It’s a fair argument that the golden age of automotive advertising spanned the decade from 1955 to 1965, but although some of the flash and color was lost in the ensuing years, advertising had to adapt to a changing world. In this case, it was the world of March 1977.
Those who collect old paper already know the score. Big, lush ads could be found in big weekly (and monthly) magazines such as Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, and Holiday. Enthusiast-oriented ads could be found in the car publications: Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Road & Track, and Hot Rod. National Geographic is also, however, a place to find car ads you might not see in other formats. They’re a little smaller than the other big-name magazines, but they’re also easy-to-find; National Geographic placed all advertising in the front and back of the magazine, assumedly to avoid interruptions to their lush photographs and extensive articles. The paper is high-quality, too.
There’s no sugar-coating the truth: ads of the 1970s were drab shadows of their former selves. But everything had changed in the 1970s, everyone seemed to feel as if they were forced to grow up. Baby boomers were becoming responsible adults, the first oil crisis threw a (temporary) wet rag on conspicuous excess, the Clean Air Act and looming fuel economy standards made cars cleaner and more efficient, and styles changed. For example, look at the seats in the GMC Motorhome shown above in all their plaidness. The big GMC was a big seller; almost 13,000 were produced between 1973 and 1978, and many are still being enjoyed today. It’s probably most famous for its powertrain, a “Unitized Power Package” from the Oldsmobile Toronado, which powered the front wheels. Most motorhomes had the Toronado’s 455, but sometime in 1977, the engine was downsized to the small-block 403.
Was this the best looking RV ever made? I think it was.
Something you might notice about advertising, 1977-style, is that there are so…many…browns. I’m not sure an ad could get more dull than this one, but at least it has the neat “Datsun Saves” slogan at the bottom. While the 810 was missing the purposeful styling of the 510, it did have Datsun’s excellent 2.4-liter straight six under the hood, which produced 127 horsepower and could be had with a four-speed manual. Datsun was quick to point out the Z-Car connection, and Paul N. discussed a Road & Track test of just such a vehicle here.
This is frankly one of the more baffling ads I’ve seen. It’s a pretty image of the efficient Civic CVCC in profile plying the highways of America under a blazing sunset (or sunrise), and the message is clear: The Civic was the first car in America to earn a 50-plus mile-per-gallon highway fuel mileage rating from the EPA.
What’s not so clear is the context, “The March Honda.” The days of the month are listed across the bottom of the page, but there is no discussion of why that is.
One might assume that the EPA fuel mileage test lasted for a month in 1977, but no, it didn’t. The test protocol is listed above, and it was run on a dynamometer over a simulated 7.5-mile course for city ratings, and a simulated 10-mile course for highway ratings. Is Honda claiming that you can drive a month on a tank of gas? Paul N. wonders if the ad’s placement in the March issue has something to do with it. Whatever the case, it’s certainly an oddball of salesmanship.
As an aside, mileage suffered greatly with “Hondamatic”: the highway rating dropped from 54 to 37 when compared with the five-speed-equipped Civic.
Less concerned with mileage was Cadillac, who was celebrating its successfully downsized line of DeVilles in 1977. This ad is a clever play on its heritage, with the car parked in front of a swanky hotel (I’m not sure which one, in this case). The tagline would not be valid for much longer: “Leave it to Cadillac to lead the way.”
The ad harkens back to some of Cadillac’s campaigns from the late 1950s, showing their new models parked in front of America’s ritziest establishments. In this case, a 1957 Cadillac is parked in front of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This isn’t really a car ad, but rather an ad for Caterpillar road machines. Like the ad for the Civic, the intentions aren’t very clear. Two guys from a rural area have stopped in the road, as you do, to have a conversation about deteriorating infrastructure, namely bridges, in their county. They know that something has to be done, but they also know that there is no money to do it. In the meantime, roads and bridges will continue to get worse. (This all sounds very familiar, by the way. History truly repeats itself.)
