Gasoline brand advertising has always struck us as pointless. After all, when your car needs gas, you just go to the nearest station and fill up. Sure there are some differences in each brand’s formulation but is it really that different to in any way, shape or form make a significant dent in the performance or gas mileage for the average driver? We could be wrong but we’ve always thought not. Gas is gas. Buy it when you need it. Buy it where you needs it.
And when we receive a press release that screams, “Fresh off their recent Titanium Lion win in Cannes and exodus from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Bill Wright and James Dawson-Hollis have already begun to inject their contagiously unconventional creativity into OgilvyWest as it embarks on a new creative era,” we aren’t expecting much. After all, it’s a gas ad. How much creativity is truly required?
Thankfully for those gas brand marketers and their agencies, our sentiment hasn’t swayed the apparent need to spend millions upon millions convincing people which gasoline brand to put in their vehicles.
And, thankfully, there is still enough creativity in this business to spark an ad so subtly and, at the same time, in-your-face innuendo-laden, you hardly notice that you’re being delivered a pretty funny joke.
So everyone pumps their own gas now, right? But do you “pump with confidence”? The folks in this ARCO ad certainly do and they aren’t ashamed to say so.
So hats off to you, Bill and James for making us laugh this afternoon. And to do it in such a way that is so over-the-top yet so subversive, we can’t decide if we should ponder whether or not we “pump with confidence” or if we, well, “pump with confidence.”
