Australian
Screen

Clip description

A Holden customer shakes hands with his dealer and drives out of the Holden dealership. The voice-over narration explains Holden’s high resale value over an image of the newspaper classifieds. The narrator – a GMH representative standing in a Holden showroom – directly addresses the camera and, as he talks about Holden’s resale value, a rotating camera shot shows the car in the showroom. After the narrator explains how a high resale value relates to the customer, the image dissolves to a Holden car driving up to a suburban house. The Holden slogan, 'Australia’s Own Car’, concludes the ad.

Curator’s notes

This advertisement is fairly straightforward and runs at one minute – half the length of previous ads in this series, but twice as long as the ads that later became the norm. Longer, explanatory-style ads like this do not fit as neatly within a minute, but the use of the GMH representative, who functions as narrator, helps convey more information in a shorter space of time. Familiar to audiences from a series of television advertisements (see also General Motors Holden – Proved Dependability, which closes with the same footage and slogan as this ad), he is conceived by the advertisers to be a dependable and authoritative voice. His assurances about better trade-in allowance, protection of investment and consistently high resale value are meant to be seen as trustworthy, and his assertion that buying a Holden 'saves you money in the long run’ would have been a real incentive for prospective buyers.