The moon shot heard round the 'world...

What's the thinking behind this fanciful ad for True Temper golf clubs? Is it the allure of the moon, pock-marked with craters, as a kind of ready-made planetary golf course?


In the second column, the copy makes a more grounded connection:
...the True Temper aluminum shafts, used by the leading club makers, are fabricated of an aluminum alloy recently developed for aviation and aerospace projects.
But wait. Did I call this ad fanciful? Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard, walking on the moon, actually did swing a club at two golf balls. Talking by radio to NASA at the time, Shepard said, "you might recognize what I have in my hand as the handle for the contingency sample return; it just so happens to have a genuine six iron on the bottom of it ... Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can't do this with two hands, but I'm going to try a little sand-trap shot here."

Though he initially said that the second shot went "miles and miles and miles" in the moon's lower gravity (who was there to check?), it apparently was really in the 200 to 400 yard range.

And you think you have trouble getting a tee time.

Interestingly, if you think it was the event that inspired the ad, think again: Shepard took his "moon shot" in 1971; True Temper's ad ran in 1969.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not just hyperbole

Image
Maybe you've seen this classic Guinness poster, created back in the '30s and assumed that it was nothing more than silly hyperbole: And you'd be partly right. The idea is actually based on the high iron content of Guinness (probably from the water used), though of course, the benefit of this is exaggerated to an unbelievable extent in the poster above. That didn't stop the image from becoming so iconic that a pint Guinness became known as a "girder." The image also inspired this parody from Heinekin some 40 years later (though its likely that many young drinkers never realized its source), that both fit the idea into its own ad format and made the male sexual subtext even more implicit: (Best not to take any of this too seriously, though. In reality, the pictures in the Heinken ad would have to be reversed.)
Read more

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

I wanted to like this ad, I really did

Image
When I first came across it, I (wrongly) assumed it was the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, using a very minimalist layout to catch attention and evoke emotion, sort of like they did with the Polaroid ads in the ‘60s . No logo, just a simple headline, and an intriguing illustration that tells you nothing about the product, only the elation it will inspire in the woman in the your life. What an incredible way to portray a woman leaping into the arms of her man, I thought, showing only what’s necessary to imply the situation, spurring the reader to imagine the embrace, the eyes, the kiss.   Brilliant, I thought. Then I read the headline.    “Wear an Arrow Shirt and you'll simply sweep her off her feet!”   No.   No, I don’t believe this ad, even for a minute.    The only way to sell this scenario is if the emotion implied feels true. Even in 1949, it’s hard to imagine anyone got this excited about a dress shirt. Unless he just got home from the service and this is the first time in years
Read more