Germany: the accidental empireAdvertising This article is more than 11 years oldThis article is more than 11 years oldThe Audi catchphrase, borrowed by John Hegarty of BBH from a faded poster in Ingolstadt, has become an advertising legendWhen Sir John Hegarty saw a faded poster on a factory wall in Ingolstadt 30 years ago, he didn't realise he was looking at a catchphrase that would transform the image of an entire country.
At the time, popular perceptions of Germany – in Britain at least – were still wrapped up in the legacy of the past. "Don't mention the war," barked Basil Fawlty, but people still did.
A three-word slogan, drawled lugubriously by Geoffrey Palmer in a series of Audi ads, changed all that. "Vorsprung durch Technik" became a motto for a nation that was putting the past behind it and restyling itself as a byword for quality, efficiency, progress and technology.
"I had no idea that it would become that popular. It says everything and says nothing. That's often the brilliance of a thought, that people put their own meaning in to it," says Hegarty, one of the founders of the BBH agency, recalling his trip 30 years ago to the Audi workshop during which the genus of the idea was born. "It just captured people's imagination."
The story of how a Brit coined Germany's most ubiquitous postwar slogan is already an advertising industry legend.
"I had gone to Ingolstadt and found the factory and I saw a very old faded poster on the wall that someone had left up there," Hegarty says. "I saw this line 'Vorsprung durch Technik'. They said that was an old advertising line but 'we don't use it any more'. And it stuck in my brain."
Hegarty had no idea what it actually meant ("progress through technology") but once he'd been told, the idea stuck. "This is the incidental nature of creativity, looking, watching, hearing stuff and it all goes in." Later, when the admen were looking for a phrase to tie all the commercial work together, the phrase popped back at him. "Everyone looked at me as though I was mad," says Hegarty. No one really used foreign languages to advertise in those days. But the client went with it, and soon it was a catchphrase of mid-1980s Britain.
"It was the first time certainly that a foreign phrase captured the public's imagination in that way," Hegarty recalls. "There was a history (with Germany). There was the possibility of rubbing people up the wrong way, but it's amazing how it took off and how it became a part of British culture." Within a few short years the phrase had featured in songs by Blur and U2, the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and in an episode of Only Fools and Horses.
Germany has moved on since then and in recent times has been seduced by slogans that substitute thrift and parsimony for Vorsprung and Technik. "Geiz ist geil" (stinginess is cool) has caught on ever since the electronics chain Saturn started saying it 10 years ago. "Arm aber sexy" (poor but sexy) declared Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, of his city, apparently oblivious that his country was neither.
But if Germany needs a new slogan for this age of euro perma-crisis, Hegarty has one or two ideas. "Vorsprung durch euro … " he muses. "That's what they'd be concerned about."
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