Automobile advertising is quite bizarre.  It is truly
depressing.  Here one finds a $25,000 machine used everyday by many
people and which one places one's life upon the proper design
thereof and how is it advertised?  Well, the best comparison I can
come up with is a vegomatic, but even the ad copy for vegomatic
describes the design to some degree whereas car advertising in
nearly devoid of design features.  It's pure "touchy-feely."  One
might ask why.

GM spent $1.36 billion on advertising in 1989, enough to create an
entire vertically integrated automobile company from scratch1.

     Why would GM advertise at all??  Let's go through the possible
reasons.

     1.  Nobody has heard of GM and they don't know what their main
line of business is.  Giggle, giggle.  It's the world's largest
corporation with dealers in almost every town with a stoplight,
but, nonetheless, without these ads people would drive by these
huge lots with fancy buildings and shiny new cars and guys in plaid
sportcoats and white shoes wondering, "What do they sell there?"

     2.  The engineering advantages of GM cars over other cars. 
This is almost as funny.  They are all the same.  They all have a
huge internal combustion engine connected to a mechanical
transmission (some that shift themselves from gear to gear and some
that are "do-it-yourself").  It's all the same stuff.

     3.  The need to make known the immense price advantage of GM
cars over other cars.  They all use the same basic technology and
design.  They all use the same materials, and, at least for those
made in the U. S., they all get their labor from the same place,
the UAW.  There can't be a price advantage.  And besides, any minor
price advantage blurs in the rebates and haggling during the sales
ordeal when you buy it.

     Well, there really might be a reason.  God Bless the Wall
Street Journal.  In an article in the Wall Street Journal you will
find the reason.  If you have any interst, I urge you to read "All
The News"2.
     Watch your local television station.  Listen to your local
radio station.  Read your local newspaper.  Look at a magazine. 
Between 25% and 50% of the advertising usually will be automobile
advertising.  If the automobile advertising were to be denied, most
media would go out of business.

          . . .  "It's one of the best-kept secrets about
     censorship in America today," says Ron Collins, a law
     professor at Catholic University in Washington, D. C.
          . . .
          . . .  [S]ome editors have even resorted to
     accepting payments from advertiser to run positive
     stories about them.
          . . .  And for businesses who happen to be
     advertisers, the caution turns frequently into timidity,"
     says Bill Lazarus, a prise-winning investigative reporter
     at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming who was fired last
     August.

2.  G. Pascal Zachary, "All The News," The Wall Street Journal,
June 2, 1992, p. 1.

1.  Jacqueline Mitchell, "GM Buys Right To Block Rivals In CBS Games,"
Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1991, p. B1.