Making the ad space part of the ad concept

Yes, yes, I know, print advertising is dead, especially newspaper advertising – but ads still use space in other mediums, so apply these observations as you will.
 
Make the height of the ad part of the concept

Look how this 1966 Mobil ad really sells the comparison of car collision at 80 mph with the impact of a car dropped from a ten-story building.

You could have used a rooftop shot of the car going over; you could have shown a tighter shot of a car falling past a row of windows; you could have shown the crushed car at the base of the building; but Len Sirowitz of Doyle Dane Bernbach used the height of the newspaper space to show the full size of building, inviting us the imagine the long fall of the automobile and what happens when it hits the ground. And making a static photo feel as dramatic as the same demonstration in the accompanying TV commercial. 
 
(The layout is even more brilliant when you consider that the ad was likely encountered by people reading the newspaper by holding it vertically.)
 
Make the width of the ad part of the concept

You may not immediately know you’re looking at an ad for Acapulco tourism, but the starkness and drama of this eye-stopping, eye-popping layout instantly pulls you in.

Produced around 1967 by Steve Frankfurt of Young & Rubicam, the ad uses the story of a man who dives daily off a 160-foot-high cliff. (“Acapulco is like that,” the copy tells us. “A little mad. A little wild.”)
 
You could shown the edge of the cliff and a pair of feet, looking down from the diver’s point of view. You could have shown him coming out of the water, dripping and elated. Or even, like the Mobil ad above, you could shown the height of the cliff, and a tiny diver launching himself into the air.
 
But Frankfurt used a dramatic angle and graphic simplicity to emphasize the grace of the diver in mid-air, his arms splayed to the very corners of the ad. (Appropriately, the ad ran during the agency’s “The Wings of Man” campaign for the airline.) 
 
Make the corner of the ad part of the concept

I could show the well-known “Think Small” ad for Volkswagen, with its little VW in the upper left corner, but here’s an even better example (also from Doyle Dane Bernbach, this time by art director Charlie Piccarillo).

This 1963 ad for back-to-school clothes at Ohrbach’s department store turned the blank space of the ad into a stark wall, and pushed the boy off-center, slumping unhappily against the “side” of the ad. 
 
You could have positioned the kid in the center of the page with same pouty expression. You could have put him in a tight closeup. But showing him dejected in the corner gets you not just a visually striking layout, it really sells his frustration at the thought of another school year. And note what he’s wearing (and not wearing). Shorts, tennis shoes, and no tee-shirt – more signifiers of the “summer freedom” he’s soon to be losing.
 
Or just make every square inch of the ad the whole concept

Another 1960s ad that can’t help but draw you in from Steve Frankfurt:


That small bit of copy at bottom right: “… And there are 27 other places in your life where Band-Aid Bandages ought to be.” 

* * *

(By the way, you’ll see these and many other classic ads at Dave Dye’s “Stuff from the Loft” web site, where he posts interviews and career retrospectives of advertising's most creative thinkers.) 

Comments

Susan Morris said…
I consider myself a student of advertising but I'm ashamed to admit half of these ads are new to me. Thank you Mr. McNamara for sharing these thought starters!
December 19, 2023 at 4:21 PM
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

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 t...
Read more

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