Robert Cox, ad man behind Ford's 'Quality is Job 1' pitch, dies

Robert Cox, an outspoken New York advertising executive who helped Ford Motor Co. embrace the slogan “Quality is Job 1” in the 1980s and later worked on ad campaigns for Honda, Saturn and a Mercedes-Benz dealership in New Jersey, died June 18. He was 78.

As an art director in the 1980s, Cox was credited by his peers for the radical overhaul of standard car and truck advertising at the time by showing a vehicle in profile.

“Before, it had always been a front three-quarters view, or a back seven-eighths,” John Ferrell, the chief creative officer of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos in New York, told The New York Times in 1989. “That work showed a fine sense of design and a real reduction of elements to their ultimate simplicity.”

Cox, who also helped craft first lady Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug pitch, “Just Say No,” in the 1980s and “All aboard!” for Amtrak, later came to decry the ubiquity in automotive advertising.

When BMW dumped Fallon Worldwide in 2005 because the “all-silver-all-the-time” carmaker felt the ad agency wasn’t being original enough, Cox called it a bum rap.

“What BMW should do is fire Chris Bangle, the designer who went completely bonkers on the 7 Series trunk lid,” Cox wrote in Adweek in February 2006.

Robert Cox was born in New York City in 1937 and later attended Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, according to The New York Times.

Advertising ran in the family. Cox’s dad was an advertising art director.

‘Quality is Job 1’ roots

Ford, in a bid to challenge the rise of Japanese imports, began a major push to improve and embrace quality in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Wells, Rich, Greene, the New York advertising firm where Cox worked as creative director, took on the Ford account in 1979. While Ford used ads in 1979 and 1980 to underscore a commitment to quality and technology -- replacing Bill Cosby after the comedian’s three-year run as a company spokesman -- it wasn’t until the summer of 1981 that “Quality is Job 1” became Ford’s calling card in marketing.

Before Cox’s campaign, “Job 1” meant something very different -- and sacred -- to Detroit automakers. Job 1 referred to the first of a new or redesigned model that rolled off the assembly line.

The Detroit priority at the time was, “Don’t worry what the car is like, just get it out on time,” author Jeremy Main wrote in his book, Quality Wars: The Triumphs and Defeats of American Business.

And Ford was very much a disciple of the practice. In 1978, a year before he became CEO of the company, Ford President Philip Caldwell wrote a note to himself before a meeting: “quality – number one.” Caldwell later decreed at the management meeting, Main wrote, that quality would become a new priority for the automaker.

Donald Petersen, Ford’s president in the early 1980s, who later became CEO and chairman, also embraced the quality push and the slogan was soon plastered across Ford. A 1982 commercial turned the words into a jingle and featured workers describing specific quality updates on vehicles. The phrase also appeared in print ads, like one that boldly placed “Bug Killers” atop a Ford assembly line. “Nobody wants to buy a car that hasn’t had the bugs worked out,” the 1982 poster read. Lining the bottom of the ad was the Job 1 slogan.

Ford dropped the "Quality is Job 1" campaign after 17 years when it launched “Better Ideas. Driven by you.” in 1998.

Saturn campaign

In early 1982, Cox was named executive vice president and executive creative director for Needham, Harper & Steers in New York. When the agency became Needham Harper Worldwide, Cox became director of creative services.

Hal Riney & Partners, a scrappy San Francisco agency, hired Cox as executive creative director under a 1988 restructuring. The company beat out a New York and Boston agency to win Saturn’s initial ad account, valued at $100 million, and hired some 50 staff members to launch General Motors’ first new-car brand since 1919.

In a 2005 letter to Automotive News, Cox ridiculed the “awesome powers of General Motors’ marketing and strategic thinkers” in creating and positioning the new Saturn brand and praised the advertising genius of Hal Riney in hiding the otherwise bland Saturn product behind the excited faces of its customers.

“By Job 1, the Saturn was a good 10 years behind the Honda Civic technologically -- not a lot to brag about,” Cox wrote. “Let the record show that the true GM marketing magician [behind Saturn] was none other than Hal Riney himself.”

Cox later started his own advertising firm, The Cox Group.

He was also responsible for Honda Motor Co.’s 1978 “We Make it Simple” campaign used to market small and fuel-efficient cars.

Eventually, the world of automobile advertising grew dull for Cox. In a 2006 opinion piece for Adweek, he said a “lemming effect” and “boring visual sameness” had taken hold of the industry’s marketing strategies.

He wrote of automotive ads’ monotonous use of silver-colored vehicles and photo shoots from a “helicopter on winding roads in low light, either along the Pacific coast” or the desert.

“One could argue that Kia is bootstrapping by showing a silver car,” he wrote. “‘Look dear, that looks just like the BMW you wanted to buy.’”

And he took a dig at his former client, Honda, for generic marketing after “the millions spent on positioning the Honda brand” as something different.

When Cox’s first car, a silver Lancia Appia, was repainted, he was warned never to ding it because the body shop couldn’t guarantee it could match the color on a repaired fender. From then on, he always drove black cars.

Cox died of complications from a heart attack, The New York Times reported. He is survived by his wife, son, daughter, three grandchildren and sister.

David Phillips contributed to this report.