BMW becomes the Ultimate Driving Machine

Five words for a market entry

In March 1975 BMW of North America took out its first victory advertisement. The brand had recorded a class win at the 12 Hours of Sebring on 21 March, and the advertisement carried a five word tagline that had been written the previous year by copywriter Martin Puris of the New York agency Ammirati Puris AvRutick.^{1, 2} The line read The Ultimate Driving Machine. It would remain the brand's North American signature for the next five decades.³

How the brief reached a six person agency

The brief had landed at Ammirati Puris AvRutick by an unusual route. The agency had been founded in 1973 by Ralph Ammirati, Martin Puris and Lou AvRutick, after the three partners had left the New York office of Young and Rubicam.^{1, 4} The agency was small, working from a New York hotel and nearly out of operating cash.^{4, 5} Bob Lutz, then a board member of BMW responsible for sales, had noticed the Fiat work and had asked the partners to compete for the BMW account as the company prepared to take over its own US distribution from the previous importer.^{1, 5}

The pitch was settled in 1974.^{4, 6} The agency was retained at a moment that was strategically delicate for BMW. The company had just incorporated BMW of North America Inc. as its own subsidiary and was building its first dealer network outside the existing Hoffman Motors arrangement.⁷ US sales for the financial year ending in 1974 had stood at 15,007 cars, a figure that placed the brand in the third tier of European imports behind Mercedes Benz and Volvo.¹ The brief was therefore not to defend a position but to define one, in a market that did not yet have a clear category slot for BMW.

Why the line worked as a category move

The line that Martin Puris had written in 1974 performed a specific piece of category work. The American premium automotive market in the mid 1970s was organised around two competing arguments. Mercedes Benz argued from engineering authority and from formal luxury, with advertising that emphasised heritage and craftsmanship. Cadillac and Lincoln argued from ride comfort, interior volume and chrome surface. Both arguments treated the car primarily as a passive object that the owner occupied or displayed. The Ultimate Driving Machine moved the category onto a different axis. The word Driving placed the owner in the driver's seat rather than in the back of the car, and the word Machine reasserted engineering primacy without conceding it to Stuttgart. The word Ultimate gave the line a competitive register without naming a competitor.

The line was therefore both a positioning statement and an editorial instruction. It instructed every advertisement that followed to argue the brand through driving behaviour rather than through ownership status. Print work of the late 1970s and early 1980s under Ammirati and Puris treated the car as a working object.^{1, 4} Photography sat in motion, copy described handling characteristics and engine response, and the line carried the category claim. The visual grammar of BMW advertising for the next twenty years was set in that period.

The numbers that followed the line

The commercial trajectory of BMW of North America through the second half of the 1970s confirmed the move. Unit sales rose from 15,007 cars in 1974 to 19,419 in 1975 and to 26,040 in 1976, a 73 per cent increase over two years against the established American import market.^{1, 8} The growth was disproportionately concentrated in the 3 Series segment, the entry point of the BMW range, where Ammirati Puris AvRutick concentrated the brand's print investment. The line was therefore not only an editorial frame but a sales mechanism. It gave the dealer network a single, repeatable argument to use against Mercedes and against the American premium incumbents, and it gave the brand an entry argument for buyers who had not previously considered a European car.

The agency relationship lasted until 1992.¹ Ammirati and Puris was eventually folded into Lintas and later acquired by Interpublic Group, and the BMW account moved through a sequence of subsequent agencies, but the line remained. It survived the introduction of the M division, the launch of the BMW i electric sub brand, the global re alignment of marketing under the BMW Group in Munich and the iterative redesign of the BMW roundel. It ran alongside Freude am Fahren, a German line created separately in 1965 by the Dusseldorf agency Gramm and Grey, and alongside Joy, the single worldwide campaign that BMW of North America introduced in 2010.³

The shape of the legacy

The Ultimate Driving Machine is the longest serving tagline in the modern global automotive market. The timeline of the American Association of Advertising Agencies dates the line to 1974 and records that a series of Fiat advertisements had brought the little known agency to the attention of Bob Lutz, a gamble that paid off.⁶ The St John's University Ammirati Puris archive holds print advertisements from the campaign and the original layout for its second BMW print advertisement.⁵

Beyond the agency record, the line continues to shape how the BMW brand argues itself. The marque's current global communication leans on the driver as protagonist, on the engineering as a means rather than an end, and on a competitive register that does not name the competitor. Each of those moves is implicit in the five words that Martin Puris wrote in 1974 and that BMW of North America first published in the spring of 1975.