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From “Like a Rock” to “Holiday Ride” Chevy’s marketing has consistently delivered memorable moments for decades.
Creating Connections
Advertising, and especially television ads, come in two basic flavors. There’s the hard sell where a specific product is highlighted and extolled. And then there’s the soft sell where the emphasis is on building a brand image in the minds of consumers. Through the decades, Chevrolet has proven adept at both forms with some of their most memorable falling into that latter category. Below we look at some of the best, most compelling, and oddest Chevy commercials going all the way back to the 1930s.
Camaro Volcano
The 1966 debut of the Camaro was indeed a big deal for Chevy. It seems even bigger in retrospect once you’ve seen the commercial that presented this now classic muscle car to the world. “Volcano!” thunders the voice over as a volcano erupts on screen. Cut to rocks and boulders smoking in the foreground as the Camaro emerges from the ground like an automotive Prometheus, “Alive!” proclaims the voice over, “Camaro, the fiery new creation from Chevrolet!” Cue pyrotechnics worthy of one of those bad ‘60s Godzilla sequels where he fights a giant moth/robot doppelganger. The voice over extols the Camaro’s many extraordinary qualities like a 350 V8, rally stripes, and hideaway headlights. The ad closes with a shot of the Camaro speeding down a dirt road as the volcano continues to erupt in the background. The ad’s over-the-top verve makes perfect sense once you’re heard how Chevy’s Pete Estes once explained the Camaro name as “a small vicious animal that eats Mustangs.” Roll your eyes if you like, the track record and status of the Camaro proves bold and brash works, no matter how cringe worthy.
1959 Chevys with Pat Boone and Dinah Shore
Presenting Chevrolet’s new line of cars for 1959, Dinah Shore and Pat Boone mix song and smiles for a surprisingly effective pitch. Shore and Boone note in their song and dance that the Chevy’s are all-new two years in a row. And indeed, we see in the background a new 1959 Impala with its signature sideways teardrop taillights looking quite spiffy. They waltz over to the new Bel Air, where Boone notes the car’s new wraparound windshield with forward leaning A-pillars, “a real eye opener.” Even the new ’59 Nomad station wagon gets a nod. It turns out this wasn’t Dinah Shore’s first Chevy endorsement either, we found her in Chevy ads going back at least to 1953.
Bonanza Endorsement
Celebrity endorsements have always been a big deal in advertising. One of the most natural came in 1964, when Dan Blocker, aka Big Hoss on the popular television show Bonanza, did a spot for Chevy trucks. This ad features a number of interesting trucks including a C/K Series fleetside pickup, heavy-duty V8, and a cabover cement truck. The Corvair van and light pickup also get nods as well. Blocker does a better than average job as a pitchman and the ad benefits from his demonstrated talent for confidently leaning against objects.
Heartbeat of America
The 1980s saw the rise of the music video and advertisers were keen to pick up on the new medium’s visceral qualities. Dovetailing with Chevy’s “Heartbeat of America” slogan was song by the same name which forms the basis for this 1988 spot. Like a music video, the edits are quick, images flash momentarily on screen as vague impressions agglomerate into a thick pastiche of Americana. There’s a Corvette, American flag background, guy jumping in like he’s vaulting a subway turnstile. There are women waving tiny American flags. Nighttime traffic headlights streaking through darkened streets. Silhouetted figures (a trio of guys in cover-alls, a young couple) run in slow motion toward the screen. There’s a beauty queen in a parade, a Chevy van in a car wash, kids pushing a toddler in a toy Corvette with a Corvette in the background, there’s a Harlem Globetrotter, the Vegas strip light up at night, and the Santa Monica Pier’s neon sign. More traffic at night, more happy families, more Camaros. It’s a lot. The “Heartbeat of America” is roughly 120 beats per minute and clearly over caffeinated.
Like a Rock
Among celebrity car endorsements some are better than others. The above Dinah Shore and Dan Blocker are two competent if not particularly memorable examples. One of the more indelible is Chevy’s “Like a Rock” series of truck commercials set to Bob Seger’s song of the same name. A lot of these include shots of Chevy trucks driving through mud in slow motion or being loaded with logs or sandbags while Seger croons in the background. The wistful tone of the song and golden hour rays of a setting sun create a sense of nostalgia even as the ads feature new trucks. The phrase “like a rock” connotes toughness and dependability, which works perfectly for selling pickups, though I’m more of a “Night Moves” kinda guy, myself.
1935 “The Balance Car” News Reel Ad
From 1935, “The Balanced Car” dates back to before the advent of television and was shown in movie theaters alongside news reels and cartoons. The ad shows its age not just by the cars seen in its footage but even more so by the structure of the ad itself. Modern, made-for-tv commercials are quick and to the point. In contrast, “The Balanced Car” is more like an infomercial with a nearly ten-minute runtime. And it doesn’t even utter the name Chevrolet.
Instead, the narrator lays out an extended argument on the attributes of automobiles (“comfort, safety, economy, speed, and power”) and notes how most vehicles necessarily make sacrifices of some sort. Comfort is ample in an ambulance, but “who wants to ride around in an ambulance?” The coach-built RV built from a bus is supremely comfortable, complete with a running shower, but there you’d be “sacrificing speed, pep, and economy.”
Race cars have speed but lack safety. Here the ad shows period racecars veering off a closed track as well as Sir Malcom Cambell’s 1933 and 1935 Bluebirds, the cars that set the world land speed record. Footage includes Cambell’s 1935 run at Daytona Beach where he set the land speed record of 272 miles per hour, powered by a 2,300 horsepower Rolls-Royce V-12 engine. The narrator notes such a car requires “special tires, special carburetors, special everything” as well as a crew of highly paid mechanics. Clearly speed comes as a cost. Other examples included tanks as possessing power but little practicality, and small British roadsters like the Austin 7 Special are declared small, unsafe, and weak (needing to be pushed uphill).
After nine-plus minutes, the audience is clearly wondering, what’s the solution to highly specialized cars, or in the narrator’s phasing “freak” cars. The ad closes on a 1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe, which parks, with a family exiting its elegant, rear-hinged doors. The narrator says what people really want is “a balanced car,” as the camera zooms in on the Chevy bowtie logo embosses on the car’s hub cap. The ending card proclaims the preceding advertisement has been “A Jam Handy Picture.”
Holiday Ride
Flash forward roughly 90 years and you find the opposite, an ad that appeals not to logos but to pathos instead. Carefully laid out argumentation can’t hold a candle to pulling at an audience’s heart strings as “Holiday Ride” proves.
In it, an old(-ish) farmer approaches a barn on his property and hangs a new Christmas wreath on the door, removing an old one. Inside, we see a vintage 1966 Chevy Impala gathering dust just like the old, desiccated Christmas wreaths he’s left piled on a work bench. We see flashbacks of when he gave the car to his young wife juxtaposed with the farmer crying in the front seat of the old car.
The ad cuts to a shot of the farmer’s adult daughter looking on thoughtfully as she watching him exit the barn. She recruits the help of a few car buffs at a local auto show who help secretly help refurbish the car. Presumably, a year passes before dad returns to the barn carrying a new Christmas wreath only to find a replacement already tacked to the door and inside his wife’s Impala painstakingly restored. As he and daughter get in for a first drive they exchange teary reminiscences about mom, all the plaintive notes of a guitar, the tune echoing the work of Ennio Morricone in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Like “The Balanced Car,” “Holiday Ride” is a branding exercise rather than focused on a particular model, and as such it proclaims Chevrolet is a brand worth sentimentalizing (even if the commercial toes the line between being earnest or maudlin).
