Targeting the Conformist Contradiction

American ideology after World War II was orchestrated around a consensus view of the good life.³ Promoted by the rising class of psychological specialists in family magazines, by Hollywood in prime-time TV programs, by Madison Avenue ads, and even by the federal government with its subsidies, the good life supposedly could be found in the new planned suburbs. Americans dreamed of owning a ranch home filled with the newest household appliances; the advertised national brands like Coke, Budweiser, Campbells, and Maytag which embraced the nuclear life; and, of course, a new model auto parked outside that reflected the latest in technology and design. Marketers hawked these goods with untethered enthusiasm. Ads uniformly trumpeted the newest, most scientifically advanced products as the only way to truly enjoy the new American lifestyle.

Detroit automobile design and advertising worked lockstep with this myth. Americans would secure a place in the corporate pecking order, and GM, Ford, and Chrysler would supply them the right car. No need to worry about the choice, for Detroit would engineer a car just right for their place in life. As families climbed the social status ladder, General Motors provided vehicles for each step: A Chevrolet begets a Buick, which begets an Oldsmobile, which begets a Cadillac.

To ensure that demand kept up with the burgeoning supply of autos, the industry promoted autos as badges of contemporary style whose value quickly faded. Each model year, manufacturers changed features to make the older design obsolete, pushing it out of fashion so that people would want the new au courant stuff, just like the latest Parisian designs. Auto ads at the time were the paragon of hype. Glamor, status, and masculinity were the goals, and these ideals were conveyed with sexy centerfold shots of the auto, often accessorized with beautiful women on the hood (except for the new “woman’s car,” the station wagon, of course). The design and advertising emphasized ornament: flashy features of the car, the latest whiz-bang technical components, and creature comforts. Consequently, when Americans bought autos, they were quite literally buying a piece of the American Dream as it was then proffered.

Many people, particularly the young, urban, and educated middle class, experienced this consensus mode of consumption as overly scripted and conformist. For people put off by the pressures to adhere to the bureaucratic suburban standards, driving an auto prepackaged with these norms felt coercive. Because autos were one of the most visible symbols of 1950s conformity, the category offered a prime opportunity to target this contradiction as it became acute.

The Volkswagen Beetle was considered one of the ugliest and least reliable cars on the road. While it was cheap, maneuverable, and durable, it also broke down regularly and was very small and Spartan. Above all, the car was considered anachronistic and unattractive compared to sleek Detroit designs. Associations with Nazi Germany—as the auto that Hitler developed as “the people’s car”—still haunted the brand. When DDB took the account in 1959, the Beetle design was already fifteen years old, this at a time when Detroit was making quick and dramatic design changes to its models. By the standards of America’s new good-life ideals, the Beetle failed on every count.

DDB’s campaign flipped this seeming deficit on its head, tacitly implementing the three elements of the cultural brief.

DDB’s Myth Treatment

Consider a classic ad from the campaign: “Lemon” (1960) was a print ad describing the lengths that Volkswagen’s quality control department took to minimize the defects of its cars. The photo of the Beetle appeared to be a product beauty shot typically found in print advertising. But the copy told the reader that this car was defective. The ad’s text was about Volkswagen’s finicky quality-control standards: A Beetle had come off the line in Wolfsburg, Germany, with a blemish on the chrome trim around the glove box. Company inspectors caught it and sent the car back to be fixed.

While the ad was explicitly concerned with quality control, the ad’s subtext aimed squarely at Detroit and American consumer advertising more generally. Against Detroit’s hyping of the style and performance of its technical wonders, Volkswagen had the audacity to profile a damaged car and trumpet the car’s problems. Volkswagen used an ad as a medium to playfully poke fun at the conventional wisdom of the day.

In ad after ad, Volkswagen hawked the Beetle in terms of what textbooks now call functional benefits: good gas mileage, airtight construction, best-of-class engine, great resale prices, and so on. Volkswagen stood squarely for the practical and the frugal. But these strident, pragmatic claims—couched in self-deprecating humor—were also potshots aimed at the puffed-up posturing coming out of Detroit. Volkswagen’s seemingly heavy-handed nuts-and-bolts hard sell was, in reality, a clever means to create Volkswagen as the antihype vehicle—the car stripped bare of all the manipulative marketing machinations that Vance Packard and others had warned about.

Volkswagen offered to its customers a car unencumbered by a Madison Avenue image, in effect telling its audience, “You’re too sharp and too much of an individual to be suckered by mass-marketed images. We just supply you the canvas, stripped bare of any pretense, and it’s up to you to put your identity into it.” DDB’s ads empowered Beetle owners to create their own stories with their cars rather than rely on marketers to do so. And owners did just this. Many treated their Beetle as a member of the family, and gave their Beetle a name as if it were a pet.⁴

DDB’s myth treatment can be summarized as follows: Volkswagen stands against the imposed lifestyles and tastes of mass culture and particularly of Madison Avenue. Volkswagen creates a world in which the customers are intelligent and creative people who can define for themselves what is stylish and beautiful. So Volkswagen acts as a smart-ass friend, offering up the unvarnished truth about how its cars are built and sold.

