Excellence in Advertising: Honda Scooters

Before God invented Netflix and PVRs, you had to sit through a battery of commercials every time you turned on the idiot box. Most of them made you wonder why the hell Philo Taylor Farnsworth didn’t also invent something to block out commercials. Like Netflix or PVRs. 

But occasionally, a television ad struck gold to where you’d sit through a seven-hour Cannon marathon to see it again. And now, thanks to the magic of YouTube (which we can thank God for inventing) you can relive the magic at the touch of a mouse. Here’s today’s nomination for Excellence in Advertising.

Anyone with a sufficient advertising budget can hire a pop star to push a product. From Michael Jackson shilling for Pepsi to Beyoncé pimping L'Oréal (and Samsung. And American Express. And also Pepsi. And...), corporations have been only too happy to take advantage of the fact that the superstars who move the most units musically speaking are the perfect people to help them push their products. There's practically no downside. There's slightly more risk involved in hiring someone whose career was built on songs about junkies and prostitutes.

In the mid '80s, someone at Honda realized that scooters weren't hip, especially when compared to the badass image of a certain other two-wheeled mode of transportation (and we're not talking about your Schwinn). You might as well have cruised down Main Street on a John Deere riding mower. Sure, classic Italian makes such as Vespa and Lambretta hold eternal appeal, but in 1984-85, to ride a Japanese-made scooter was to declare that you didn't particularly give a shit about being seen as cool by mainstream standards.

Or at least that seems to have been the thinking behind a series of TV spots for Honda scooters featuring the likes of Lou Reed, Grace Jones, Miles Davis, and Devo. All were well-known enough at the time to be recognizable by middle America, but each was just far enough left of centre to appeal to self-styled rebels, misfits, and pop-cultural outliers.

Did the commercials succeed in making the Honda scooter an icon of cool? Hell, no. Madison Avenue creatives loved the ads, especially the one featuring Lou Reed, which was done by the firm of Wieden+Kennedy (others were by Dailey & Associates), but that didn't add up to a banner year for Honda. As Randall Rothenberg wrote in his book Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign, “For all its impact on the advertising industry, the Lou Reed commercial did little for Honda. Young Americans had little interest in scooters, no matter how hip they were made out to be.”

They are fun to watch, though.