Alfa Romeo
Gestalt
Germans are able to pack an encyclopedia’s worth of meaning into one word. But their cars lack the emotional quality of Italian autos.
The German / Italian sports car rivalry has been raging since the 1960’s.
This ad was designed to address it head-on.
Brief
Differentiate Alfa from its German rivals by leaning into what makes it uniquely Italian: passion, emotion, and the thrill of the drive.
Insight
German automakers dominate on precision engineering, performance stats, and status. Alfa competes on something harder to measure: the feeling you get behind the wheel.
Italian car brands have always had an inferiority complex when stacked against the big German brands. On Alfa Romeo, our job was to lean into what made them different: passion, emotion, and the unmatched thrill of driving an Italian sports car.
I wanted an ad that captured that ethos. And because I’m also a nerd and a writer, I landed on this conceit: gestalt. A German word meaning “something made of many parts, yet greater than their sum.”
The hook was simple: the Germans coined the word. The Italians built the car. We mocked it up, pitched it, and were set to shoot… until COVID struck. 😩
Concept
Borrow a bit of German culture to celebrate Italian automotive superiority. The Germans may have coined the word gestalt, but the Italians built the car that embodies it.
We mocked it up, pitched it, and were prepping production when COVID shut it down. The idea never made it to the road, but it remains one of my favorites for how simply it captured the brand’s soul.