To mark the 60th anniversary of the Volkswagen Combi, we wrote a love letter to a vehicle that had become something far bigger than a van. A Trotskyist owned one, then a Maoist, then a Democrat, then a Republican. The van stayed the same throughout. It was there at Woodstock, at the communes, on the road to Kathmandu, and occasionally on the other side of the barricade with “Polizei” stencilled on the door. “We know, it’s a shock.” Six press ads, each one a different chapter of the same improbable biography.
The campaign was a conscious nod to Bernbach’s classic Volkswagen work - the same spare typography, the same white space, the same willingness to let the writing carry the entire weight of the ad. The copy is dense, funny and genuinely moving: a social history of the post-war world told through one vehicle’s windscreen. One headline reads: “It’s unusual to drive the vehicle you were conceived in.” Another: “It has carried all the world’s ideals. The door must not have been shut right.”
