Given the fickle nature of the buying public and the unreliability of fashions, advertising as a practice must be somewhere up there with three-card-monte on the reliability scale. The tastes of the public can be tipped with a clever campaign into mass consumption of something completely idiotic — reference, if you will, the Pet Rock — or despite the best efforts of legions of advertising men, they refuse to buy a perfectly good product — reference the Edsel, which actually was a pretty good car.

Car advertising has always been a pretty odd game. Arguably, the best slogan of all time was Packard’s eternal “Ask The Man Who Owns One.” In other words, there’s no reason for us to waste your time and ours babbling about the virtues of a Packard, because they’re already obvious. Want to know how good it is? Ask Mr. Loaded over there in his shiny 6=40 runabout with golf-club storage compartment. Buick came in close with its alliterative, imperative “Better Buy Buick!” There’s some question about that one, though — does it mean “Buick is a better value for your money” or “You’d better buy a Buick or we send the guys with brass knuckles”? Bringing up the rear of car slogans would invariably fall to Toyota, which has shamelessly adopted “Everyday” as its motto. They’re obviously trying to project the image of reliability — your Toyota will be there, ready and waiting, every day. Unfortunately, that connotation requires the use of two separate words: every and day. The single word “everyday” refers to — well, solid, boring mediocrity. Which is in fact exactly what Toyotas are, but it’s not exactly the way I’d want to market a car, and it’s certainly not the way I’d like to go about buying a car. Gee, I’m a solid, boring and mediocre person — I need a car that fits my complete lack of verve and personality!

In the last century a good bit of advertising has been just plain nonsense. For years, Grape Nuts used the slogan “There’s A Reason”. I’m sure there was a reason. There have been many reasons for many things. Grape Nuts, sadly, never quite made it clear what the reason was or why you’d have been searching for it in the first place. Maybe it was supposed to mean that there was a reason for eating Grape Nuts, which is good because most people think that Grape Nuts are prepackaged gravel useful only for paving your breakfast table.

Browsing through samples of Victorian posters and handbills, I’ve noticed that the ostensibly prudish Victorians knew a lot about selling things. They sold with sex. Every item you can imagine was sold with ads featuring pretty women. Perfumes and soaps — sure, that makes sense, use Vinolia Toilet Soap and you’ll look like here. Baking powder? Well, okay, healthy and attractive women feed their healthy attractive families with healthy attractive bread made with Calumet. But tractors? What do hot babes have to do with tractors? Absolutely nothing, but people want to look at hot babes and frankly there isn’t anything too sexy about tractors (if anyone thinks there is, I do not want to know about it). Put a babe on the tractor poster and people will look at it. Put a tractor on the tractor poster, people will see it and think, “Oh, tractor. Whatever,” and keep walking. Old Gold cigarettes really had it right with those dancing packs of smokes — wouldn’t you rather smoke the brand that has a knockout set of legs?

It’s time that Madison Avenue (if that is indeed still the epicenter of the ad universe) shook the moral foundation a little bit and started using sex to sell things again. I know perfectly well that naked people have nothing to do with Oldsmobiles, but they’re a hell of a lot more interesting than transmissions and fuel economy. If people had started equating Oldsmobiles with naked people ten years ago, that venerable marque wouldn’t be tottering into the big garage in the sky.

Scantily clad Venuses and Adonises on the hood of a car is, emphatically, not everyday.