Earning Authenticity in the Art World

When DDB received the Volkswagen assignment in 1959, the contradictions that had formed in response to America’s new ideology had already stimulated several potent myth markets that organized around populist worlds of the day. While Mountain Dew made use of the hillbilly to address conformity at work, Volkswagen targeted another populist world: the bohemian art world centered in New York City and other large cities to take on conformity in mass culture.

The most acerbic rebellion against the 1950s scientific-bureaucratic ideology came from intellectuals and artists. Social critics like C. Wright Mills, William Whyte, and David Riesman lambasted the new ideology for its lemming-like conformity. Literary critics like Dwight MacDonald fretted about the debasing of high culture. And artists such as the abstract impressionists spawned art movements that posed a direct aesthetic challenge to the new instrumental personalities of the day.

DDB’s advertising quickly captured the imagination of the literati in the major coastal cities. This is not surprising, as DDB creatives hobnobbed in social circles that intersected with the avant-garde. DDB’s key staffers were Jewish urbanites in a heretofore staid business dominated by Ivy League men. With the Volkswagen campaign, the creatives sought to make ads that their art-world peers would find hip and interesting, an absolutely novel approach that violated the customer-centric approaches that ruled then as now. Beetle branding was a concerted effort to create advertising that would actually impress New York’s jaded bohemians, a group notoriously hostile toward Madison Avenue advertising of the day.

DDB’s Literacy. To be perceived as authentic, the campaign had to adopt the art world’s disdain for mass culture and its advertising. Moreover, Volkswagen had to heap scorn on Detroit with the élan expected of a leading member of the intelligentsia. The criticism had to be ironic and under the table, not simply a direct assault. The real trick was to avoid substituting a new, more bohemian-centric image for the car. Bohemians would easily see through this sleight of hand. Rather, Volkswagen ads had to make bohemian insiders conclude that, since Volkswagen was “one of us,” the company didn’t want to push any sort of commodified associations onto the car.

And this is what DDB did. In one seminal early print ad, “Think Small” (1960), Volkswagen attacked the patriarchal undercurrent of the existing hierarchy of auto models, in which the bigger and more expensive the car, the more status the owner has. In Detroit’s symbolic competition, the size of the car and its engine were emblems of manliness. The psychosexual innuendoes were everywhere and rarely oblique. Every year, the stakes were raised. Advertisers even used photographic tricks to make the cars look bigger.⁵

DDB took a different tack. It photographed the Beetle from above and from the dead-square front of the auto, making a very small and rotund car look even smaller, more feminine, and more un-car-like. The declaration to think small was a devastating left hook to Detroit’s macho posturings. In two words and one unadorned photo, Volkswagen mocked the car industry’s ethos and replaced it with a more feminine and bohemian sensibility.

The magic of the DDB campaign was that, rather than promote nonconformist ideals, the advertising spoke from within the bohemian milieu as an insider to comment on what was going on outside in Detroit. There were no smoky underground jazz clubs or poetry readings. Instead of trying to hop on to the counterculture through imitation, Volkswagen acted like a particularly clever and creative insider.

DDB’s Fidelity. Volkswagen never tried to stretch its point of view to reach a broader mass audience. If anything, Volkswagen turned up the volume of its critiques. For example, in response to Detroit’s efforts to get customers to trade up to a more expensive model, Volkswagen chided the audience to “Live below your means.” In ad after ad for over a decade, the brand heaped more and more puns and clever tongue-lashings on Detroit’s propensity to dictate consumer tastes.

This willingness to defend a particular set of ideas, even when they offend a substantial fraction of the buying public, is a consistent thread among iconic brands. The longer Volkswagen stuck with its artworld-influenced values, the more respect it engendered for its commitment to this vision. This wasn’t a company trying to sell a line; this was a committed philosophy that Volkswagen happened to express through a funny-looking car.

The campaign was so compelling in championing the anti-mass-market view that, when bohemia later exploded into the full-blown hippie counterculture, the Beetle was the obvious choice as the standard-bearing vehicle. For hippies, the creative reconstruction of the self—through drugs, philosophy, new living situations, and experiments of all kinds—was the order of the day. Cultural experimentation was in. And the Beetle quickly became the choice ride for these experimenters. The car provided the mobile space where free-spirited people pursued existential experiments. People started calling the car “the love bug,” for its associations with the hippies and their “make love, not war” mantra. A film by the same name became a hit.

Volkswagen didn’t make much money on hippies. Rather, as the hippie ethos became extraordinarily influential and valued in 1960s American culture, the Beetle became a symbol through which other Americans could access the hippie world. The Volkswagen Beetle had become an icon: In condensed form, the auto embodied a creative, sensual, and libertarian sensibility that allowed people who owned one to transcend the anxieties they felt with the bureaucratic-scientific ideology.

As mainstream Americans began to respond to hippie ideas and experiment with them—growing their sideburns, throwing away their bras, listening to rock music—the Beetle was an apt container for these ideas. Thus, when the counterculture became mainstreamed, when it moved from a fringe populist activity in coastal cities and college towns to become the zeitgeist of the times, Volkswagen sales exploded. Now you could drive a Beetle as a sales rep in Peoria and feel as if you were at the center of a whirlwind of cultural change in which all social norms were subject to challenge.

DDB’s Charismatic Aesthetic

Automobile advertising of the 1950s and early 1960s was all hype: glib pronouncements claiming the biggest, shiniest, newest, sexiest, most modern, most sophisticated. Print advertisements were styled to glamorize the auto, like a model in a fashion magazine. Volkswagen offered up the antithesis: an aesthetic that combined a cutting sense of humor with the minimalist aesthetic of high modern design.

