'Lemon' Would Never Get Approved Today

If I told you you could spend just 2% of what your competitors are spending but have 10x the effect, would you want that?

According to Dominik Imseng, author of “Ugly Is Only Skin-Deep”, the advertising budget for the VW Beetle in the late 1950s-early 1960s was $600,000, just 2 percent of what Detroit was spending on its campaigns. And though the data escapes me, apparently a study was done in the 1960's where the VW ads got about 10x the bang for the dollar spent as GM got for their ads.

An incredible ROI. But it's unlikely "Lemon" or any of the great VW campaign ads would be approved today.

The general tendency among marketing people (especially clients) to want everything to be positive, happy, and solved, all the time would prevent a headline that suggests something negative about a product. Negative emotions and controversial unpleasantness will permanently stain your brand, the thinking goes.

But marketing’s bias against negativity ignores the human bias towards paying attention to negativity. Our brains have been hardwired through evolution to focus on the negative. Prehistoric humans had to pay special attention to threats to avoid danger and increase survival rates. Those who were more attuned to danger (negative stimuli) stayed alive longer.

Of course, this is the genius of the VW ads, they treated people like they had the brains enough to get past the negative headline. Our car is small, slow, and ugly... was contradictory to the hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing messages about style, power, and status Detroit was putting out at the time. Through wit and honesty VW invited people to read on to the body copy, where the positive attributes of the car were invoked... its economical, easy to park, lasts longer, needs less maintenance, and holds its value.

"Love it or hate it, the fact remains we've been talking about it for the last fifteen minutes." says Don Draper to the agency team about the "Lemon" ad from VW.

Draper hated the ad. But he understood the purpose of being interesting.
Volkswagen ads were worth thinking about and easier to remember because they made the audience work to understand them. Whether people liked them or not, the ads were unforgettable.

Imseng believed Carl H. Hahn might have been the best client an ad agency has ever had because of his no-nonsense approach to advertising. "Why pay for ads if you don’t have something relevant to say? If you don’t want to get noticed? If you don’t want to get talked about? Hahn realized that advertising is an extremely powerful weapon—if you have the guts to use it."