Not only was it small on the outside and roomy on the inside, the 1974 International Scout still had a lot of space for a lot of things. For this reason, it seemed only sensible to replace your compact car, luxury car, or station wagon with an International Scout as demonstrated in this piece of vintage advertising genius from IH.
Although it doesn't take a lot to convince us that replacing a fleet of malaise era cars with Scouts is a flash of brilliance, we imagine the people driving these cars might have had a few problems if they chose to take International Harvester's advice.
The Scout was small, so the compact car owner wouldn't have had an issue, except of course for significantly reduced gas mileage (small car owners usually aren't concerned with that).Replacing your station wagon or sedan with a Scout wasn't a much better prospect on paper. The 1974 Scout may have had a lot of space for a lot of things, but it's people hauling capacity couldn't compare to a huge mid 70s sedan or wagon.
Having taken all of that into account and factoring in our significant IH bias, it still doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to think anyone who saw this ad and traded in their malaise era land yacht or compact car for a Scout made the right choice—at least until they hit the gas pumps for the first time or tried to take the whole family somewhere.