Volkswagen print ads became famous for their clever headlines that poked fun at Detroit. But some of the television advertising carried an even more powerful sting. One of Volkswagen’s most provocative ads, “Auto Show,” presented a fictional account of an auto show set in 1949. Crowds packed around car displays of Volkswagen’s competitors: A slick announcer selling DeSoto intoned, “The car of the future, the car everyone wants.” A high-society maven pushing the Studebaker advised, “Long skirts will be the next look on the fashion scene and the Studebaker will be the next look on the automotive scene.” A scientist lectured, “Next year every car in America will have holes in it.” A female a cappella group harmonized, “The Forty-nine Hudson will be the car for you.” Meanwhile, an earnest salesman standing in front of an empty Volkswagen showroom declared, “So Volkswagen will constantly be changing, improving, refining this car, not necessarily to keep in style with the times, but to make a better car.” The Volkswagen on display was identical to previous years. The fashion-seeking crowd ignored him. Volkswagen acted as a dry, tongue-in-cheek muckraker, revealing for all to see that Detroit wore no clothes.

The predominant codes for the print ads—an uncluttered layout featuring a black-and-white “beauty” shot of the car with a short and punchy declarative headline—reflected in form Volkswagen’s high-brow stance against the lowest-common-denominator pitches of its competitors. While other manufacturers used glossy, stylized portraits and bombastic copy, Volkswagen responded with the austere minimalism then found in the form-equals-function high modernism of Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers and Eames furniture.

Volkswagen television spots carried these same aesthetic elements into film. One of the most famous spots, “Snowplow,” told the story of “the car that the snowplow driver drives to work” (in a snowstorm), ostensibly to highlight the Beetle’s better traction resulting from the rear engine placement. But, what struck the viewers was the twenty-five-second shot of the snowplow driver driving his plow through a storm before they heard the payoff voice-over that revealed that they were looking at an ad. DDB had delivered on the same striking, minimalism in a television spot.

American Ideology: Bohemian Frontier

The timing of Volkswagen’s move was fortuitous. A new national ideology was then rising to dominance: the bohemian frontier, an ideal perfectly suited as a foil for Volkswagen’s revival. The United States was rapidly converting to an economy in which knowledge products—finance, software, entertainment, law, medicine, and education—dominated hard goods. This economy placed an extraordinary premium on highly trained and motivated professionals whom labor secretary, Robert Reich, termed symbolic analysts: consultants, engineers, scientists, lawyers, bankers, programmers, accountants, and commercial artists. This new, knowledgecentered organization of the economy brought about a new set of values that were functional to this work. The most valued knowledge work required creativity and nonroutine problem solving. Companies could not approach these tasks with rationalized processes, breaking down work into discrete pieces, and routinizing how it was accomplished. They needed to allow their employees to take a more independent and entrepreneurial approach to their work.

In response, a new tangent of the free-agent frontier formed. The bohemian frontier combined the intensely competitive winner-take-all labor markets of the early 1990s with the artistic inclinations of bohemia. For businesses that required creativity to spur innovation, managers had to weave the values of the artist into the workplace. For inspiration, the myths that formed around the bohemian frontier drew heavily on the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. Once a revolutionary countercultural challenge, the music, dress, and values became the mythic center of a new economic philosophy based on business as creative revolution.⁶ Now, every good entrepreneur—especially those lodged in Silicon Valley—used the 1960s as a battle cry against staid institutions and rigid ways of thinking that kept economic value on a leash. New media like Wired magazine spurred this radical creativity, and the Burning Man Festival became the obligatory pilgrimage for Bay Area techies.

Leading-edge knowledge firms, such as software makers, Hollywood production houses, ad agencies, and other companies that specialized in creative content, began to reinvent work as artistic play. The ultimate work place was now modeled on bohemia: a job where you could arrive when you wanted, in full slacker regalia, and work like hell on projects that you thought were flat-out cool. No hierarchies, no formality. Corporatism was designed out of existence. All hints that the organization had anything to do with commerce were tucked in a back room so that creative employees could pretend that they were inventing for art’s sake. This was business as theater troupe; the conflict between art and commerce had ended and art had won. New-economy workers were to devote themselves to projects geared to their own internal creative and technical standards of excellence (“insanely great,” in Steve Jobs’s words), the passion of which would necessarily drive marketplace acceptance. The new heroes of the bohemian frontier pursued quixotic avocations, but applied their creative wanderlust to capitalist pursuits to conquer commerce with the same enthusiasm found among the Wall Street deal makers of the 1980s.

Targeting the Bobo Contradiction

At the center of this new ideology lived people whom journalist David Brooks has called Bobos (short for bourgeois bohemians).⁷ These were highly educated professionals—upper middle class by conventional definitions, approximately the top 5 percent of the country—people at the center of the knowledge economy. Bobos were entirely wedded to the idea that life was about individual expression and self-actualization, whether at work or at play. They crafted idiosyncratic lifestyles that expressed delightfully whimsical tastes. Life should be a creative and adventurous enterprise. The person was the canvas, and one painted it with extraordinary experiences. Passionate projects were the rule; everything that one did was to be a personal statement.

