Latest Look in Auto Ads: Don’t Show Pictures of Car

Here’s one way to get attention in automobile advertising: Don’t show the car.

That, at least, is what Nissan’s new, upscale car division--Infiniti--has decided to do. And its print advertisements now appearing in car magazines show everything from pretty flowers to scenic rock formations--but no sheet metal.

“When the car launches, we don’t want it to be old news,” said David F. Hubbard, national advertising manager for Infiniti. “We probably won’t even show the car in advertisements until we launch it in October.”

The ads, which recently began to appear in magazines including Motor Trend and Car & Driver, feature full-page photographs of natural settings. But the photos look more like the kind commonly found in art books--and not in auto ads. An adjoining page of print then relates the photograph to a feature of the car.

For example, one ad features a close-up photo of a rock. The photo shows all of the rock’s details--from indentations to subtle color differences. The adjoining page is filled with printed text about the interior details of Infiniti cars. “The seats are stitched vertically,” the ad explains, “because the muscles in the human back and thigh run vertically.”

The ads were created by the Los Angeles office of a Boston ad firm, Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos. “We don’t necessarily consider them car ads yet,” said Chuck Kushell, managing director of the ad firm’s Los Angeles office. “They are ads that announce Nissan’s new luxury car division.”

More than a year ago, Sterling, the British car maker, ran a television ad campaign that barely showed the car. “It’s an attention-getting device,” said Tom Else, vice president at the San Francisco agency that formerly handled the Sterling ad campaign, Hal Riney & Partners. “I’m not sure why Infiniti is doing it, but we did it to separate the car from other products.”

Meanwhile, Toyota’s new, upscale car division, Lexus, which will also launch a new line this fall, will soon break an ad campaign that shows only portions of the car. “We’ll show individual elements instead of full beauty shots,” said Bob Neuman, director of marketing at Lexus. “The object, of course, is to keep interest high.”