight-door limousine stretch, saying ‘We couldn’t make it any roomier,’ and up on bricks without wheels ‘We couldn’t make it any cheaper’, with the punchline being ‘So we painted it,’ illustrating the three special two-tone colour schemes available for the limited edition model. It also ran an ironic black and white ad to promote its latest Dolly colour schemes, plus a tortoise gradually evolving into a 2CV!

Imitation supposedly being the sincerest form of flattery, Chinese car giant Geely recently ran a marketing campaign in India for its anonymous GC7 saloon, directly aping the precise style, wording and comparisons of the classic 2CV ad with a Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Porsche, right down to claiming ‘a complete set of fully round wheels’, as per Citroën GB’s mid-‘80s copy.

Possibly inspired by their British colleagues, the self-effacing stance now being taken by Citroën’s French HQ marketing team to promote its unconventional new Ami is equally as droll and refreshing in this current age of glib, uninspiring, boring and predictable new car advertising. Generalising, this marketing now tends to be uniformly worthy but dull, being instantly forgettable with generic politically-correct beautiful people driving their perfect families on empty scenic roads in soft focus to an unremarkable musical track with a Hollywood movie voice over man delivering the all-important ‘the new Aardvark Mark 3. Motoring re-invented’ marketing strapline at the end.

The Citroën Ami’s humorous self-deprecating promotional approach in France is as distinctive and original as this new electric commuter car, with its mockery of marketing (conceived my Citroën’s creative communications agency, Buzzmann) spread over huge advertising hoardings, bus stops, print media, online and the Brand’s busy social networks in selected French cities.

The photos I was sent show a set of eye catching and witty advertising billboards for the new Ami, with comical captions and messages (understandably in French), loosely translating into ‘The worst thing is not that its doors are mounted upside down. It’s that we do it on purpose’ (referring to the micro Citroën’s unusual asymmetric opening doors), ‘If you really want 300 horsepower in Paris, go to a hippodrome racecourse’ (the electric Ami producing a mere 5.5kWh), ‘It looks like a toaster. That’s why you can buy it at Darty’ (a popular French electrical chain store). Other ads continue ‘Curiously, our designer has still not been fired,’ (mocking the car’s boxy design), ‘Not only does the car of the future not fly, but it doesn’t have power assistance either’ and ‘Always zero F1 victory. Always zero CO₂ emissions’ with ‘Impress your great, great-great grandchildren’ referring to the electric Ami’s future-focused zero C0₂ emissions.

Read our list of the eight best car advert stunts.

A comical commercial tone isn’t just exclusive to Citroën within the automotive sector though. Citroën’s PSA/Stellantis Group partner, Peugeot, produced a memorably amusing broadcast and print promotion for its popular 206 hatch two decades ago, called ‘The Sculptor.’ In this whimsical promotion a Hindustan Ambassador-owning Indian motorist dreams of driving a modern, stylish Peugeot 206 that he has seen in a crumbled colour magazine advertisement. As his ‘dream car’ is unavailable in India, he reshapes his faithful Hindustan in a backstreet workshop with a hammer, plus some help from an elephant sitting on the Ambassador’s bonnet, to closely resemble the Peugeot. The ad closes with the driver and his friends proudly driving through the local streets to an upbeat Indian tune in their fake 206.

Another more recent Stellantis partner, Fiat, also produced a humourous TV ad for its 500L, featuring a mature ‘Casanova’ in urgent need of his blue Viagra tablet when a lady friend comes to call. And this from the same company that boldly placed ‘If you think the front is ugly, wait ‘til you see the back’ window stickers on its Multipla press launch cars! 

Other notable and appealing TV car ads that charm and delight, rather than generate tear-inducing laughter, include the light-hearted (but calorie-laden) Skoda Fabia ‘cake car’ from 2007, Volkswagen’s ‘Changes’ forlorn Golf drivers keeping the keys to the car in the 1980s, Renault’s celebrated Nicole and Papa series of ads for the original Clio, plus Citroën’s own CX (with Grace Jones and a giant revolving model of her head from which the avant-garde CX2 emerges), plus its memorable dancing Citroën C4 Transformer. Honda’s infamous ‘Cog’ advert, (once voted the best British TV car ad) stretched to a record two minutes long in its full form, with the public encouraged by Honda to send off for a DVD of the full ad, such was its popularity. Cog reportedly cost £1 million to make, but allegedly generated £400m in additional sales revenue for the Japanese brand.

Further afield, rib-tickling small screen adverts have included Subaru in the late 1960s, promoting its tiny 360 to dubious American buyers a little too honestly, highlighting it as being cheap and ugly, whilst in Australia Saab placed its New Generation 900 on a long aircraft runway, empty, except for a row of ‘witches hat’ traffic cones. Pleasingly, rather than predictably slalom between the cones at high speed as expected, the Saab drives straight into them, each one making an amusing pinging sound as it is flung off the bonnet of the robust Swedish hatch.

In print and poster form, advertising humour has been just as prevalent. To revive the Mini’s flagging popularity after the launch of the larger Austin Metro in the early 1980s, BL (or whatever it was known as that week) successfully ran a marketing campaign, using a few familiar celebrities (including Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes and Twiggy), as well as a series of wry copy (‘Nips in and out like Ronnie Biggs’, ‘Better in jam than strawberries’, and so on), closing with a ‘Happiness is Mini shaped’ strapline.

More recently, Daihatsu employed a sexist, cringe-worthy but playful headline to promote its small six-seater Hi-Jet MPV. It read, ‘Picks up five times more women than a Lamborghini, with the main text claiming the Daihatsu to be ‘the ultimate “babe-magnet” with its six comfortable seats and two sunroofs “for when things really get hot”!

As if to disprove the old cliche that the Germans lack a sense of humour, Audi promoted its third-generation 100 Avant under the simple heading ‘My other car's a Porsche, but today I'm in a hurry,’ with Porsche itself stating that the 928 was ‘About as fast as you can go without having to eat airline food.’ Sehr gut!

The ultimate smile-raising German car promotion has to be a long-running 1960s campaign for VW in the USA, however. Using witty headlines and simple, attention-grabbing black and white studio imagery, Volkswagen’s American advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, famously adopted an original, bold, intelligent and tongue-firmly-in-cheek approach to advertising the small, bug-like Beetle to US motorists more favourably disposed to driving huge, soft, heavy gas-guzzlers. The American VW advertising derived humour from the sometimes ‘negative’ quirky traits of the Beetle, camper van and other models, highlighting the unusual features of the vehicles to help sell more examples. As an enthusiastic and admired American motoring journalist recently put it, the idea of a company showing their new car crushed into a cube or calling its little moneymaker a ‘lemon’ is unimaginable now.

Of course, not all attempts at humourous marketing have worked well for car companies, with Vauxhall’s flawed VX220 roadster campaign, using middle-aged Welsh comedian Griff Rhys-Jones dressed as a boffin scientist in his old Y-front underwear, backfiring on the company and seriously tarnishing the image of this exciting mid-engined sportscar for some time. Thankfully, Vauxhall later revived its reputation with its witty, entertaining and memorable ‘little dads’ broadcast ad for its new Meriva and Zafira MPV people carriers.