Although the bohemian frontier ideology promoted work as a forum for individual expression, most of the prior characteristics of bureaucratic life remained in place. Some had even intensified. While upper-middle-class Americans became wedded to Bobo values, the percentage of jobs that actually allowed for the Bobo work utopia—wherein commerce became art and everyday life was a quest for self-actualizing projects—remained minuscule. News reports hyped cool jobs in the commercial arts where the CFO was indistinguishable from the bike messenger. But most Bobos still worked at mainstream companies—as doctors, lawyers, publicists, and bankers. And most of the work at these companies, regardless of relaxed dress codes, became in the 1990s increasingly rationalized as management sought to squeeze higher productivity out of professional-managerial labor. Bobos found it difficult to retain an artistic self-concept when their work life was bent on satisfying customer demands, the assignments were routine, and their roles were often to execute orders handed down to them from above.

Once they committed to a professional career path, Bobos had to compromise the bohemian ideals they had treasured in college. Work suppressed the pent-up bohemian in them. As a result, these tastes took full expression in leisure and consumption, as Bobos grasped for symbolic expressions of the ideals that they no longer had time to actually live in their eight-to-eight jobs. This contradiction created an enormous indie myth market for cultural products that allowed Bobos access to the new bohemian world of the indie/alternative artists: noncommercial musical genres, independent films, artisanal foods, and experiential vacations.

Arnold’s Myth Treatment

Arnold had won the account review with a campaign built around the tag line “On the road of life, there are passengers and drivers. Drivers wanted.” Volkswagen launched the “Drivers Wanted” campaign with seven spots, all of which depicted thirtysomething professionals, trapped by work and technology, who finally experience freedom by driving their Volkswagens fast in the countryside with the music blaring. The driving scenes relied on images styled like an MTV video, depicting rides full of rock-and-roll whims and pleasures. Despite the splashy introduction with substantial media weights, none of these spots caught on.

Instead, the first breakout ad was a promotion for lease packages. Ostensibly a product testimonial for the Golf, “Cappuccino Girl” featured a young woman with abundant energy and apparently working retail accounts for a specialty coffee distributor in New York City. As she traveled through lower Manhattan’s cramped streetscape, she described her duties at a caffeinated pace: “I just moved into the city, right? And I need a very flexible car. So I leased a new Volkswagen Golf. It’s great. I sell cappuccino machines. Sometimes I have to move big things, sometimes I have to move little things. But I always have to move.” She chatted with the staff at a café that she serviced, walked in the middle of a narrow, brick city street, and drove maniacally through hectic urban traffic. As she stashed large coffee urns into the hatch, she said of the Golf, “Everything fits into it.” She aced out another car about to sneak into her parking space and said that the Golf “fits into everything.” To ward off the other car, she leaned out the driver’s window and shouted, “Hey!” Perky as ever, she appeared again on the street and addressed the camera, “I’ve got to cut back on the caffeine.” In the final shot we saw her red Golf, two bikes on the roof rack, speeding out of the city.

Viewers understood that she was a well-educated young woman. She was articulate and confident, suggesting a middle-class upbringing and a good college education, exemplary Bobo material. Her performance hinted that she could easily have landed a much more prestigious and better-paying job, perhaps downtown on Wall Street or uptown on Madison Avenue. Yet instead she had chosen the bohemian life, selling coffee to support her passions.

This unassuming ad struck a chord because it spoke to the key existential dilemma in Bobo life: the devil’s pact requiring that one trade in Bobo ideals—the pursuit of passionate projects and personal creativity—for career success. Here was a woman who possessed the confidence to just say no to the corporate career track. “Cappuccino Girl” portrayed a woman with the guts to reject the professional career path for a downshifted life in the city. She thrived on her noncareer job’s hustle and bustle, its street life. And because it didn’t eat up her time or mental energy like a professional job would, she could focus her energies on other pursuits.

In these thirty seconds, Volkswagen demonstrated persuasively that the brand identified with one of the central anxieties in Bobo life. Yet the world that “Cappuccino Girl” created with her Golf lacked mythic power. Just like the uninspired launch spots for the campaign, Volkswagen’s ads presented the world of driving as throttling a car through the countryside. Since the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s, the image of getting in your car and driving fast out in the country with the rock music blaring to rebel against bourgeois norms has been a cultural constant. Musicians from the Beach Boys to Jonathan Richman to Bruce Springsteen have painted this scene as the quintessential rebellious moment. The exhilarating rush of driving a car fast with loud music was neither an original nor a compelling solution to Bobo anxieties.

Beginning in 1997, Arnold corrected this deficit, creating an entirely original and compelling myth that reinterpreted DDB’s work in a way that worked to resolve the Bobo contradiction. Amid a slew of smart advertising, four ads stood out as exemplars of the new myth.

“Sunday Afternoon.” This ad, also known as “Da-Da-Da,” was one of the most influential ads of the decade. It featured two young men on a Sunday drive, picking their way slowly, aimlessly, through working-class neighborhoods and industrial zones. Though shot in Los Angeles, the spot eschewed the usual television-commercial Los Angeles, the city of tanned, lyposuctioned actors. Instead, the ad showcased sprawling, empty, concrete Los Angeles, the city of empty bus stops, where a car could wait at a stoplight seemingly forever even though no other cars were visible. This was L.A. at noon, but the poor air quality prevented the high sun from inspiring a single shadow.

