Brand
Volkswagen ads
Volkswagen's best ads, from DDB's "Think Small" and "Funeral" to "The Force": honest, witty work that shows rather than claims.
All ads
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2014Eyes on the Road
A text message that crashed the car.
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2011The Force
A pint-sized Darth Vader tries to use the Force on the laundry machine, the dog, a sandwich — and finally, apparently, on the family Passat,…
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2009The Fun Theory ("Piano Stairs")
Volkswagen Sweden turned the stairs at Stockholm's Odenplan subway station into working piano keys, filmed commuters abandoning the escalator, and…
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Small but tough. Polo.Volkswagen2003
Cops
A squad of American cops is pinned down in a street shoot-out, and every one of them has picked the same cover: not their own patrol car but a…
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2000Autostadt
Volkswagen opened Autostadt beside its Wolfsburg plant on 1 June 2000, timed to Expo 2000 in nearby Hanover.
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1969Funeral
A procession of limousines heads to a funeral while the dead man, Maxwell E.
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1964Snow Plow
A Beetle ploughs through thigh-deep drifts while an unhurried narrator asks a question nobody had thought to ask: "Have you ever wondered how the…
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1959Think Small
The ad that started advertising's creative revolution.
Volkswagen’s advertising
Volkswagen's place in advertising history rests on Doyle Dane Bernbach. Think Small sold the Beetle in 1959 by admitting what it was, small and odd, when American car ads promised bigger, longer, lower. Ad Age ranked DDB's Volkswagen work the No. 1 campaign of the 20th century, and the entries here show how far that voice travelled.
On television, Snow Plow is a demonstration by implication, built on a question nobody had thought to ask: how does the man who drives the snowplough get to the snowplough? Funeral made thrift funny and saved the Beetle for the final reveal. Decades later, DDB London's Cops made its case in a single photograph: a squad of police in a shoot-out, all taking cover behind a little Polo.
The common thread is showing rather than claiming. DDB Stockholm's The Fun Theory turned subway stairs into piano keys to prove that fun can change behaviour, with the cars barely featuring. Deutsch's The Force, a wordless spot about a child in a Darth Vader costume, went up on YouTube days before the Super Bowl and started the now-standard practice of releasing big-game ads early. Volkswagen has also built experiences rather than ads, from the Autostadt beside its Wolfsburg plant to a Hong Kong cinema stunt in which the audience looked down at a text message just as the car on screen crashed.