In the post-war boom of the 1950s, Americans developed a serious case of wanderlust, coinciding with a newly ignited love affair with the automobile.
Those two forces combined to birth the 20th-century road trip, where families piled into station wagons, navigated with paper maps and sparked a decades-long trend that coined the pesty catchphrase, “Are we there yet?”
The phenomenon has waned in recent years—per the advent of mass air travel and discount airlines—but a nostalgic campaign out of Kentucky aims to revive it.
“Joy Ride,” with its vintage-style travel posters, says that simply hitting the blacktop is every bit as compelling as wherever you land. Provided it’s at the heart of the picturesque Bluegrass State, that is.
Calling it “the anti-destination destination campaign,” independent agency Coomer created “Joy Ride” for a co-operative of more than a dozen small towns, counties and points of interest throughout the state.
“We’re all so intent on going from point A to point B, but the idea here is to enjoy the open road and be where you are without necessarily thinking about where you’ll end up,” Greta Pittard Wright, COO and head of strategic planning at Coomer, told Adweek. “It harkens back to a time when Americans got out and just explored.”
As the centerpiece, Coomer made a short film starring American Pickers host Mike Wolfe and his partner Leticia Cline, a preservationist and Kentucky native. The two-minute video shows the couple, driving a cherry-red 1955 Chevy Nomad, tooling around on two-lane back roads, stopping at some requisite horse farms and bourbon distilleries along with out-of-the-way town squares, nature preserves and historic homes.
Art-forward approach
The campaign features more widely known cities like Lexington, Georgetown and state capital Frankfort, but also draws in off-the-beaten-path places like Winchester—home of Ale-8-One soda and the Beer Cheese Trail—and Harrodsburg, a landmark former Shaker community.