From the first shot, the hook on which the audience hung its hat was the incredibly droll and facile 1980s club hit, “Da-Da-Da.” The song, by German minimalist popsters Trio, was a jangle of repetitive, percussive tones overlaid with a simple two-chord melody. You could not have entered a dance club anywhere in North America or Europe in the early 1980s without hearing the catchy tune. But by 1997, the tune had disappeared from the radar screen. Consequently, its use was entirely unexpected, neither hip nor retro. Accentuating the flat pictures, the banal but catchy tune provided lackadaisical propulsion.

Riding shotgun, a clean-cut, nondescript African American guy opened and closed his right thumb and forefinger to the music’s beat, his fingers dancing between his eye and the sun. An equally tidy white guy at the wheel ignored him. The next shot showed the passenger mocking a martial arts combat pose with his arms and hands, chopping the air, mimicking a kung-fu movie. The driver still ignored him.

With a single hand, the passenger then manipulated a familiar child’s toy—a small, multijointed figurine of the type that moves when someone pushes the underside of its plastic base. As with the other understated stunts, the figurine’s dance was performed to the music’s beat. The car paused at a stoplight, and the turn signal flashed to the beat. The driver briefly searched for his bearings in the unfamiliar territory.

The men returned to a residential neighborhood, still on a narcotic meander. The driver reached to the dash and with a finger wiped away a smudge, again back and forth to the song’s rhythm. A wide shot showed the red car crossing a bridge over a particularly bleak section of a Los Angeles river, a sun-baked, nearly empty concrete drainage ditch. Slightly smiling now, and ever so gently moving with the music, the passenger popped a bubble he’d blown with his gum, still to the soundtrack’s beat.

They spotted a well-worn green armchair, abandoned next to a trash can on the curb. In the next shot, the chair is in the back of the car, but the characters remained manifestly dispassionate. Suddenly, the driver sniffed a few times, looked sourly at his friend, who got his drift. They glanced back at the chair.

In the next shot, the car pulled away from another curb, revealing the newly abandoned chair. A female voice-over added a proviso to the standard “Drivers Wanted” refrain: “The German engineered Volkswagen Golf. It fits your life. Or your complete lack thereof.”

“Sunday Afternoon” was the ultimate anti-ad. It wallowed in ugliness (the squalid scenery, the smelly chair) and unspectacular events (toys, kung-fu, smudges). The car was driven with no impressive turns or acceleration. Precious ad seconds were “wasted” showing the vehicle waiting at a stoplight. The Trio song became the improvisational skeleton on which the ad’s makers built creative responses to the plain vanilla environment. The passengers were absolutely stoic, thoroughly absorbed by the trivial. They flailed, swabbed, and karate-chopped to the beat.

The ad worked because it presented a novel and compelling idea of what it meant to drive and to be a driver, from a Bobo worldview. Gone was the literal interpretation of driving in the earlier “Drivers Wanted” spots. Now, to be a driver meant that one engaged life as a creative actor, as an iconoclastic producer of one’s own cultural experiences. Whereas passengers were spectators who inertly absorbed mass-media spectacles, drivers were creative people who found all sorts of little pleasures in the world that they happened upon, improvising as they proceeded. “Sunday Afternoon” asserted that, with a sufficiently offbeat worldview and a will to create, one could find many small pleasures in what others found dispiriting.

Volkswagen’s new hero was the creative misanthrope, the outsider who whimsically confronted the regimented world with an idiosyncratic, imagined world of his own. The auto became an autonomous space, free from institutional structures, where the hero could create. Following this pioneering effort, the brand team produced three more ads that embellished this myth.

“Synchronicity.” The sequel to “Sunday Afternoon,” “Synchronicity” again featured two people in a Volkswagen, observing seemingly mundane life around them. In the ad, an early-thirties couple cruised slowly in their Jetta down a narrow, old-quarter New Orleans street. The art direction spoke to the educated, urban creative worker. Both characters were brunettes, both wore only black, and their car was black. Shots alternated between the couple in the car and what was happening on the street.

The driver, a man, popped in a CD, and a slow, hypnotic electronic dance beat began. Thereafter, each action that surrounded the couple was mysteriously synched with the beat: the windshield wipers (it was drizzling), people’s footsteps, a broom that a man pushed to sweep the sidewalk, a yo-yo tossed by a kid leaning against a lamppost. They passed the traffic light, and the “Don’t Walk” symbol flashed to the beat. So did the basketball a kid dribbled on the sidewalk. Periodically, the viewer saw the couple’s faces looking around with increasing bewilderment. Men unloaded a truck, tossed boxes in rhythm with the music. At the corner, the car’s turn signal light maintained the beat until a red pickup truck splashed a giant puddle’s worth of water onto the Volkswagen’s windshield. As though a bucket of cold water had awakened the drivers from their dream, the synchronous effect disappeared. The man said in a flat, straight voice, a conclusion that could have been spoken in an X-Files episode: “That was interesting.” His partner nodded agreement. The car turned right and drove on. The closing shot provided an elevated look down the empty street before them. No vehicles were in sight—certainly no red pickup.