Caterpillar says:
Replacing all 34,000 deficient bridges at one time is not realistic. At the same time, modernizing key country roads and bridges must have a high priority in the nation’s overall transportation program.
Caterpillar Tractor Co. makes machines that build roads, pipelines, railroads, airports, and waterways. We believe good rural roads are vital to our National well being.
So….in essence, “We need to fix the rural roads! Caterpillar makes equipment to fix them!” OK. How do you connect the dots, Caterpillar?
By 1977, it’s a miracle that Chrysler still had an advertising budget, but here’s a dreamy, foggy scene of a Newport parked in front of a wraparound porch at a weekend get-together where everyone’s dressed in white (Of course, there’s a brown cast from the brick driveway over everything). A Chrysler tradition for well over a decade (by 1977) was advertising how cheaply you could “step up to Chrysler” by purchasing a Newport. Unfortunately, the Chrysler nameplate was becoming somewhat tarnished; it didn’t have quite the cachet it once did.
Dubiously reliable equipment didn’t help, although that didn’t stop Chrysler from bragging about it:
Chrysler Newport also gives you the engine that thinks. The exclusive Lean Burn Engine. It contains a small computer that constantly monitors engine conditions and adjusts ignition timing with split-second accuracy. The result is more responsive acceleration and performance.
I’m sure many Chrysler owners of the late-1970s and early-1980s would disagree.
Finally, we have an entry from one of the decade’s most popular vehicles, the last of the second-generation Monte Carlos. Aside from being very Earth-toned, this ad feels like an awkward pep talk from the uncle you see once a year.
When a car makes you feel good about its looks, that’s styling.
When a car makes you feel good about yourself, that’s character.
What? Does the car have character or do I? Either way, the Monte Carlo sold itself in 1977, to the tune of over 411,000 units. That’s getting into Silverado territory today.
No, none of these ads will stir the heart like a Fitz/Van Pontiac ad from the sixties, and some of them ask for a little more critical thinking than an ad should require, but as a portrait in time from my birth year, it’s an interesting sociological document…with character.
Related Reading
Curbside Capsule: 1977 Chrysler Newport – A Tested And Trustworthy Mopar (by me)
The (Mostly) Black-and-White World of 1964 Car Enthusiast Advertising: Performance Over Practicality (by me)
Would love to have a ’77 or ’78 Fleetwood Brougham. My father had a ’78 Sedan DeVille and it was a great car for the time.
Effortless cruising and good torque from the 425 V-8. Reasonably sized compared to the ’76 leviathans.
I love this feature – National Geographic is a great source of ads, both automotive and otherwise. My parents subscribed to National Geographic when I was a kid, and I remember scouring the ads immediately when I saw every issue because there were great ads in those issues that I never saw anywhere else. It seemed like there was a Cadillac ad every month.
I can shed a little bit of light on the “March Honda” ad. It was one of a series of month-related ads that Honda published in the winter and spring of 1977. But… like you noted, there’s no clue as to why the month was noted, or what its relevance was. Unless there was some kind of introductory ad that I missed, all the “month” series of ads just appeared to be regular ads, with a random month in the big print, and the month’s calendar along the bottom. Below is a “February” Civic ad.
Oddly, the Civic sunset (or sunrise) ad that you featured was also used in January. As far as I can tell, these ads were published for January through April. Maybe by then, someone at American Honda realized the theme wasn’t resonating with audiences.
Thanks for bringing that up, Eric. Paul and I had a short conversation about that ad, and without the surrounding context of other issues, it was tough to make heads or tails of it. Like you said, even in context it wasn’t very clear.
Doing a bit more digging, it seems that the ad campaign lasted longer into the year than I first thought. Still a bit puzzling, though:
Not all that puzzling, to me anyway. I worked with a lot of ad agencies and sometimes the creative teams come up with ideas that are a bit out there. I can see the idea of running ads with a calendar theme in the corresponding monthly issues of certain magazines might have seemed sort of new and different, but yes, it doesn’t come off as very effective. Someone should have questioned it.
