Bugging out

By 1968, Avis' powerfully blunt "We try harder" campaign had been effectively checkmated by Hertz, forcing Avis' ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, to settle for a softer approach:

"Just one of 47 bugs we're trying to get rid of at Avis," the ad says.  In previous ads, Avis had never flinched at admitting responsibility for any problems; now the ads were creating humorous culprits to take the blame; the change in attitude couldn't be more stark.

And it probably didn't help that Essolube that run essentially the same campaign three decades earlier:



And if those illustrations seem vaguely familiar, yes, they're by Theodore "Dr. Suess" Geisel; long before he starting regaling children with tales of Horton, The Grinch and The Cat In The Hat, Geisel was a successful magazine illustrator, editorial cartoonist and advertising artist.
(Lots of other Dr. Suess-illustrated and concepted ads here.)

UPDATE 4:30 P.M.: Apparently, Shell also beat Avis in discovering its own engine-beastie in 1952. And judging by its devilish appearance, this one seems far more malevolent in nature:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

If two minutes is funny, why not ten?

Image
Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...
Read more

Red-Nosed Drunk – the audio play

Image
  It's Christmas Eve in a dive bar, where Santa's most famous reindeer has a lot to say about "The Big Guy," commercialism, and his role as a holiday icon. I wrote this in response to the Theatrical Shenanigans podcast’s call for holiday plays.  Since this would be an audio production, I realized I could adapt (and extend) my 2003 short essay about a conversation between a bartender and grumbling Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and not have to worry about costuming.  Produced by the podcast for their "12 Plays of Christmas" Special, December, 2024. (The title graphic for the play was created by me.)
Read more