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planned obsolescence, Teague observed that during the 1957 buyers’

strike that sank the Edsel, Americans who had “cash and credit both went on buying other things.” Of the things they bought most of, he writes, they mainly bought “small foreign cars as fast as they could get delivery, and especially they bought the little Volkswagen, about the smallest,most economical,sturdi- est, and least pretentious of the lot . . . the Volkswagen scarcely changes its body style from one decade to another.In 1959, a total of 600,000 foreign cars [were] sold in the U.S.A. . . . [at the same time] exports of American cars . . . dropped sadly.”

In the year that tailfin reached their peak of extravagance, the Volk-swagen represented a sensible lack of pretense and a return to the same no-nonsense practicality that had put America on top before Sputnik. Of the 600,000 foreign cars that Teague tells us were sold in the United States in 1959, 150,000 were VW Beetles. As early as 1956, Road and Track had marveled at the little car’s ability to gain “an unmistakable wheel-hold in the garages and hearts of the American car-buying public.” They also wondered, “How did it happen? Espe-cially with practically no national advertising? . . . Probably the simplest [explanation] is that the Volkswagen f lls a need which Detroit had forgotten existed—a need for a car that is cheap to buy and run, small and maneuverable yet solidly constructed . . . utterly de-pendable and troublefree.”

Volkswagen’s lack of advertising did not last long. In Germany, VW was expanding its Wolfsburg plant facilities and would soon be

producing more cars than ever before. Realizing that the sixmonth waiting list for Beetles in America indicated a tremendous potential market,Volkswagen appointed Carl Hahn as head of the newly created Volkswagen America in 1958.One of the firs things Hahn did was to hire the tiny advertising fi m of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach.In 1959 DDB was ranked eightieth among all American ad agencies. The cre-ativity of their campaigns, however, had won them a lot of industry at-tention. In their earliest meetings with Hahn, partners Bill Bernbach, Mac Dane, and Ned Doyle decided that Volkswagen’s unsung popular-ity was a natural reaction to Detroit’s excess. They recognized that the Beetle was, as the cultural critic Thomas Frank would later observe,

“the anti-car, the automotive signifi r of the uprising against the cul-tural establishment.”⁴³In their war against the Detroit “dream cars,”

DDB decided honesty, irony, and humor would be the best way to ex-pand Volkswagen’s American market.

Other car ads of the late 1950s included beautifully air-brushed pho-tos and mellifluous y vague promises like: “Filled with grace and great new things,” or “You ride in a wonderful dream car world of space and light and color.”⁴⁴By contrast, the Volkswagen campaign has been de-scribed as “the firs time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.”⁴⁵Because the product they represented was the polar opposite of Detroit cars, DDB posi-tioned themselves directly against the idealizations of mainstream American car advertisements. Early DDB Volkswagen ads used un-doctored photographs and ran single-message sales captions like: “It won’t drive you to the poor house,” “Don’t let the low price scare you off,” or the completely subversive “Live below your means.” Their suc-cess was palpable. In 1959 Sales Management observed that “the aver-age American may be confused by Comets, Corvairs, Darts, Falcons, Hawks, Larks, Ramblers, Tempests, Valiants . . . But chances are he’ll know one little bug by its changeless shape, and even know that its en-gine is rearward and air-cooled.”⁴⁶

As DDB’s campaign for Volkswagen evolved, it fell right in with the emerging cultural idiom of cool and hip. Planned obsolescence soon became one of the primary targets of this idiom. DDB took death-dat-ing to task in one of the best promotional campaigns in advertisdeath-dat-ing history.⁴⁷What they accomplished was really the firs new develop-ment in marketing since Sloan’s annual model change more than thirty years earlier.Essentially, Bill Bernbach, a master advertising strategist, solved the problem of overproduction and under-consump-tion by encouraging Americans to buy their product as an expression of their rejection of consumerism. In so doing, he established a con-tinuous marketing trend. In 1961 a now-famous DDB ad ran the fol-lowing caption under a photograph of a VW beetle lit by several spot-lights on an otherwise darkened showroom f oor. The single picture simultaneously introduced readers to “The ’51, ’52, ’53, ’54, ’55, ’56,

’57, ’58, ’59, ’60, and ’61 Volkswagen.”⁴⁸DDB’s point was obvious:

Volkswagen did not make superficia model changes.

For the next decade, DDB elaborated their anti-obsolescence theme in print ads that attracted twice as many readers as other car ads, and also—according to Starch Company readership studies—scored signi-ficant y higher in readership surveys than any of the editorial content in the same magazine.⁴⁹By the mid-1960s American magazine read-ers preferred a really good VW Beetle ad to almost any feature article.

The ads reached a level of popularity that would not be matched until Budweiser developed its Super Bowl ad campaign in the 1990s. Ad-vertising historians Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalyrymple de-scribed the attraction of the DDB print ads this way: “People stopped at the ads . . . read every word and were able to recall the illustration and the point months after publication.” A famous VW ad made its anti-obsolescence point by running extreme close-ups of very minor features of a Beetle’s body under the caption “How to tell the year of a VW.” In the same ad,the box for the 1957 photo is blank and contains only the words “No visible change.”⁵⁰

My favorite is the 1961 caption that Bill Bernbach personally con-vinced Volkswagen to run at the bottom of a blank page. Instead of the usual photograph, DDB ran arresting uncluttered white space in a full-page magazine advertisement that probably cost the company

$30,000. The caption made its anti-obsolescence point succinctly, al-though it also provoked surprised reaction at the parent company’s of-fi es in Wolfsburg. “We don’t have anything to show you in our new models,”read the DDB copy. Of course, the ad then went on to tell you why: Volkswagen did not believe in superficia styling changes to the body of the Beetle; anything new and noteworthy happened inside the car.

Gradually, by opposing the idealization and absurdity of Madison Avenue’s consumer paradise (and especially the self-serving strategy of planned obsolescence), DDB put forward its own style of advertising as an antidote to the American establishment. Following the Volkswa-gen campaign, for a while, Americans bought fewer goods to keep up with the Joneses. Increasing numbers of Americans bought products like Volkswagens and, later, much more expensive Volvos “to demon-strate that they were wise to the game” and, ironically, “to express their revulsion with the artifi e and conformity of consumerism.”⁵¹In this way, Madison Avenue cleverly made the values of the countercul-ture accessible and acceptable to middle America, and then pressed them into the service of consumerism.

HATLESSNESS AND THE PEACOCK