What’s your choice? Car or Girl?

Pairing a beautiful car with an even more striking model is a marketing trick older than the automobile itself, one that reached full bloom in 1960s muscle car advertising with lines like Pontiac’s famous ‘What’s new pussycats?’ GTO campaign. Read on to find out how a decades-old formula built purely to provoke a reaction still shows up at car shows today, and why the original photographs have become collectible artifacts in their own right.

Long before automakers had focus groups or social media metrics, they had a formula that worked anyway: park a beautiful car next to an even more striking model, take the photograph, and let buyers argue about which one they actually wanted. It is a marketing trick with roots that stretch back further than most people assume — advertisements pairing women with vehicles show up as far back as the late 1800s, long before muscle cars existed to sell in the first place. By the 1960s, the formula had become a full genre of its own, showing up everywhere from magazine spreads to showroom posters. The strange part is how effectively it still works today, decades after the cars in those original photos stopped being new. Why does an image built purely to provoke a reaction still get people talking this long after the fact?

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A Marketing Trick Older Than the Automobile Industry Itself

Pairing an attractive model with a piece of machinery to sell it predates the automobile entirely — bicycle and sewing machine advertisements used the same basic formula in the late 1800s, decades before Detroit ever built a V8. What changed by the mid-20th century was scale: national magazines, billboards, and dealership showrooms gave automakers a much bigger stage to run the same trick on, and they took full advantage of it.

How the Formula Reached Muscle Cars

By the time muscle cars arrived in the mid-1960s, the pairing had become standard practice across nearly every performance brand’s advertising department. Automakers and aftermarket parts companies alike leaned on glamour photography because it reliably grabbed attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace, using the model as a not-so-subtle visual shorthand for the car’s own performance credentials.

Pontiac’s GTO Ads Set the Tone

Pontiac’s GTO advertising is often cited as the high-water mark of the genre. Pontiac even cut a promotional 45 record called ‘GeeTO Tiger,’ backed by a matching print and TV campaign built around a growling tiger mascot instead of a spec sheet, capturing exactly how unapologetically the era’s marketing leaned into personality and cheek over pure horsepower claims.

Selling Personality Instead of Spec Sheets

That approach reflected a broader shift in how muscle cars were sold. Rather than leading with horsepower figures and quarter-mile times the way later advertising eras would, 1960s campaigns sold an entire lifestyle and attitude, using aggressive model names, bright paint colors, and cheeky copy written directly at a younger generation trying to define its own identity apart from its parents’ cars.

Not Every Automaker Played the Same Game

Not every manufacturer embraced the formula equally. Some brands, particularly those courting a more conservative or family-oriented buyer, kept their advertising comparatively restrained, focusing on engineering claims and dealer financing instead. The contrast made the brands that did lean into glamour photography stand out even more sharply on a newsstand rack.

Car Shows Kept the Tradition Alive

The tradition never really disappeared — it simply moved from print advertising to car shows and calendar photography. Today it is practically expected at vintage car meets, where models in period-appropriate styling pose alongside restored classics for exactly the same reason automakers used the trick sixty years ago: it draws a crowd and holds attention longer than the car alone would.

Why the Images Became Collectible in Their Own Right

The photographs themselves have since become collectible artifacts in their own right, sought after less as advertising and more as a snapshot of exactly how brash and unfiltered muscle car marketing used to be before regulation, changing tastes, and a more cautious advertising culture toned the genre down for good.

When the Formula Started Drawing Criticism

By the 1970s, the same advertising formula that once felt bold started drawing real criticism as cultural attitudes shifted and objectification in advertising became a more openly debated topic. Automakers gradually pulled back on the most overt pairings, though the shift happened slowly and unevenly across brands rather than all at once.

How the Aftermarket Kept the Look Alive Longer

Even as major automakers softened their approach, aftermarket parts catalogs, calendars, and trade show booths kept a version of the same formula alive well into the following decades, often with far less restraint than the original factory campaigns ever showed. That gap between mainstream and aftermarket advertising standards persisted for years after the muscle car era itself had technically ended.

What Today’s Car Shows Do Differently

Modern car show promotional photography tends to frame the pairing more as a nod to period authenticity than a straightforward sales pitch, with models styled specifically to match a car’s model year rather than simply standing beside it. That subtle shift — treating the pairing as historical reenactment rather than active marketing — is part of how the tradition has managed to survive into an era with very different standards than the one that created it.

Why the Cars Still Outlast the Controversy

What has ultimately outlasted the controversy is the car itself, not the advertising that once sold it. A GTO or a Chevelle SS still draws a crowd at a modern car show regardless of how its original marketing has aged, and most collectors today separate the two almost automatically — appreciating the engineering and styling of a period muscle car while viewing its original glamour-photography advertising as a dated artifact of a specific decade rather than something worth reviving wholesale. That separation is probably healthier for the hobby’s long-term reputation than pretending the old marketing never happened, and it explains why period advertisements now live mostly in retrospective galleries and collector books rather than in any current automaker’s playbook. Museum exhibits on muscle car history now routinely display the advertising alongside the cars themselves, treating both as artifacts of the same era rather than pretending the marketing never happened, which lets modern audiences appreciate the engineering without having to endorse everything that once helped sell it, giving both the cars and the culture around them room to be understood in full context rather than edited down to only the flattering parts.

What the Photo Accompanying This Post Actually Shows

Setting the marketing history aside, the car in this particular photo is a dark green early-1970s Mopar B-body coupe, distinguished by a body-color dual-scoop hood, styled steel wheels wrapped in red-line tires, and a chrome front bumper with a divided grille consistent with Dodge and Plymouth intermediates of that era. The twin non-functional hood scoops and overall proportions point toward a Coronet-based Super Bee or a Road Runner-adjacent Plymouth from around 1969 to 1970, though a photo alone, without a visible VIN tag, fender badge close-up, or build sheet, cannot confirm the exact model, trim, or engine option with certainty. That is worth stating plainly rather than guessing a specific badge just to sound more authoritative than the image actually supports.

Reading Advertising History Without Repeating Its Mistakes

There is a useful distinction between studying this kind of advertising as history and simply reproducing it uncritically today, and most serious automotive publications now draw that line deliberately. Understanding why a campaign worked in 1966 does not require endorsing the assumptions baked into it, and a growing number of collector-focused outlets treat glamour-era advertising the same way film historians treat outdated genre conventions: worth examining for what it reveals about the period’s marketing psychology, without holding it up as a template anyone should be replicating in a current campaign. That framing lets enthusiasts appreciate why a photograph like the one paired with this post keeps circulating decades later, not because the formula itself has aged well, but because the car at the center of it has earned its own lasting appeal independent of how it was originally sold to buyers back when it was new.

The car pictured here has earned that lasting appeal on its own merits, independent of the pose it happened to be photographed in.

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