"It's nice to see a great British institution giving a great German institution the credit it deserves. It may not be the most spectacular, efficient, cool, sexy or beautiful car that German industry has produced – but it's certainly the most "
The Beetle Pitch …
Cars don’t come much more iconic than the Beetle. Love em or hate em, no automobile has represented the ideals of everyman motoring more than the original “peoples car”.
It’s not surprising then that some stratospheric stars have represented the brand — From Paul Newman to Marty Feldman and even Buzz Aldrin of the Apollo 11 mission — have chosen to lend their image to this most basic of family cars.
To put this into context back in 1970 Aldrin, along with numero uno Moonwalking astronaut Neil Armstrong, was perhaps the most famous celebrity on the planet.
To get an idea of the brand value of the Astronaut’s face, he was paid a cool $300,000 dollars for endorsing the car. Forty years ago that was an almost unimaginable money for an endorsement of a car campaign.
In choosing a man that walked on the moon – an individual with a doctorate in Astronautics from MIT as well as an epoch-making claim to fame – was association of forward thinking tech way before Audi dreamed of Vorsprung Durch Technik.
And this for a car designed originally in Nazi Germany in the thirties.
It’s difficult not to mention the Werner Von Braun connection. Sometimes history has a fearful symmetry.
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