John Singleton, “A Parade of skills … but not of Products,” Advertising & Newspaper News, October 17, 1969, p. 4. Republished in These Thoughts are Genuine (Kensington, NSW: Blake & Batcheler, 1971), pp. 24-25.

The Tortoise Beats The Hare. again.

If there is such a thing as a regular reader of these jottings then he could well be excused for believing that we feel the creative function is relatively unimportant.

Certainly we do believe that it is totally unimportant unless it is pointed dead on target.

And unfortunately we are of the substantiated opinion that much of today’s advertising has no target at all.

Time and time again we see advertising people parading their skills rather than parading their product.

And in any case we believe that advertising plays such a small part in the marketing of most products that it should only rarely be isolated for special accolade.

But then occasionally we see the great advertisement. The very great advertisement. The one that can only be the product of a fertile mind seeking every opportunity for its client’s product.

Now you would be a very strange advertising person indeed if you were not aware that a thing called the Bathurst 500 was run recently.

It is a pretty important occasion in the car selling business.

We happen to know that the most important thing in the Australian new-car-consumer-mind is “performance”.

And here in an immense blaze of publicity is an opportunity for car manufacturers to have all their performance “claims” ratified as fact.

As far as I know no one has made an estimate of the money pumped into the preparation of cars and drivers and promotion for the Bathurst 500. But I imagine the bill would run in the millions.

Holden don’t officially support competitions but they won last year. It would be less than wise to suggest they’d like to finish anywhere else this year.

Ford have their biggest, fastest models ever.

And Ford do support competitions.

They wish to win as much as Holden, maybe more. And they don’t care who knows it.

Every make and every model is there. Bigger, faster, flashier than ever before.

There are lap records being set and much talk of all the things that car people talk about.

The papers are full of it. The TV broadcasts it.

And in the field is one tiny, lonely Volkswagen.

Now it is a long time since the days of Jack Davey and “Gelignite Jack” and the battered, mud spattered VW trooping in winner after winner of the old Redex trials.

And what a VW is doing in a race such as this God only knows.

VW is the guts car.

It stands by you. It doesn’t let you down. It is the sort of car you should marry.

It is the sort of car you’d want alongside you if you had to go to war with a car.

But it is not the sort of car that you want to race 500 miles around the Bathurst circuit with the big boys.

A normal advertising copywriter would look at the situation and wish the car wasn’t in the race in the first place.

A good advertising copywriter might cross his fingers that the car would finish and make capital out of it.

You know the sort of stuff: VW reliability proven again.

But only a very great advertising mind would come up with the advertisement that VW did in fact run.

There is a lot of talk going around today about turning disadvantages into advantages.

Claude Hopkins did it for his brown salmon with the claim that “our salmon don’t turn pink in the can”.

Mary Wells did it with Benson & Hedges 100s.

This one has to be in the same league.

Volkswagen loses