HANDBUILT ADVERTISING

The Strada didn’t just provide Fiat with a car to rival the VW Golf, it also made advertising history when, in August 1979, it took up all two minutes of an ITV News at Ten ad-break with its ‘Handbuilt by Robots’ advert; the mesmeric mechanical waltz of Fiat’s production-line robots, set to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, led to two separate send-up sketches on Not The Nine O’clock News. The advert cost a staggering £300,000 for UK ad agency Collett Dickenson Pearce to make, not least because – in protest at the robots – the workers were on strike and the plant at a standstill when CDP’S film crew turned up, meaning the machinery had to be turned on solely for its benefit.

It was second-time lucky for CDP. It actually launched the Strada the previous month, with a gloom-laden campaign with the depressing, unwieldy tagline, ‘Listen, if we are going to leave any oil for our kids, more cars have got to look like this.’ The print adverts demonstrated the superior space, aerodynamics and fuel economy, but also contained a line that must have angered the Fiat Group’s most prestigious brand. It read, ‘Perhaps you yearn for a multi-cylinder, fuel guzzling, scarlet monster? As Italians we understand that particular lust only too well. But just try repeating this to yourself a couple of times before bed: The last oil well runs dry in forty years time.’

Perhaps tellingly, this advert, which only lasted a month, wasn’t written by Italians. Good job they went back to the drawing board...