





That's not to say the past is without its own faults, though. Case in point, the odd SAAB piece shown below that features“The most intelligent car ever built,” portrayed as a human-car hybrid snatched from David Cronenberg's wastebasket of rejected body horror sketches. Very hard to believe more than one person signed off on that, and yet... But even that bizarre piece of media is at least fun to make fun of. The Chevy-type stuff just makes you lose faith in the average IQ of the world.





If you were to somehow sum it all up, it's pretty easy to see why the brochures and ads and all manner of promotional material from the 20th century are more entertaining and as close as you can get to objectivelybetter than what we're stuck with now.
It's certainly got a lot to do with the nostalgic power of the cars featured in them, but the whole presentation is just more fun, more brash, more playful, and often more artistic. We've flipped through our virtual stack of old magazines to pull out a few of our favorite print ads for some inspiration, but we want to know: what are your favorite, or most memorable, classic automotive ad campaigns? There weren't as many television spots in the 1970s and 1980s as there are today for obvious reasons, but there are still some gems likeFiat's old stunt-based series to be found too.














