Everyone is talking about the weather. We are not.

Everyone is talking about the weather. We are not. was the title of a highly regarded advertising campaign launched by the then Deutsche Bundesbahn in the autumn of 1966 . The slogan, which is one of the most successful in the history of the former Federal Railroad, emphasized the railway's relatively great independence from the weather compared to other modes of transport. Your idea and choice of words were copied several times.

The campaign was developed by the McCann Erickson advertising agency and designed and written by Carolus Horn and Margot Müller .

The campaign, which was started in autumn 1966, was supported in the following months by further motifs under the mottos "Our locomotives are getting used to smoking" (summer 1968, when the steam locomotives are beginning to be decommissioned ) and "The car of the year" (in the form of a locomotive) accompanied.

Motifs

Posters

Bundesbahn logo

The campaign poster showed the three-line sentence “Everyone is talking about the weather” in white bold letters and in the center a picture of a class E 10 locomotive in a snowy landscape, signed by the (smaller) words “We don't.”. Most of the poster was set on a black background, surrounded by a thin white frame. At the bottom left, in small letters, was the sentence “Better to take the Federal Railroad”, and at the bottom right the logo of the Federal Railroad.

Television advertising

The campaign was accompanied by various black and white TV commercials. The short films showed various settings of weather-related difficulties for various other modes of transport. They always ended with (apparently without difficulty) rolling railway vehicles in bad weather. The words “Everyone is talking about the weather. We are not. We always drive. ”Before the Bundesbahn logo was displayed in the middle in large format.

Reactions

The campaign slogan has been copied and varied many times. Examples of its use are campaigns for cars, financial investments or currywurst stalls. The modification of the Bundesbahn motif on an election poster for the Socialist German Student Union at the University of Stuttgart also attracted a lot of attention in 1968 .

Socialist German Student Union

On a consistently red background in the upper area in white letters distributed in the middle on three lines could be read “Everyone is talking about the weather”. The heads of Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels and Lenin were depicted in the middle of the poster . The lower third of the motif was filled with the centered words "We do not.", The bottom line was filled with the designation "SDS SOZIALISTISCHER DEUTSCHER STUDENTENBUND".

The motif designed by Ulrich Bernhardt and Jürgen Holtfreter , two students at the Stuttgart Art Academy , in January 1968 was used by political activists of the student movement in the late 1960s .

The poster was originally developed for the SDS election campaign at the University of Stuttgart. It was more by chance that the Stuttgart students came up with the slogan with the weather. At that time there were three heads cut out on a table on a black sheet with the said railway slogan. The poster was inspired by this motif. It appeared in a first edition of 60, then 2000 copies at the University of Stuttgart. According to a report by the DPA , newspapers throughout Germany reported the motif. Several mass editions followed in numbers of over 50,000 copies. Among other things, the federal executive committee of the SDS financed the legal representation in lawsuits for breaches of the peace after protest actions against the emergency laws .

Automobile manufacturer

A few years after the DB campaign was published, Fiat responded to the Bundesbahn campaign to introduce its Fiat Panda . The manufacturer placed advertisements under the headline “Let's talk about the weather for a change.” The motif showed the four-wheel drive car between snow-covered tracks.

The Bundesbahn responded with advertisements showing snow, ice, mud and fog, combined with the subline “What does the railway say about this? She is silent and drives. "

The green

The Greens moved with the slogan “Everyone is talking about Germany. We're talking about the weather ”in the 1990 Bundestag election campaign . The slogan referred to the fact that the 1990 election was all about German reunification . The Greens, however, were critical of the association and wanted to discuss topics such as acid rain or global warming . The voters, on the other hand, were very interested in the union and its consequences.

After the Greens entered the Bundestag for the first time in 1983 and again in 1987, they failed in this election because of the five percent hurdle . Only Bündnis 90 in the new federal states , which later merged with the Greens from the west to form Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen and to which the Green Party in the GDR belonged, could because of the five percent threshold for the new federal states move in the Bundestag.

Alliance 90 had not adopted the campaign slogan of the West German Greens.

effect

The impact of the campaign was ambivalent . On the one hand, the campaign very quickly achieved a level of awareness - which in some cases continues to this day. On the other hand, their very general advertising promise was often directed against the railway as soon as weather-related operational disruptions occurred. Sometimes the saying was perceived as bragging or "ostentatious".

When on 18./19. In January 2007, as a result of hurricane Kyrill, train services across Germany were discontinued, various media picked up the 40-year-old slogan.

Web links

Motif of the Bundesbahn campaign on the Spiegel Online website
A product from the museum shop ( Memento from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). Background information on the SDS variant on the pages of the museum magazine

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d Volker Albus, Achim Heine: Die Bahn. Brand culture positions. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-87584-055-0 , pp. 34, 39, 42 f, 164.
^ DB Museum Nürnberg (ed.): On separate tracks: Reichsbahn and Bundesbahn 1945–1989. Verlag DB Museum, Nuremberg 2001, ISBN 3-9807652-3-7 .
↑ ^a ^b DB Museum (Ed.): Go easy Go Bahn. Nuremberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-9807652-9-9 , p. 178.
↑ The poster of the movement . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , May 14, 2008
↑ Helmut Böttiger: When suddenly everyone was talking about the weather. In: Helmut Böttiger (ed.): The VFB greets the brave Viet Cong. Stuttgart in the 1960s. Stuttgart 1989, pp. 9-12.

[db-marken-34-1] Volker Albus, Achim Heine: Die Bahn. Brand culture positions. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-87584-055-0 , pp. 34, 39, 42 f, 164.

[db-museum-2001-2] DB Museum Nürnberg (ed.): On separate tracks: Reichsbahn and Bundesbahn 1945–1989. Verlag DB Museum, Nuremberg 2001, ISBN 3-9807652-3-7 .

[db-museum-2008-3] DB Museum (Ed.): Go easy Go Bahn. Nuremberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-9807652-9-9 , p. 178.

[4] The poster of the movement . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , May 14, 2008

[boettinger-5] Helmut Böttiger: When suddenly everyone was talking about the weather. In: Helmut Böttiger (ed.): The VFB greets the brave Viet Cong. Stuttgart in the 1960s. Stuttgart 1989, pp. 9-12.