PastImperfect/early car advertising:Car advertising has both moulded and reflected public demand, public taste and the manners and mores of an age. From the simply misleading pronouncements of outright charlatans to the brilliant lyricism of brilliant copywriters like Ned Jordan, car advertising has been used by motor manufacturers to sell their products to the public.
In the early days of car advertising - and motor advertising is just about as old as the car itself - there were two very distinct forms.
What might be called the 'Nuts and Bolts' approach gave a very factual account of what the car on offer might be able to accomplish, and the 'Art Nouveau' usually took the form of an often somewhat esoteric illustration in which the motor car was usually attributed the power to accomplish amazing feats.
Notable also in those early ads is the often surprising lack of knowledge by the artist of the precise 'look' of the advertised car.
Such inaccuracies were presumably acceptable, because cars were still such a rare sight that few were likely to question the accuracy of the illustration.
By the 1910s there was a dramatic shift in the content of these advertisements.
Now the motor car was portrayed as the means to greater happiness, either by ownership or by simply driving it.
Speed was already a major component of these advertisements and was seen as a strong selling point. The arrival of the aviation age also provided early advertisers with something else with which they sought to link their products and aircraft feature strongly in many motor advertisements of this era.
The romance of motor racing also featured strongly although only one early racing driver, the Belgian Camille Jenatzy, seems to have been sufficiently well-known to feature in motor advertising.
Jenatzy's demonic appearance - he sported a red goatee beard and was known as The Red Devil - was the basis of a long-running series of advertisements by electrical component manufacturer Bosch.
The 1920s was the golden age of car advertising with superb artists such as Rene Vincent producing some very fine work for the major manufacturers.
By the end of the decade, cars and lifestyle were indistinguishable and motor advertising held out an often exaggerated promise of a better life.
Perhaps the greatest car advertising of all was that produced by the Jordan Motor Company around the years 1922-25 for their Playboy car.
It is even said that the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather, made all their apprentice advertising executives learn it by heart.
Here is a short flavour:
Somewhere west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting,
steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that's a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome.
The truth is - the Playboy was built for her.
Now those were the days.