Volkswagen’s new driver sensibility was on parade here. The couple peered from inside their car-as-cocoon to see the world as an odd aesthetic pleasure, which could be had simply by observing and interpreting the seemingly banal activities of everyday life. Volkswagen called out to all those who imagined themselves as an artist. The brand proscribed that everyday life could be anyone’s canvas.

“Great Escape.” The “Great Escape” spot was Volkswagen advertising at its most confident and adventurous. It placed Volkswagen values in an entirely new and unexpected place: a geriatric African American man in an old-folks home. The spot began with a confident, elderly man standing before a mirror in his room and adjusting his tie and hat. He grabbed his cane and stepped gingerly from his room into the home’s institutional corridor. Proceeding spryly down the hall, he tipped his hat to a passing nurse and then, unable to resist temptation, turned somewhat furtively to admire her derriere. Evidently she knew the old codger, because she too looked over her shoulder and shot him a semiplayful scowl. Above reproach for such a minor infraction, he smiled and continued sneaking down the hall until he came upon a horrible sight—a geriatric calisthenics class. He took a quick detour, sneaked past the nurses’ station, and pushed through a door with a sign that he ignored: “Please use the front door.” He stepped into a desert parking lot’s bright sun. A silver Jetta skidded to a stop in front of him. The old fellow beamed recognition. In the car, a young black man looked dead ahead, smiled mischievously, and greeted the fugitive hero, “Grandpop.” The old man climbed in and said with a grin, “Hey Boo-boo. I’m glad you’re on time.”

The car disappeared down a desert highway. Boo-boo opened the sunroof. Grandpop tilted his head back, soaked up some sunshine, and reached his hand out the window to play aerodynamic games with the rushing wind, a playful gesture that obliquely referenced the “Da-Da-Da” guys. With nothing around but the Mojave landscape, the car raced past a road sign that put Las Vegas 134 miles in their future. The old man tossed his hat out the window.

The cantankerous old man, trapped in the old folks home, was an effective metaphor for the Bobo professional suffocating in rationalized corporate life. He was yet another hero who escaped regimented daily life in favor of the freedom of expression to be had while driving. His enthusiastic toss of the hat and playful hand surfing, combined with the subtle intimacy he shared with his grandson, told the audience that a simple act—like sharing a drive through the desert—could be transcendent.

The ad’s soundtrack music was a classic free-jazz composition by Charles Mingus, a renowned jazz iconoclast who invented a textured ensemble style of jazz. Mingus was a fiery personality who lived the bohemian life with gusto. The old man possessed similar tendencies, a mature but still vigorous spirit.

“Milky Way.” The final addition to this quartet, “Milky Way,” told the story of a racially integrated carload of meditative teenagers cruising under a full moon in a Cabrio convertible on lonely rural roads. The images were cold and blue, accompanied by Nick Drake’s haunting ballad, “Pink Moon.” As the teens quietly pondered the moon reflecting off a creek, the fireflies, and the dazzling rural starscape, they seemed to be simultaneously realizing that quiet moments with friends and the moon possessed unseen relevance, emotional gravity.

The kids pulled into the dark driveway of a summer cottage that was alive with a summertime party, but no one got out of the car. They washed each other tenderly with their eyes, trading quiet, subtle glances. None of them spoke. The driver put it in reverse, the turn signal flashed, and they headed back out onto the road. They leaned back and soaked in the moon.

The kids had skipped out on the usual suspects of teen culture—loud music, partying, and sexual conquest—for the simpler yet much more profound pleasure of soaking in a perfect night. Teenagers blowing off what seemed like a cool party for a more soulful and imaginative experience staring into space with the wind in their hair was yet another original context to illustrate that Volkswagen championed personal autonomy and sensitivity to aesthetic experience. In this advertising masterpiece, the automobile again became a medium for the pleasures brought by an aesthetic sensibility and the iconoclasm to break with “normal” behavior. “Milky Way” became so popular that Volkswagen continued to broadcast the ad two years after its original release.

The myth treatment for Arnold’s campaign can be summarized as follows : Volkswagen champions a world of drivers: people who treat whatever mundane situations they find themselves in as a canvas with which they improvise to create personal aesthetic statements, everyday art.

Authentic Populist Voice: The Indie Art World

Arnold located Volkswagen’s new myth in the contemporary incarnation of the artist’s bohemia. As in the past, bohemias had sprung up primarily in big U.S. cities and college towns. At the center of new bohemian life was indie, or simply alternative culture. Indie began in the early 1980s as the American transplant of the British punk counterculture of the late 1970s. The punk movement never caught on as a working-class political expression in the United States, because American class politics was much more reticent. Instead, punk inspired a bohemian underground that simmered through the Reagan years, just as the Beats had in the Eisenhower years.

Because mainstream American life had changed dramatically since the 1960s, the bohemian critique had shifted as well. The bohemia that DDB tapped in the 1960s had stood against the stultifying conformity enforced by mass marketing and corporate bureaucracies. By the 1990s, much of the cultural agenda of the 1960s had been absorbed into mass culture. The market had easily adapted to Volkswagen’s stinging critique—the desire to express individuality in one’s consumption—with microsegmented markets and rebellious brands. But, regardless of the countercultural frosting, work life had become even more rationalized.

