"It's a lazy afternoon, and the beetle bugs are zooming, and the tulip trees are blooming... "

Those are the opening lyrics for a song that provided a background for one of the finest corporate commercials ever produced. The car was a Chevrolet and the period was somewhere in the 1960's. It was a superb example of the camera making love to the car, a technique all but forgotten in our digital age and even derided by many in the creative community when the spot first appeared.

It was the era of the creative revolution, led by ad agencies Doyle Dane & Bernbach (Volkswagen, Avis), Carl Ally (Volvo) and Wells, Rich, Greene (AMC, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff Airlines). Logic (consumer benefit) was presented in a clean, simple, clever and often funny technique, whereas image advertising lacked meaning. The latter was like promoting chrome over performance.

Chevrolet's Lazy Afternoon spot was at least one-and-a-half minutes long (perhaps two minutes) and produced for a TV show where GM was the sole sponsor. It was shot in a meadow that symbolised everything beautiful about summer. Human beings were nowhere in sight as the camera slowly zoomed and panned, not too close, not too far. No annoying voice-over spoiled the mood. The vocal was hauntingly lovely. You watched the commercial, you wanted to be there in that car.

My ad writing career, then totally hooked by the logic technique, began not long after the Chevy commercial appeared. Yet my biggest struggle with suits and clients was in persuading them that long shots, where the car was seen from the distance in a romantic background, were more powerful than glitzy close-ups. Now a lot older and hopefully a little wiser, I still believe that image advertising has a role to play. You watched the commercial, you wanted to be there in that car.

[I couldn't find the commercial on YouTube, nor even a similar Chevrolet print ad. The above is just a pretty picture.]