This holiday season let’s give a little goodwill to all the ad men and women who were tasked with creating Christmas car commercials.
Could there be a less creatively rewarding job? Every year, car company executives must tell advertisers they want something new and fresh for their December holiday campaigns. And every year, after being pitched a host of new and fresh ideas the self-same executives recline into their boardroom seats and say, “We love it, but let’s go with big red bows, Christmas morning and that driveway moment.”
As a friend who worked in advertising for big auto manufacturers told me, “There would be some great ideas, the clients would enjoy them and laugh but they never got produced. Getting a car on Christmas is ridiculous but, at the end of the day, it’s the idea that sells that gets made.”
Ridiculous, they are.
Christmas car commercials are so saccharin and cloying they almost defy parody, though they are routinely spoofed on television.
Christmas car commercials are “year-end events” made to move old product to make way for new models. They seem like work. During a season when people are spending money on other things and worrying about the bottom line, car sales in the United States are about average. In Canada, they are a tad lower.
More importantly than pure sales, car Christmas commercials link their brands with feel-good Christmas spirit, which carmakers hope will carry into sales in the new year.
In fact, so many cars are sold in the Yuletide season that companies such as Car Bow Store specialize in giant garish red car bows. Founded in 2009, the Car Bow Store designs and manufactures their bows from their 11,000-square-foot plant and sells an average of 25,000 giant car bows annually. Forty per cent of its sales are direct to consumers, with the other 60 going to dealerships.
Year-end prices help December sales – December is arguably the best time to buy a car as dealers are desperate to clear out old inventory and get new models on deck – but don’t underestimate the power of the “driveway moment.” Car companies have used this motif to burn their brands into the consciousness of potential car buyers.
Christmas and car advertisements are perennial associates and have gone together like mistletoe and flu season. In 1935, Henry Ford urged Americans to “Give Your Family a New Ford V-8 for Christmas.”
The ribbon-decked car “driveway moment” first appeared in 1999, when Lexus came out with the original “December to Remember” campaign that depicted loved ones awaking Christmas morning to find ribbon-topped Lexuses in the driveway. According to The Wall Street Journal, three years later there was a car bow shortage. Since then, they’ve been an annual “event” for television viewers, like a pap smear or prostate exam.
“The Driveway Moment,” underneath its sugary commercialism, has a cultural resonance. Driveways are unique liminal spaces. They are our in-between worlds. In his 2017 paper, “Research Notes: Toward a History of the Suburban Driveway,” David Salomon, an associate professor at Ithaca College, argues “While the driveway is an emblematic component of the suburban landscape, it is also a paradoxical one. It is a border that divides, but it connects the street with a house. The street belongs to the public realm, the house decidedly private. The driveway belongs to both. It is a piece of personal infrastructure rather than a place one lingers.”
The driveway is a threshold where we have our “hellos” and “good-byes.” The driveway is where, when someone is just about to leave, we have the difficult conversation we’ve been avoiding. The driveway is theatre; a stage where scenes of painful farewells and jubilant greetings play out. That’s the current, for all their appalling sentimentality, that Christmas car commercials plug into.
This fact was not missed by the folks at Lexus. In 2020, as the pandemic raged, they rolled out a series of “December to Remember” spots that saluted “the roles that driveways have played throughout the year.”
They emphasized the driveway’s role as a safe socially distanced space to celebrate birthdays, graduations and of course, leaving cars with ribbons on them parked in driveways as Christmas presents.
The ads must work because I’ve asked Santa Claus to leave me a brand-new ribbon-topped Lexus. This year’s “December to Remember” campaign is called “Over the Years” and depicts a couple aging as the years go by and their children grow up and leave the nest. The unmistakable sound of Fleetwood Mac’s timeless classic “Landslide” (a song which no one associates with Christmas and makes many people cry) anchors the spot.
Personally, I think “Over the Years” lacks the bow-topped gift car spirit. Our final image is of the now wizened parents in the snow-covered driveway with the daughter and son-in-law marvelling at their granddaughter next to a Lexus.
And then what?
Death?
In what shadow or deep darkness do they now abide? Whether felled by ambition, blood or lust, like diamonds were the man and woman in “Over the Years” cut with their own dust? A sallow picture of their poisoned past? Are Heaven-gates being not so highly arched as the doors of Lexus owner McMansions; they that enter there must go upon their knees?
This is not the Christmas spirit. If we’re in keeping with Christmas (which commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe is the Son of God and the saviour of humanity), we should see the couple in “Over the Years” die, get buried and then be called up to Heaven (if they were not venal sinners). There they would each get a giant red bow-topped Lexus. If they were sinners, then straight downward and onto the eternal barbecue – no Lexuses.
That would be a December to Remember.