Selling cars is one of the biggest businesses around and it has to be said, advertising is a fundamental part of this. There have been some wonderful TV campaigns over the years promoting some very famous brands: Honda's quirky ads particularly stand out in recent times. Their almost esoteric content suggests more about the brand and its image than any substantial details about the vehicle. Local car dealers and their press and radio advertisements, on the other hand, can be a very different beast altogether.


Some of the more common things you will find when local dealerships advertise is a tendency to go for the familiar, or to be more precise, their wholly unembarrassed use lots of clichés. Pushing large sales campaigns during holiday periods isn't necessarily an uncommon thing - indeed, it makes sense - but how many more Halloween themed advertisements can you stomach that feature a picture of a brand new Vauxhall Astra surrounded by a rather randomly placed pumpkin or ghost (or both)? The headline no doubt says something like "No tricks, simply treats!" and has run in various guises every October for the last ten years.

This kind of lazy advertising could no doubt be blamed upon the advertising agency producing the artwork. But as someone who has worked for an agency such as this for many years, I believe the responsibility is steadfastly the fault of the car dealers themselves.

Having little imagination for what makes a good advertisement work, they revert to type and go with what they know. Placing a lot of cars on a page or listing endless amounts of used deals for a reader to peruse is certainly a useful way of letting the potential customer know what you've got to offer. But there lies the rub. A car dealer wants the customer to know what stock they've got - and they're definitely not interested in any kind of clever or intellectual campaign.

This practical approach certainly works, though. The success of the Autotrader magazines proves that quantity, not quality, sells cars in a practical sense. The arty, cleverly branded advertisements work to place the car in your consciousness, generating a feeling of who should drive the vehicle, of what it stands for. But, when it comes to actually buying a car, it's the cheap and cheerful that seems to sell. And in a way, as much as they're easy to mock, advertising clichés such as "The Big Easter Egg-stravaganza" certainly raise a smile.

So the next time your attention is caught by an advertisement for one of your local car dealers, and maybe you see a used Honda at a reasonable price, ask yourself a question: what really attracted me to this advertisement? Was it the brand, the car or this cheesy advert? Maybe, it's simply all three.