Pantera: The Art of Sculpting Fog

The Media Guy — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 11:38:00 +0000

The de Tomaso Pantera. Around $10,000.*

In Italy, men build cars with passion. One of them is Alejandro de Tomaso. And this is his car. Pantera.

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The evolution of the print ad is something that deserves its own dissertation (I am sure there are many) and today too much copy scares away even the most avid reader. Today, any print ad worth its media uses four key components:

A headline
Visual-grabbing design elements
Snappy copy or even as short as a tagline
A call to action.

I miss the days when copy dominated print ads covering up to seventy per cent of the page. You simply can’t get away with that now. Looking back through my ancient Sports Illustrated enearthed some treasures, namely an ad for the Pantera. If I asked a thousand of my readers if you knew what the Pantera was, my guess is that two or three would know what it was. For the other 9,997 of you, take a mental walk with me and let me tell you…

Elvis Presley was car enthusiast known for his love of Cadillacs. After all, he owned nearly a hundred of him during his lifetime. But in the 1970s, the talk among car buffs was a sleek Italian-made sports car called the Pantera (aka Panther in English). Elvis bought one and was never the same. One day when he fancied a spin, the car wouldn’t start. After some frustration, he took out a gun and shot it a few times.

The Presley Pantera is now in a museum…respectful visitors count the wounds.

It might be thought that the incident, enthusiastically reported around the world, would damage sales of the Pantera…nothing was further from the truth. Why? Perhaps the love affair for automobiles was best described by William Faulkner in “Intruder in the Dust”:

“The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn’t really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motor-car. Because the automobile has become our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it.”

It was felt that even the king of rock and roll had no right to take shots at a car. The Pantera, a car previously confined to the specialist market,quickly gained notoriety. Pantera fans sympathized with Alejandro De Tomaso, its creator, when he explained that his design, like many an Italian prima donna, could be temperamental and should be treated with kindness and patience. The starting problem was a minor matter, he said, to do with overheating, and could be simply remedied.

As for the Presley Pantera, it is now in a museum. Respectful visitors count the wounds.

If, as Faulkner and other writers claimed, America has had a love affair with the car (now possibly fading, as affairs do), this may explain why the Pantera became an object of special affection along with the country’s own classics stretching back to Henry Ford’s Model T. De Tomaso’s achievement was to get his Italian job into a pantheon largely made up of American models. He had an unusual combination of gifts, that of innovator and salesman.

Immortalized in plastic…a sure sign of a classic….

Yet, I digress…

When Ford president Lee Iacocca wanted a sports car that his dealers could offer to match the Corvette, he turned to the De Tomaso Pantera to do the heavy lifting. Growing up in the the seventies, Iacocca was a bit of a business folk hero. No one knew CEOs and Presidents of big companies back then, but everyone knew him. Even a 10-year-old from Los Angeles. He said once, “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.”

This statement was never so obvious as him turning to his Lincoln-Mercury ad agency Kenyon & Eckhardt to create the materials that would get his big idea across. By the time the Pantera was ready to find its way into Lincoln-Mercury dealerships the ads were ready and immediately made an impact. The copywriting itself deserves a special spot in the pantheon of copywriting. Each word carries the weight of ten. Consider the following paragraph:

“Conceived without compromise. A car so carefully built (it is virtually handmade) there will only be 2,500 made the first year. Mid-engined like a racing car. An ultra-high-performance sports coupe that stands a little higher than the average man’s belt buckle, it seats two (and only two) and it’s priced in the neighborhood of $10,000.”

And then the ego grabbing hook-line:

“Obviously, Pantera is for the few who demand something extraordinary.”

Today, this would be enough copy for two ads, but in the 1970s, they were just getting started:

“The body is the inspired work of Ghia, the renowned coachbuilder. It is Italian craftsmanship at its finest. Monocoque construction fuses the steel skin and frame into an incredibly strong and rigid structure.

“The engine is a 351 CID, 4-barrel V-8 placed just ahead of the rear axle, which gives Pantera some huge advantages over conventional sports cars. Better vision forward. Less power-loss. Better weight distribution. And the tightest, most satisfying handling characteristics you’ve ever experienced.”

And if all of this mindblowing car jargon (easily retained and digested as you read) isn’t enough, they his you with the cherry on top of the sundae:

“With five forward speeds fully synchronized, independent suspension of all four wheels (die-cast magnesium wheels are optional), rack and pinion steering, power-boosted disc brakes — even an ingenious system to prevent you from inadvertently selecting the wrong gear while shifting, the de Tomaso Pantera has to be one of the most impressive vehicles ever offered here at any price.”

Copywriters are, I suppose, beasts of imagination tethered inescapably to reality. They define success by creative brilliance, knowing ultimately it is only properly defined by commercial performance. And amongst all this, they yo-yo in and out of an odd state of immersion – rapt by a brief about chewing gum, or shoes, or Japanese lemonade, all the time knowing that none of it really exists.

Copywriting, like marketing, is the art of sculpting fog. This is never more apparent than in the Pantera ad above.

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The Flip Side

Of course, the ad agency cut some corners too and resorted to the 1970s Mad Men-style of advertising…sigh:

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Pantera: The Art of Sculpting Fog