Amazing 90's Volkwswagen ad

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Thesis
Driving a Volkswagen is conducive to meaningful friendships and making memories.

Triune brain
This ad really stimulates the limbic brain by acting on the audience's emotions via romantic images and music. There is a huge starry sky, a rural landscape where only the highway is illuminated, and a moody Nick Drake song. This ad captivates the limbic brain so strongly that the neocortex and reptilian brains don’t need activating.

Shifts/Trends
Technological shift: I saw this on youtube, where many other Volkswagen advertisements are accessible. Before youtube, video advertisements could only be seen on television, where the audience does not have a choice as to what appears on their screen.
Epistemological shift: This advertisement represents a shift from word to image. The ad uses images and music as its method of communication, rather than words.
Economic shift: Nick Drake’s music didn’t sell well during his lifetime. Decades later, Volkswagen included a song of his in one of their ads, positive that the ad would aid them in selling cars.

Facts
A Volkswagen provides you and your friends with meaningful experiences. Driving at nighttime in a VW is more meaningful than going to a big party. A moving VW is a great place to look at nighttime scenery. (Text at the end of the ad says – “The Cabrio/Drivers wanted”) The VW wants to be driven.


Principles
Individual meaning: This ad communicates a very powerful emotion in a vague way, so the viewer can feel like the ad is about his or her own unique memories.
Value messages: The ad portrays the value of friendship, and asserts the VW as the perfect place to spend time with friends.
Reality construction: Nostalgia distorts the way people think about their past. This ad persuasively constructs a reality where the viewer’s youth is just as good as they remember it.

Persuasive Techniques
Group Dynamics: The group of friends driving around in the VW eventually decides that their time is better spent together in a small group than with drunken strangers.
Nostalgia: The music, imagery, and plot of this ad are all nostalgic. Driving a VW feels like reliving moments the viewer nostalgic for.
Symbols: The VW logo is displayed in front of a starry sky at the end of the ad.
Big lie: Driving a Volkswagen is conducive to meaningful friendships and making memories.
Either/or: The viewer is persuaded that riding the Cabrio throughout the night is better than anything else they could be doing.

Seprite themes
-Social structures: the ad makes a divide between partygoers and the people in the car, and makes those in the car seem cooler.
-Ideology: people use the car as a means of performing freedom, as described throughout Republic of Drivers, which is especially important to people who don't have the amount of power they want. These are high school kids, who don't yet have the power of independence, who use the car to feel free.
-Technology: there is irony in how the kids in the car (a highly complex piece of technology) use it as a means of experiencing nature's visual beauty and stimulation (wind). Even if it's not experiencing nature, it's the same feelings people experience when deeply connected with a certain slice of nature.

-In Republic of Drivers, Seiler talks about the highway as a place to perform freedom. In the ad, the passengers opt out of going to a party, favoring the highway.
-In Carjacked, Lutz & Fernandez talk about how romantic notions of driving for some people stems from the image of a man driving a vehicle with a woman at his side. In the ad, a man is the driver, and numerous women are passengers.