Perhaps the idea was based upon the pin-up girls of yesteryear?
“Yeah – like they can cut the ad out and pin it on the wall for more free advertising.”
“Yeah – lay off the acid, man.”
I’d forgotten about those ridiculous V8-vents in the Civic.
I keep a keen eye out for NG magazines for this reason only. They have supplied me with approximately 95% of my AF/VK Pontiac ads and a surfeit of other US marques. I’m not sure if it was just the overseas editions, but something changed in the 1970s and most of the ads were for Mercedes-Benz and Fiat instead. Thanks goodness it was after Pontiac stoped using the world’s finest car ad renderers.
As a kid, I always thumbed through the beginnings and ends of NG magazines for the ads. And ads like these of the 70s were what made me seek out the bolder, more colorful ad campaigns of the prior decades. I am still fatigued by earth tones.
That Chrysler ad is maddening. The big Chrysler actually sold quite well in 1977. But I remember reading the ads, thinking “Yes, we know you can do great engineering. Can you actually build cars that look good and run right?” And as someone who would eventually own a 1977 Chrysler with Lean Burn, I could have done without the electronic gimmickry.
For a while I had inherited a trove of National Geographic magazines from a relative; I kept them in my classroom. They were probably from early to mid 70s. I do remember that King Tut magazine; I would have been in junior high. One time I did a lesson analyzing the ads. There were lots of ads for camera equipment, hi fi stereo, cars, etc. I distinctly remember an ad from some sort of national sugar council encouraging families to feed their kids more sugar for quick energy. (At least it’s not high fructose corn syrup?) Times have changed.
True story.
I was a 10 year old kid in 1977 and my love of Cadillac’s started a year before. I loved to look at and read the ads from those days and with the 1977 Cadillac’s being all new, I hunted them down. Remember, this was before homes had internet, cell phones or other stuff to make things more easily accessible. By this time, I had started a collection of print ads for any Cadillac or Lincolns. My best friend’s mom had a collection of NG magazines and being young and stupid, my buddy found that those magazines would often times have pictures of nude people. So we would go through them looking for the nudes, although my interest was more the ads of cars of all types. This is something we would do for months, and I began to carefully rip the Cadillac and Lincoln ads out to keep and my buddy didn’t care as he was too busy looking for the nudes. Well one day his mom walked in on us with her stacks of NG magazine and my small pile of ripped out car ads. She was NOT happy with us!!
She did let me keep the car ads, to which I was thankful. But I don’t think she knew just how many I had ripped out over the months. To this day, I still have all those lovely ads stored away and I have that exact blue Cadillac ad from 1977.
As a kid I remember a handful of nudes in the magazines as well. But they were always of people with super weird cultural traditions and body decorations. So it was more like looking at a textbook.
My grandma received Nat Geo magazines when I was a kid in the 80s, and the beautiful car ads were my go-to thing.
A few years ago I saw a Craigslist ad for a CD set of many decades of Nat Geo magazine. $50 was worth it to me, but it was 2 hours up north and nasty winter conditions so I passed. Not too long after, not sure if it was the same one, but I saw I the same thing in the local resale for like $5 so I nabbed it. I put it all on my hard drive for easy access. So when I get in the mood I can go down memory lane and revisit all the stories and car ads.
I suspect CC contributor Jim Grey is now trying to track down the bridge in the Caterpillar ad.
The hotel in the Cadillac ad…the ca. 1977 entrance to the St. Francis…Union Square/Powell Street…San Francisco.
Thanks, Chuck!
Neat if not great auto adverts .
The nekkid females in the NG goes back a long time, in the very early 1960’s my best bud came running up to me excitedly saying “there’s nekkid boobies in the NG magazines in the study room !” .
Interesting for a moment only because as stated they were not beautiful women for the most part .
I remember those “Lean Burn” controllers were mounted in the plastic air cleaners, we replaced lots of them after the police department’s cars were allowed to sit and idle with the AC on ‘MAX’ for hours at a time .
-Nate