So, in the 1990s, bohemia pushed hard against the routinization and passivity of everyday life. Beyond merely rejecting cultural conformity, bohemians pushed a step further, rejecting the idea of being consumers. Indies were well aware by now that marketers used their anticonformist values to hype their brands. And they wanted nothing of it. The new bohemians rejected consumerism as a passive approach to life. Instead, they claimed the role of cultural producers. They were intensely involved in music, film, and other forms of popular culture. Rather than purchase mass-marketed products, they preferred to support their fellow nonconformists who produced music, film, and art at the margins of commerce. They also rescued and reused odd cultural detritus that they found gathering dust at thrift shops.⁸

Central to the indie sensibility was a mix-and-match eclecticism: the more obscure and absurd, the better. Alternative culturalists began rummaging through artifacts of post–World War II United States. Thrift shop fashion quickly spread to kitschy, mid-twentieth-century interior style. Interest in less-known music genres spread to the odds and ends plucked from the twenty-five-cent bins: Hawaiian guitar music, 1950s country, show tunes, torch singers, Latin jazz—the list is as deep as the bin. Playing in a band was cool, part of everyday citizenship in the indie world. But really impressive is taking up something that hasn’t been explored before—Japanese cartoons, tube amplifiers, Kurdish folk songs—and digging into these cultural materials with the never-sated enthusiasm of a 19th century aristocratic amateur.

Arnold’s Indie Literacy. In the second year of the “Drivers Wanted” campaign, Volkswagen established its indie bona fides with a spot that had little impact on the mass audience, but won considerable credit in bohemian circles. “Speed Racer” featured the GTI in a take-off of a 1960s cartoon . Speed Racer, the cartoon’s earnest young race driver protagonist, lamented that his car, the “Mach 5,” broke down before a race. He believed his competitors had sabotaged it. As a replacement, he was given a GTI. He and his cohorts were surprised at the GTI’s speed and handling, and they won the race. This silly, stilted spot ended with the theme song from the original cartoon.

Set against the conventional show-the-metal car advertising of General Motors and Toyota, Arnold’s choice to animate an ad was audacious, reminiscent of DDB’s communication-code jabs of the 1960s. The choice seemed to be a spoof, denying serious interest in promoting the GTI. And the particular choice of “Speed Racer” was a mighty nod to indie tastes. The Japanese cartoon had been dubbed into English and had played on afternoon television for a generation of American kids. In the 1990s, Japanese animation had become quite popular in the commercial arts scene, creating a cult following for this animated Japanese cartoon, which even played on MTV.

Aside from “Speed Racer,” Arnold established Volkswagen’s literate understanding of indie culture through purposely eclectic and discriminating music choices as soundtracks for the ads. The Nick Drake song “Pink Moon,” which set the mood for “Milky Way,” is a case in point. The ethereal melancholy ballad was ideal for the ad, but it also performed important work as a means to build authenticity. Drake was a mysterious figure in the British folk rock scene of the early 1970s. At an early age, he perfected new detuned guitar chords and a haunting vocal delivery. He made a few albums, and then, a depressed and possibly schizophrenic individual, he died of a drug overdose in 1974. Ever since, his reputation in the indie underground grew. In 1999, when Volkswagen chose his song, Drake’s music had just been released on CDs. Using the Drake track in a creative and appropriate way, as the centerpiece of a moody ad that fit the song, gave Volkswagen tremendous authority as an authentic indie voice. Volkswagen’s tastemaking capability was demonstrated by the tremendous sales of Drake CDs that followed the broadcast of the ad. “Pink Moon” sold more copies in three weeks after the ad’s first broadcast than it had in the previous twenty-five years.⁹

Most of Arnold’s musical choices reflected this kind of discriminating taste. Occasionally, however, Volkswagen ads purposely dipped into songs of dubious merit. These odd choices were also subtle nods to the indie sensibility. Just like the indie bohemians cruising the bins at the Salvation Army, Volkswagen confidently played songs that were decidedly unpopular. In addition to “Da-Da-Da,” another spot infamously featured the Styx song “Mr. Roboto Man,” a schlocky AOR hit by a 1970s band whose albums most discerning music fans would be ashamed to admit they stored in the attic. Such confidently oddball choices demonstrated that Volkswagen inhabited the indie world rather than pilfered from it as an outsider.

Arnold’s Indie Fidelity. Iconic brands demonstrate their fidelity when they are willing to take chances to uphold the populist ethos. Sacrifice of this sort is one of the most effective vehicles for earning authenticity. Brands that claim an affiliation with a populist world, but then behave in ways motivated by commercial rather than populist interests, are perceived as shallow and opportunistic.

Volkswagen’s “Driver’s Wanted” spots consistently stood up for indie values. For example, Volkswagen earned authenticity points when it launched “Sunday Afternoon” on the famous episode of the television program Ellen, in which Ellen Degeneris came out as a lesbian. Many advertisers had backed out of this show fearing that audiences might infer that the advertised brands condoned lesbianism. The publicity around the ads that did run made the program a huge media event, and eyes were not only on Ellen but also on which advertisers were willing to be associated with lesbians. In this charged atmosphere, Volkswagen won many new admirers, just as it made enemies among social conservatives.

The Ellen placement also precipitated an unintended reading of the ad that further added to its indie credentials. In the gay community, “Sunday Afternoon” was interpreted as depicting a gay couple. These additional connotations only served to enhance Volkswagen’s credibility among the very prodiversity bohemians.

