Oil Advertising

Bikes

We were thinking recently how pathetically wimpish current oil ads have to be. Gone are the days when you could sell lubricant with hot cars and hot babes. Post BP oil slick,and taking environmental realities into consideration, it’s not particularly surprising that oil companies are managing their image with kid gloves.

So, commercials for oil are packaged with tweeting birds, and laced together with a sting of pure, green air. We thought we’d dig up a couple of gems to show you how it wasn’t always necessarily so.

Here, for example, Mobil use a whacked out, hyped up Charles Manson lookalike to publicise their product, presumably to make the far-reached spin that using their brand of lube will chill you out.

This South African Castrol ad, meanwhile, straddles the hard-edged line between xenophobia, homophobia and the cherished boorishness of the Boers…

Its pretty hard to unravel the semiotics of this animated beauty from India (below). There’s bullets, murder, mayhem and other fun stuff that seem to be equating the performance aspects of Castrol lube with moving faster than a speeding bullet. We love the Bollywood steez, whatever it all means…

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