Late one night a frustrated female ad copy writer came up with an alternative to a proposed print ad for the 1967 Mercury Cyclone GT. As you can quickly get by reading the ad (shown below), it never came close to running. Compare this ad with the one that made it through all of the corporate committees (go here).
NOTES:
This post is a parody. For further discussion about what is real, go here.
ADVERTISING & BROCHURES:
- autohistorypreservationsociety.org: Mercury Cyclone (1967)
Wow! Talk aboht full instrumentation. It even has a speedometer! So the Cyclone didn’t have independent rear suspension?
Well, I did take some liberties in order to make the point that Detroit could have offered a car like this in the late-60s. And men may not have necessarily been the only interested buyers. The muscle car fad was arguably more of a guy thing but a real GT could have had broader appeal.
Ha! You almost had me going, except when I got to the ‘standard radial tires’ then I realized it was just another ruse. I quite like the ad better than the “man’s car” version anyway!
Well, it beats the Apperson appellation for the 1906 Apperson “Jack Rabbit” race car, called and advertised as the Apperson “Big Dick”! Now that’s a “man’s car”!
Yesterday, I was browsing a 1966 Ford Wagons brochure online and was surprised to see that both power front disc brakes and radial tires were listed as options. This made me want to check if the “man’s car” offered those options as well. In the 1967 Mercury full-line brochure, the options list did not include radial tires but power front disc brakes were standard as part of the Cyclone GT Performance Group option, among other features. PFDB were noted as standard equipment on the Marquis, Brougham, Park Lane and Colony Park, too. FoMoCo seems to have been offering disc brakes and radial tires well in advance of GM. I thought it most ironic that you could get PFDB on a 1966 Ford Country Squire but they weren’t even offered as an option on Oldsmobile’s 1966 Toronado (a car that truly needed them).
The options page of the Mercury brochure further condescends to women with this opening headline: “A man’s choice of options… designed with a woman in mind”.
Despite how we might view this today, there has long been a pervasive discriminatory attitude towards so-called women’s cars (that still persists) such as Subaru Outbacks and VW Cabriolets to name just a couple. Feminine continues to be perceived as weak in Detroit group think and that is why there are so few attractive cars and an overabundance of overwrought, over-aggressive, downright ugly cars, trucks and SUVs on the road. Every prospective new vehicle buyer is shown in ads to be a warrior of some sort. Roads are to be conquered and plundered. Even an obvious grandmother archetype who bids farewell to her old VW Golf in a new video campaign suddenly turns into a Formula 1 racer behind the wheel of her new VW EV. While I appreciate that women are astute enough to want more than mere transportation from their vehicles, I find it ludicrous that advertisers are portraying females as “power women” with a get-of-my-way-I’m-in-my-Jeep attitude. Obviously, and sadly, IMO, it seems to be working. And, so even though car companies and their ad agencies wouldn’t dare promote a new vehicle as a “man’s SUV/truck”, the implication is still there, stronger than ever.