AUTOMOTIVE HAIR: Want to Demonstrate a Car’s Head Room? Head to Texas

How best to advertise the fact that a car has lots of headroom? The usual ploy would be to scrunch an NBA power forward into the driver’s seat. But Earle Palmer Brown’s Philadelphia office took a different tack in a commercial for Five-State Honda Dealers. ‘If there’s one thing Texans know,’ says the voiceover, ‘it’s ‘big.’ So your local Five-State Honda Dealer drove a new Accord all the way to the Lone Star state to get their expert opinion’ on the big trunk, big cabin, big value, etc. And to show off the car’s capacious head room, a woman with the ‘big hair’ for which Texas is so justly famous primps for a moment and then gets into the car without scrunching a single strand of her lofty bouffant. Her cheerful verdict on the Accord: ‘Plenty of headroom!’ As luck would have it, Honda consolidated all its dealer advertising at Santa Monica-based Rubin Postaer shortly after Earle Palmer Brown had won the Five-State account on the East Coast, so an EPB staffer ruefully describes this as ‘the first and last regional Honda spot we will ever do.’ Ah, well – at least it was a big one.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)