Clio Wired (History 696)

The GTO, however, was anything but a family-friendly sedan. It was, in fact, based on a family sedan, the popular mid-size Pontiac Tempest, but if the buyer chose the GTO option he got an incredibly fast, two-door rocket that was completely the opposite of the type of car that GM management was working so hard to promote. The Tempest-GTO was an immediate hit with the general public and sales exceeded expectations by tens of thousands. How does one explain the appearance of a GM drag racer at this time?

According to legend, the top engineer at Pontiac, John Z. DeLorean, the same man who in the 1980s launched his own car line and was arrested for smuggling cocaine, surreptitiously developed the GTO right under the noses of GM’s upper management because, as DeLorean later claimed, he saw a opportunity in the domestic automobile market for just such a car. According to DeLorean, he determined that there were thousands of young men with cash to spare who were eager to get behind the wheel of what amounted to a street-legal drag racer. Knowing that GM would never approve of a racing sedan, he was able to sneak through an option package to the base Tempest that, when chosen by a buyer, included the largest and fastest available engine made by Pontiac (an engine designed for the largest Pontiacs, not the mid-sized Tempest). Upper management did not notice this particular option and it was made available to the general public. DeLorean had succeeded in circumventing the bureaucracy of one of the largest corporations in the world! Once management saw the success of the GTO’s sales they gave DeLorean and Pontiac free reign to develop the GTO as its own separate line but continued to fret and meddle with DeLorean and his team. All during this time there was a young advertising executive, Jim Wangers, a member of DeLorean's team, who was also playing an instrumental role in the GTO saga.

Wangers has been described as a marketing genius. He was responsible for developing an advertising campaign that helped the GTO become one of the best selling cars in the GM lineup. Wangers used innovative print and television advertisements to reach the target audience. He also tied that ad campaign into television programs and the music industry, among others, to promote what became known as the first “muscle car,” including developing the Monkee-mobile, a modified GTO, for the television show “The Monkees.”

Jan and Dean and Ronnie and the Daytona’s wrote hit songs about the car. But GM’s management kept limiting what Wangers was able to do in these advertising campaigns and he, along with the GTO team, kept attempting to “put one over” on the old, staid, conservative management by camouflaging their messages within what appears to be rather bland advertisements. It was this tit-for-tat, back and forth battle between the innovators at Pontiac and the conservative elements at GM that shaped the GTO and the advertising campaign. Popular youth culture too, in another back and forth interaction, influenced the GTO. For example, the inspiration for the popular “Judge” GTO option, first offered in 1969, was borrowed from the TV show “Laugh-In.” The GTO, then, was a product of the times in which it was produced as much as it was a product of the internal tensions within one of the nation’s largest corporations.

This story opens up a number of historically interesting and, I think, significant questions. Is DeLorean's version of the birth of the GTO correct? Did he hoodwink GM or create a myth? If the former, would a corporation whose purpose of existence was to pay attention to the bottom line really worry so much about image over profit? What role did advertising play in all of this? What did the interplay between DeLorean, his team, and GM management and the cultural climate of the time influence these events? Did main-stream culture play a role or was the counter-culture more of a factor? These are but a few of the questions raised by the GTO.

I propose to develop a website that will examine DeLorean and the GTO in general and Wanger’s innovative advertising campaign in his effort to reach his target audience in particular. Pontiac had a history of using well-known artists to develop their print advertising and was way ahead of the curve compared to the other automobile manufacturers at this point in time. By tracing the history of the GTO’s advertising campaign by developing a web essay tied into an interactive database of both print and TV advertisements, I hope to explore the question of how this campaign developed as an interaction between DeLorean and the GTO team and their battle with upper GM management. If DeLorean’s myth is true, his attempts to circumvent GM’s bureaucracy may be seen as a product of the times, symbolic of the 1960s generation’s attempts to distance themselves from their parents' generation.

This project would be well served by publishing it to a website as it will use dozens of color and black-and-white images and TV advertisements, artifacts that would make it prohibitively expensive to use in a standard print publication. These will be added to a searchable archive-database. (The complete run of print ads are available through a variety of sources.) The site will also include an interactive timeline, tracing the key decisions by DeLorean and the GTO team, Pontiac’s management, and GM’s upper management. I would add some graphs that would document the sales figures for the GTO compared to other GM models by year of production and hopefully include copies of key GM and Pontiac memos in a document archive. I will also add a scholarly essay, complete with an argument and sources! I would hope to have links to other sites that explore the history of advertising in the 20th Century as well as some of the scholarly articles written on the history of advertising and culture while taking into account some of the arguments put forth by these very publications to frame my essay.

There are a number of excellent websites dedicated to the history of advertising, such as the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History sponsored by Duke University (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman/) but few that target a specific type of automobile. The few that do are run by automobile enthusiasts and, for the most part, do not present a scholarly argument. For example, see the Muscle Car Club’s section on advertising (http://www.musclecarclub.com/musclecars/general/musclecars-ads.shtml). My website’s target audience would be scholars of advertising and the automobile as well as cultural historians concerned with the 1960s. Nevertheless I would hope that enthusiasts too would find the site interesting and informative. Hopefully, Professor Kelly will think so too!