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A man on a bicycle crosses a good part of the city to visit his beloved Ismenia. While pedaling, with a bouquet of flowers in hand and the melody of the piccolo concerto in C major by Vivaldi in the background, he receives a shout from taxi drivers, workers and students who stare at him in astonishment: buy a car, parrot. The same phrase, a surprised Ismenia will tell him, when she receives him at the gate of her house.
Then, a deep voice over invites the audience to contract a loan with Banco de Santiago. That is the scheme of the well-known spot, starring the late Nissim Sharim, along with Delfina Guzmán.
The advertisement, produced by the Matte & Pérez agency, hit the screens in 1978, the same year that color broadcasts began and a plebiscite was called to submit to consultation the legitimacy of the military regime – the results of which were questioned as exist electoral registry. His main phrase until today is one of the most remembered among the advertising productions of the country.
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At that time, the country was in full swing of the new economic model promoted by the “Chicago boys” -the economists trained in the US-, who, in addition to the privatization of state companies, invited mass consumption taking advantage of the fixed dollar at 39 pesos , and the results of the economy that that year marked a GDP growth of 7.7%, according to World Bank figures.
The enthusiasm was such that General Augusto Pinochet did not hesitate to use the media to promote the supposed benefits of the new order. “Out of every ten Chileans, one will have a car. Out of every five, one will have a television and one out of seven will have a telephone ”, he promised around 1980.
On that string, the experts read, the impact of the commercial must be understood. “It connected very well with an aspiration of popular culture of the time, which was the desire to have a car,” explains Cristián Leporati, director of the School of Advertising at the Diego Portales University.
“Graphics are also beginning to appear in the newspapers that, if memory serves me correctly, were from Suzuki, in which a small car appeared and next to it was a tremendous building, super aspirational, with young, well-dressed people,” he adds. In other words, somehow, at that time, the bug of improving status through material goods began to get in, part of the economic culture of Chicago ”.
“This spot is very important,” says Óscar Contardo, author of Siutic (Planeta, 2013) and co-author of The eighties era (together with Macarena García, Planeta, 2015). “It was the first time that they put characters that one supposes funny to talk about a bank loan.”
Furthermore, it was a production that, in his opinion, summarized the ideology of the model. “It wasn’t even a car commercial, but a commercial asking for money to buy. And what do you buy? A car. This is how you are supposed to make the girl fall in love. It was the culture of consumption. Ask for money to buy because otherwise they will make fun of you on the street. And it is the culture of bullying, of people shouting ridicule in the street to another person ”.
This incipient culture of consumption is condensed in the one-minute spot, which installs the famous phrase that made it memorable until today. “All communicators who work in the commercial field know that always the jingle, or the pertinent phrase is what remains, and that is what happened with the ‘Buy yourself a parakeet car'”, explains Leporati.
Another aspect that draws the attention of specialists are the characters shown in the spot, all taken from the streets. I mean, no executives in suits; it is above all about showing the average Chilean. “A taxi driver appears, workers, students appear, it was a very simple, very cheap spot, but very well thought out because it also addressed the people who were pushing Chile at that time towards a new type of economy,” adds Leporati.
And in this regard, the academic relates that idea to another subsequent advertisement that he considers important. That of the remembered “Faúndez”, the electrician who answers his brand new cell phone in an elevator, while he is surrounded by encumbered executives who look at him somewhat puzzled, since until then mobile phones circulated almost exclusively among executives with high purchasing power.
That was a spot of the defunct CTC Startel, widely spread in the nineties, when Chile was opening up to free trade agreements, and products such as cable television, among many others, became widespread. “It is very memorable because it captures a historical moment of the country,” says Leporati. In his opinion, this reaffirms the idea of meritocracy, and allows him to make a link with the “perico” spot. “They are two ends of an iceberg, which is the neoliberal free market economy. There is the success of that story, because it is a country that believes in the model, and those spots connect very well with that popular feeling ”.
On the other hand, there are the actors. In the case of “perico”, the commercial brings together Nissim Sharim and Delfine Guzmán, two recognized opponents of the dictatorship who were already recognizable faces from their work at the Ictus theater -where they formed a creative committee together with Claudio di Girólamo-, but also for his participation on television, in a memorable comedy program, The Crank.
This space of sketches, broadcast between 1970 and 1976 on the screens of different channels (it went through TVN, Channel 13, Channel 9 and UCV), also had the participation of other actors of the Stroke who will make history both on television and on stage. ; Julio Jung, Patricio Contreras, Gloria Münchmayer, José Manuel Salcedo, Jaime Vadell, Jaime Celedón, María Elena Duvauchelle, among many others.
For this reason, Óscar Contardo thinks that the announcement of “perico” also had that tension between the actors and the economic policy that was promoted by La Moneda. “It was paradoxical because they are two characters from the left, Nissim Sharim and Delfina Guzmán, in some way, through that commercial, they were endorsing the new economic model. And a consumer model. Because it was asking the bank for a loan ”.
However, Cristián Leporati maintains that the success of the advertisement and the reach of its actors is read more from his television exposure, more for his stance against the regime. “They were well known characters and more than being opponents, it was because they were on television.” ensures. “We must not forget that at that time the control of information was brutal by the dictatorship, and for the same reason people were not so aware of what was happening in the country, that is, the political hypothesis in the fame of the spot, I think not, “he adds.
Culto managed a conversation with Delfina Guzmán for this article, but from their surroundings they stated that they would not deliver statements in this regard.
