From time to time, we like to change The List up and present old covers, brochures, catalogs, and advertisements of yesteryear. Today, we’re going to focus on one year, one company, and one series of win ads from Cycle News that used hall-of-fame levels of cleverness and overall production: Yamaha’s movie-poster parodies of 2001.
Back in 2001, Cycle News was the industry’s weekly bible, and every brand that won would use the paper to boast about their wins. But year after year, week after week, it can start to get redundant.
“It’s a really big deal to our brand and the heritage of Yamaha when we win a race, and we are of course very proud of our motorcycles and our riders,” explains Bob Starr, General Manager of Motorsports Communications for Yamaha Motor Corp. U.S. “We also like to step out of the norm creatively as that ultimately attracts attention to our brand, after all, how many times do you see the same old cliché slogans and headlines? So for that year, we decided to go a different route...”
With the help of Marshall Advertising, the "Men in Blue" at Yamaha came up with a whole bunch of funny headlines and photoshopped images for every one of their major wins that season. We wanted to look back at some of those '01 Yamaha ads for this week’s The List…