Volkswagen’s most successful performances of its fidelity have come from how it presents its vehicles in advertising. Auto industry conventions have always been guided by the assumption that ads persuade when they glamorize the auto. Showing off the graceful good looks of the car is supposed to convince prospective owners that they will be recipients of this borrowed glory. Nodding to the DDB campaign, Arnold’s ads also pushed against this convention. For example, one ad showed a Golf with a dirty mattress tied to the roof.

Volkswagen’s most audacious act of fidelity came in an ad broadcast at the 2000 Super Bowl, the first time the automaker had placed a commercial on advertising’s biggest event. “Tree” was a static spot, even for Volkswagen. Most of the sixty seconds featured two men standing around a big maple tree, occasionally throwing various objects into the tree to knock out what could be a ball or Frisbee. A disheveled kid looked on curiously. Finally, the man knocked out his target with a stone. But, rather than dislodging a toy, he had succeeded in freeing a full-sized GTI hidden in the branches. The car landed with a massive crunch, and as the GTI came to rest, leaves and small twigs fell onto it. The thrower’s friend offered the punch line as sarcastic advice: “Next time, don’t let the clutch out so fast.”

“Tree” fared poorly according to the USA Today poll. Industry observers called the ad a failure, citing Volkswagen’s lack of Super Bowl savvy. Just the opposite was true, however. Volkswagen pulled off the ultimate symbolic coup. In the most-watched media event in the world, in which all advertisers were more than willing to bend their strategic goals to play to what the audience would rate as most entertaining, Volkswagen refused to play this game and instead offered an ad that was defiantly Volkswagen. “Tree” was Arnold’s rendition of “Lemon,” the 1960 print ad for the Beetle. The brand declared its allegiance to indie values by showing the company’s best performing auto in the least flattering manner, and by refusing to play to the mass-market production values demanded by the event.¹⁰

Arnold’s Charismatic Aesthetic: Independent Films

To make “Drivers Wanted” work, Arnold had to invent a charismatic aesthetic that would overcome the indie counterculture’s inoculation to mass marketing. Rather than the formalism and wiser-than-thou humor of the Beetle ads, “Drivers Wanted” instead opted for an aesthetic centered on the conventions of art house independent films.

In the mid-1990s, the auto category provided plenty of low-hanging fruit for a brand looking to develop distinctive production values. Governed by the product-centric logic of conventional brand management, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota all produced predictable ads governed by the only rule that seemed to matter to auto executives: Show the metal. The ads emphasized cars over their passengers. There were images, but no characters or plot. Instead, the auto was a hero looking for a story, portrayed majestically on a winding Pacific Coast road or in the middle of an amazing, mountainous wilderness. The ads were lushly produced; glamorous shots put the auto in its best light.

Volkswagen produced ads that turned this aesthetic on its head. The spots emphasized character and plot over steel. Volkswagen displayed its cars as they would have been shown in a film, as if they were a prop in a movie rather than the stars of ads. The brand team developed characters worthy of an intelligent film-goer’s time, in scenes selected to support interesting story lines rather than to show off the car. The ads used intriguing, off-kilter characters and abandoned the glib acting style common in advertising. Evidencing the automaker’s distinctive approach, “Milky Way” received a nod as one of the Top Ten Films by an influential member of the bohemian press, the Village Voice.¹¹

Another good example is a series of four spots Arnold commissioned from independent filmmaker Errol Morris to direct for Passat. Morris was one of the most respected indie documentary directors, famous for The Thin Blue Line and the quirky Pet Cemetery. Famous directors, including those of an indie persuasion, had been employed many times before in advertising. What was impressive, Arnold demonstrated the interest and knowledge to use Morris properly. Rather than grab a famous director and trade on his credibility, Arnold instead crafted ads to fit within the director’s oeuvre, much as Apple had done years earlier with Ridley Scott for the ad “1984.” Using the tag line “Our Secret’s Safe with You,” the brand team developed a set of confessional stories that allowed Morris to deploy his trademark eccentric interviewing style. In his movies, Morris had coaxed eerily uncomfortable deadpan confessions from his subjects, in which they matter-of-factly described their lives’ odd and intimate details. Each ad in the series also used the curious music that Morris favored: Composed to make the audience expect that something profoundly interesting was about to be revealed, the clarinet and Theremin music sounded as if it were stolen from an old silent film or prewar traveling magic show. Oddly framed camera angles decomposed the subjects by putting them anywhere except in the center of the frame, where the eye usually expects to find them.

Most ads use metaphors of some type, but they are often clichés, analogies that beat the viewer over the head. The Volkswagen aesthetic was built on a literary style that used challenging metaphors, devices that forced the audience to engage their imaginations. Consider, for example, “Dawg,” an ad produced to drum up anticipation for the new Jetta and Golf models that were due out in 1998. A shaggy mutt entered an informal dining room and sat beneath the table on which whirred a desktop fan. For a long pause, all that the audience heard were the fan’s blades and the dog panting. Unsatisfied, the dog hopped onto a dining chair and sat so that the fan blew directly into its face. Volkswagen finally provided the punch line to resolve the mysterious story: “Get ready, the new Volkswagens are coming.” Volkswagen’s aesthetic exemplified the ethos of creativity and spontaneous improvisation that its myth championed.