NEW YORK Two years ago, Volkswagen courted controversy with a commercial featuring a man so despondent about life's travails that he contemplates jumping from a rooftop. "There's no affordable housing," he laments. "You think I wanted high taxes or global warming?" His outlook on life brightens considerably when a passing driver below informs him that VW offers three different models priced under $17,000. That was one of several commercials from Crispin Porter + Bogusky that wryly positioned the German carmaker as a societal soother with its affordable line of "V-dubs," but like others produced during the four-year agency-client relationship, the ad polarized consumers and soon enough, the "Jumper" spot was pulled.

This month, VW placed creative chores on its $220 million domestic ad business in review and Crispin declined to defend. The move ended a partnership that generated work inspiring praise, controversy and derision. While the opinion of the public, press and pundits seemingly shifted with each campaign, the work was rarely ignored. (See also: "VW Meets With at Least 5 Shops.")

Moving forward post-Crispin, however, most expect VW's advertising to strive for mass appeal and, for better or worse, lose some of its vaunted edge.
Hired in late 2005 after former Mini client Kerri Martin moved the then-$400 million account out of Arnold, the Boston agency that in 10 years working on the brand introduced the new Beetle and the "Drivers wanted" tagline, Crispin produced a body of work that was breakthrough, attention-getting and decidedly offbeat.

"Our goal is to make VW famous and relevant again," Martin told Adweek in early 2006 when the agency's first campaign for the German automaker was introduced, a push for the GTI that aimed to recapture the cult following the sporty model once enjoyed among young car enthusiasts. Teaser ads featured a devilish mascot called "Fast," giving way to a Pimp My Ride parody starring actor Peter Stormare as an adrenalized German engineer who, with long-legged, lab-coat-wearing Helga at his side, lived to "unpimp your ride" in grand demolition-style displays.

Since then, the agency has driven the brand through a multitude of themes. The most famous included a series of 2007 Jetta ads that depicted realistic and jarring car crashes with the message "Safe happens." Last year, Crispin introduced "Max," a black, German-accented classic VW Bug that first starred in a talk-show-style series of commercials with celebs like Heidi Klum in a campaign titled, "It's what the people want" and bowed the "Das auto" tagline in the U.S. Max most recently starred in "Meet the Volkswagens," paired with a vintage VW Bus voiced by Thomas Haden Church.
Two weeks ago, the Wolfsberg, Germany-based company made it clear that the "edge" sought in its advertising is no longer a main priority. Explaining that it was embarking on a search for a new advertising agency, VW vp of marketing Tim Ellis said, "Our goal of rapidly increasing our volume in a mature market requires the Volkswagen brand to evolve into a more relevant mainstream choice."

And Crispin, of course, is anything but mainstream. Ellis explained, "The Volkswagen brand needs to inspire our base of enthusiasts as well as reach out and captivate those in mainstream America." As undisclosed contenders for the account meet with VW this week, it is clear that any advertising that will come out of a new relationship will likely veer towards conventional category tastes rather than Crispin's bold brand departures from the norm.  

"I think everyone in the industry will agree Crispin is an incredibly talented agency, the best agency when it comes to having an edge to your brand and arguably using that edge to stand out," said Wes Brown, a consultant at Los Angeles consumer research and consulting firm Iceology. "[But] when you are trying to have a slightly broader appeal to your message, I don't think that's the agency for you."



Last week, CEO Stefan Jacoby outlined the company's aggressive goals to ignite VW's money-losing U.S. operations and sell 800,000 cars by 2018. The automaker, which is building a U.S. plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., will introduce several new models designed specifically for the domestic market, including a new sedan and SUV and an update of the classic Beetle.

Todd Turner, president of Car Concepts, Thousand Oaks, Calif., said that in order for VW to reach and surpass Toyota's performance in the marketplace, it has to create a strong brand positioning that is consistent over time -- a consistency that critics say was lacking in Crispin's work, which until the introduction of "Max" had no unifying theme and a tonality that was too narrow for broad consumer appeal.

"Those communications reached certain younger buyers, which is fine for half of their model line, but when you get to the [more expensive] Phaeton and Touareg, that's where they run into trouble," said Turner. "Their line extends from youth oriented to very much not youth oriented, [and] they need to find a way to communicate differently to different buyers."

Work relying so heavily on pop culture, he added, also limits its appeal. "It's all stuff relevant in one moment in time, but it's not going to stretch and take the image to an awareness level that you need to have for a car company," Turner said.

The Crispin campaign that did the most for the VW brand, said observers, is the Jetta "Safe happens" campaign. Lois Miller, president of IAG Automotive at Nielsen-owned ad effectiveness ratings company IAG Research, said those ads were groundbreaking for the category. "In the auto business, the last thing we want to do is put fear in consumers minds, but that ad really woke people up. Until then, who owned safety? Volvo," she said.

A new agency will have a formidable challenge ahead. How much of Crispin's brand flavor will be undone remains to be seen. Iceology's Brown said VW's lofty goals aren't going to be easy to reach.

"Finding the right balance of maintaining some edge and your German heritage, yet obviously finding a way to tone both those down so a mainstream consumer gives you serious levels of consideration is a tough thing to do," he said. "If you broaden it too much, you risk turning off some of your owner base that came to you because of that edge and hipness, but if you keep it too narrow, you can't get to the sales goals. It'll be an interesting tightrope."