On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 12/1/2021Bikes and Cars…a Different Spin
In 1957, Vance Packard wrote a book called The Hidden Persuaders. It was about the world of advertising and how it plays such a huge role in influencing and orchestrating our lives. It was a best-seller at the time and pretty much required reading for any thinking person who wanted to be au courant in the modern world.
Today it’s safe to say that most thinking people would take it for granted that advertising not only works overtime to persuade us to buy stuff or vote for the right candidate but is also an arbiter of cutting-edge style and even cultural mores. Just consider what we see over any given day on television. While conservative politicians are still wringing their hands over same-sex marriage and dog whistling about creeping tides of racial infiltration, the TV ads are showing us happy gay couples with kids, interracial couples, mixed-race families. Men kissing…Egad! Just a few years ago, such images would have been shocking on network TV. Now they’re only remarkable for having become so commonplace. The advertising execs didn’t wait around for the approval of some red-state curmudgeons to get on board. They simply gave us the world as it is. One ad campaign at a time, they not only reflected the world as it is, they validated it and made it mainstream.
In that same vein, think how many times you see ads that feature some sort of cycling. Not ads for bikes but ads for something else but featuring bikes. Could be some racers out training behind the car the agency is marketing. Could be folks unloading mountain bikes from the roof of some SUV. Could be a middle-aged couple riding cruiser bikes along a path while the voice-over promotes some unpronounceable pharmaceutical we’ve never heard of. It may be that we still get buzzed by retrograde knuckle-draggers now and then while out riding, but overall, bikes are considered cool. I would say cycling is trending except it’s been trending—staying trendy—for about a hundred years. It has never really gone out of style. When the marketing mavens want to add a little style or sporting cachet to the product they’re promoting, some cycling iconography is an easy way to do it.
I was reminded of this while browsing through old car ads (something I like to do now and then). The images are always trying to tell us a little story; to concoct a narrative we, the prospective buyers, will believe in and buy into. The ad people want to place their cars in some larger context they think will appeal to us. That sometimes leads them to include bikes in their illustrations because bikes are popular and accessible and speak of play and freedom and robust good health…virtues and values they hope will adhere to their cars. The bikes are invariably portrayed in a subsidiary role in the illustrations. That makes sense. They aren’t selling the bikes, after all. They just want to gussy up their cars by association with the carefree sportiness of bikes.
To be sure, bikes are not the only sporting icons to lend their luster to the marketing of cars. Down the years, most other recreational activities have had their moments in that role, especially the sports that were deemed to be the most fashionable in any given era: skiing, tennis, golf, any sort of boating, anything to do with horses. But bikes have always been in the mix, as they are in the real world. The account executives on Madison Avenue get it, even if some of the drivers we encounter on the back roads may not. Cycling sells.
So, in this last month of the year, with holiday color and glitter on all fronts, I decided to depart from my more conventional biking topics to entertain you with some “shiny-brite” images showing bikes in car ads down the years. (Click on the thumbnails for larger images.) My collection here—just a small sampling—ends in the mid-‘60s because that’s about the time most of the ad agencies were switching from hand-painted illustrations to photography. As an illustrator myself, I have a special fondness for the old paintings. It’s true that photography and television (or video, generally) can do things the old illustrations couldn’t. But they cannot match the charm of the old paintings created by some of the best artists of the day. Big, full-page illustrations in magazines like Time and Life and Look, printed in lush colors on glossy paper, were where you were going to get the biggest bang for your advertising buck.
And you have to remember that, up until maybe the end of the ‘50s, TV ads and even photography in general were still fairly unsophisticated and crude. No amount of Photoshopping could make a grainy photo as attractive and evocative as a well-done painting. And anyway, they didn’t have Photoshop back then. Any touch-up was done with airbrush or paint brushes. (This is a clumsy segué on my part to take this slightly off-topic for one paragraph.) When I was an aspiring graphic artist in high school, I was given a personal tour of the art department at one of the largest ad agencies in Portland, where I watched guys a few years older than I beavering away with their airbrushes to tidy up ad photos. My guide—a friend of my father—was the head of the agency, Homer Groening. Homer is the father of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. And yes, Homer’s wife is named Marge. Homer was not the clueless doofus that is Homer Simpson, but rather a very savvy and successful advertising executive.
That’s where I have to leave this fantasy world and ride on into the present moment, a time where we see bikes in TV ads and print ads all the time. We may not even notice them all that often…that is, not consciously take note of them. But they’re out there in ad-land, the same as interracial and gay families, subliminally reminding the world that bikes are a part of our lives; that they’re fun and green and good for us. The road bikes and mountain bikes and cruiser bikes in ads for cars and drugs and munchies may not be what’s being sold, not directly. But they’re selling themselves as they roll past us on the TV screens or on our monitors or in our magazines.
I suppose a politically-correct scold might point out that all these images are somehow bad because they represent the horrid old auto industry and all it has done to pollute our little planet and, further, that the illustrations promote or celebrate an upper-crust snobbery. The ads almost always invoke some image of the good life…the hoity-toity, high-end swank of wealth and privilege. (Who would market their product with images of down-market scruff and squalor?) But I think of the lives of those many talented and hard-working illustrators and hark back to the painters and other artists of past times who got paid by some corrupt pope or decadent duke or fat cat burgher to create everything from a Sistine chapel to a Pieta. In this sense, the car companies and their marketing budgets are just another take on the art patron paradigm. They paid the bills for a lot of good artists so they could do their lovely images…so they could live and survive creating fun and interesting art. Thank goodness such artists exist in every generation and thank goodness someone has the money to pay them so they can keep doing what they do.
And thank goodness there were art directors and illustrators whose world views embraced cycling and incorporated it into their hidden persuasion. Art imitating life.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net