Automotive Advertising Used to Follow Political Processes

There was a time when automotive advertising involved political-type campaigns of nay saying and mudslinging against the competition.
You always know when it’s time for new leaders and civil servants to be elected in your area or in the country. This is when the signs and posters show up all over the place and you see advertising on television and hear it on the radio that has one candidate trashing another in a variety of ways. While this is acceptable for political campaigns, it’s not what we expect for any other advertising, but that wasn’t always the case.

The Punches Weren’t Pulled in the Past

Today, car sales and ad campaigns are designed to highlight the positive of a vehicle and leave out the negative of others. We’ve seen many different celebrities being hired to show us vehicles and brands and let us understand what we can love about the models being driven in the commercials. This has become the most effective way to have the drive we may want to enjoy and the right way for automakers to appeal to the customer base of today. Even so, there was a time when automakers loved to take punches at each other and show them off in short videos.
Back in the 1950s, Chevrolet certainly wasn’t pulling any punches at all. Today we see German luxury brands take shots at each other, but there was a time when this was the norm. the Chevrolet production studio was more than capable of tossing as much “shade” as they could at Ford and letting us know what their thoughts about the brand that competed in the same class and market was deficient in. The video below shows you some of the ways Chevrolet was working to toss a negative air toward their chief competition, which is certainly something you wouldn’t see or hear today.

There Wasn’t Any Mercy Shown

In 1952 Chevrolet released a video that spent a full twenty minutes meticulously disassembling every one of the Ford features that Ford was showing off with pride. Different ways the bowtie brand worked to negatively showcase Ford includes claims that more than 70 percent of the people who would buy a ford in 1952 would have to deal with outdated, inefficient, and overpriced engine technology. This was only one of the ways the Chevrolet team found to dunk Ford and show to the world the ways the brand wasn’t going to be able to deliver.
The video below is certainly one that you’d never expect to experience today, but it does give you an idea of just how hard the brands fought against each other in the earlier days of the automotive industry. This was an ad that was designed to not only showcase the benefits of the 1952 Chevrolet Bel Air but to also to tell us what the negative aspects of the Ford brand was at the time. Check out the video below and be amazed by what advertising was like in the 1950s as the different brands competed against each other.