A message about heart and authenticity. Below is a story and excerpt from Peter Coughter’s The Art of the Pitch (which I highly recommend to read.)
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The Volkswagen of America pitch was the most memorable pitch I have been involved with. Arnold was the dark horse. We felt like underdogs.
They were coming into town to visit the agency, and we thought we would make a video. Alan and I went down to the bar below the agency and the first thing we wrote down, on a napkin no less, was that on the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. We wrote a bunch more lines, which eventually became the TV spots, pretty fast.
That weekend we drove around in my Jetta with my friend Joe Fallon. We basically just acted like we always
do, having stupid conversations in cars. Not slick at all.
We cut that footage into whatever else we could find and put music we liked on it the night before they arrived and played it for them the next day. We learned later that we basically won the account right then. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time and spent the next month trying to get all clever. Ron Lawner kept pushing us back to the spirit of the video. He
wrote the words “Drivers wanted” and stuck it up on the wall, and that was that.
On the road of life, there are passengers, and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.
Kristen Volk, the planner, recovered fast when the power went out because someone kicked the cord out of the laptop or something. She knew her stuff, so it didn’t matter, and I think the clients appreciated the human aspect of that. We all just spoke from the heart, the words just poured out. We were a team that spoke in one voice. We really did believe that we had captured the spirit of VW. Still, I couldn’t believe it when Ron called me and told me the news.
It was the largest account ever won by a New England ad agency at the time. -Lance Jensen, ecd hill holiday.
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#vw #vwbeetle #volkswagen#arnoldboston #lancejensen #authentic#heart #tagline