Imagine yourself here

Pulling the reader into your ad as an almost active participant can result in some very effective communication. This 1960s-era ad makes it easy to imagine yourself in the same embarrassing situation:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fly Me Again

Image
We referenced this ad campaign in an earlier post , but it really deserves its own entry. This memorable/notorious American Airlines campaign appeared back in 1971, at the behest of National Airlines'  Lewis Maytag  who sought to modernize the airline and the image of its stewardesses.  (Yes, they were still known as stewardesses back then.) At the time, airline advertising had frequently based their messages on the friendliness and attentiveness of their stewardesses, but previous efforts tended more toward the chauvinistic end of sexism spectrum, treating them more like Ladies Of The Air than ladies of the night: (Despite the caveman ethos of the headline and illustration, if you click on the ad to enlarge it and read the copy, you'll see it's actually about men being so beguiled by their stewardesses that they often took them for wives -- after first mistaking wives for servants, I suppose.) But now, with the sexual revolution and women's liberation in full swing (an...
Read more

Avis Analysis - part 5

Image
Concluding our look at the hits and misses during the seminal years of Avis' famous "We Try Harder" campaign. Throughout the initial "We Try Harder" campaign, Avis avoided any mention of who was #1 to their #2 status.  Everyone knew who #1 was, of course, and back then, it was almost unheard of for any company to name their competitors.  It may also have had something to do with knowing that, with its much larger ad budget, Hertz could squash Avis in any direct competition.   This ad, coming late in the campaign, was one of the more obvious, though still veiled, references to their larger rival: If you were watching TV back in the mid 1960s, you'd get the reference.  If not, here's a typical Hertz spot from that era.  Watch for the visual mnemonic at the end: "I feel all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant," Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto  is reputed to have said following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Whether Hertz was sleepwalking th...
Read more

Doing the Shark Dance

Image
So there I was, on the sands of a Florida beach, surrounded by a group of young people in swimwear, all eyes on me as I instructed them in the dance they were about to perform. The dance I was still coming up with barely five minutes earlier. The Shark Dance.   In 1994, I was a writer at an ad agency in Minneapolis, where one of my projects was the launch of that year’s Tigershark personal watercraft models made by Arctic Cat. Along with writing the ads and brochure, I would be going down to Florida to help supervise the film shoot of people riding Tigersharks in the gulf.    That included a riff on  Jaws , where beachgoers are panicked by a kid yelling “Shark!” as he spots a guy on a Tigershark. And later, the four Tigershark models zooming left to right across the screen, followed by a large shark fin we had made that was pulled through the water on a submerged rig. The fin was convincing enough that two riders unconnected to our shoot darted over and started yelli...
Read more