How Volkswagen mended my broken heart – and why its new ad hits home

VW's family values

With that formula, you’d be hard-pressed to separate the individual car models vying for your attention.

It’s cheap – a few days at most on set or shoot (if it’s not wholly imported from overseas) – and it’s safe, because it showcases the obvious features your average family buyer will look at.

What that sort of ad doesn’t have – despite the emphasis on family values – is any sort of real emotion, the sort which makes you love your car not merely as a four-wheel piece of transport, but as an integral part of your life.

In my case, years ago, it was a classic South African Volkswagen ad which appeared at just the right time to mend my broken heart. No, it wasn’t romance; it was the realisation that, in buying my first new car, an Opel Kadett, I had made one of the worst decisions of my life.

It would take half a book to describe the faults in the car and the appalling service from didn’t-care dealers. Before embarking on a trip to Zimbabwe with my pregnant wife, I informed an Opel dealer principal that if the car broke down, I would leave it on the side of the road and come back to find him. You get the picture… I used to be able to do barely concealed violence pretty well when I was younger.

Then, I saw the VW Family ad – with hundreds of VW employees outside the factory in Uitenhage, forming the iconic badge with the unforgettable backing track: V-Double You and Me, the Volkswagen family…

Advertising

Volkswagen refreshed iconic VW You and Me TVC as part of their 75th anniversary in SA

28 Apr 2026

They, I understood, could feel my pain and offer a cure. That cure, acquired a few months later, was a Jetta, which stood by my young family and me for more than two decades. I felt I had come home. I felt I was part of that family.

I bought another Jetta later and will never forget that ad because it was that which bonded me to VW for life, effectively.

As the company celebrates its 75th anniversary in South Africa this year, the VW Family ad has been revived and, although it’s updated with the new models, the essence is still very much the same: We are the People’s Car. And we will always be.

The fact that the ad still retains the original essence is testament to the original creative idea – and to the fact that the brand still delivers for tens of thousands of devoted fans. It also retains the ordinary people – like you and like me – who make the memories for people like you and me.

That’s what my Jetta did – made the memories for our family. And VW is still doing that, so another in a long line of Orchids from me to Volkswagen for another stellar execution and a reminder that the best marketing always puts people front and centre.

Service delivery

A colleague asked me the other day how I am finding it living down at the coast – and I said, facetiously, that I really do miss Pikitup, Johannesburg’s waste collection and disposal “service”.

Even as I made that remark, I was well aware that many householders have been experiencing poor, or non-existent, service from that entity – whose CEO earns about R4m a year, according to some reports.

Then I saw the latest bit of AI-generated rubbish being spread by the City to tell people how wonderful it is and why they should pay their bills.

Perhaps if the municipal mavens spent more time trying to actually improve services, rather than telling residents – in the face of objective evidence to the contrary – that they are doing their jobs, then the city would be a better place.

Ironically, apart from the fact that the silliness appeared, mid-crisis, on Pikitup social media feeds, it was also marked as emanating from the City’s Finance Department. At the same moment, thousands of ratepayers are getting obviously inflated and incorrect bills and struggling against the treacle-like bureaucracy to rectify matters. You absolutely, as the Yanks say, cannot make this stuff up…

When you’re in trouble, don’t try and make it worse by claiming you’re wonderful. That’s deceitful and disrespectful of the people you’re meant to be serving.

So, you get another Onion for wasting time and resources on this insulting, self-serving marketing, City of Johannesburg.