Thursday, February 7, 2008

Chevrolet Nova Magazine Ad

LUXURIOUS LIVELINESS AT A LOW, LOW PRICE. CHEVY II NOVA. I have this ad framed and hanging on my office wall at home. If you happen to have one of these torn from a magazine you will enjoy owning it more when you know more about the picture. It was shot by Warren Winstanley on a parking lot near his studio in Detroit. The young lady in the car is his daughter who at the time thought I looked like Perry Como. The guy trying to coax her little brother out of the car is a model. At the size we have here it's hard to tell what the model has in his hand but it is a dollar bill. And the reason I have the ad framed is that the little boy is my son Tom. I often used my sons in ads-I have four. Two of them found their way into the advertising business. Number three son John is the creative director at an agency in California and number one son Tom, the boy in the picture, is now the Worldwide Chairman and CEO of the Leo Burnett Agency. How about that! When we did this ad, Leo was still alive and running his agency. If anyone had told me back then that in years to come the Chairman of Leo Burnett would be calling me and my wife Ruth on the phone regularly and having us visit him at his home I would have laughed at them. They would have been out of their mind. The Leo Burnett agency does the advertising for Pontiac, Buick, and GMC Trucks among a bunch of other accounts. Anybody collecting ads while they are still easy to come by?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jim, I was at a Border's today, browing the car books (natch), and I came upon a series of 4 small-format hardbounds by the editors of Consumer Guide. They were Chevy Classic, Ford Classics, Cadillac Classic and Chrysler Classics. Each one seemed to covert the period of roughly 1948 to 1973 and the pages paired color photography of certain models from that year with vintage color ads for that same car. This ad of yours was one of a number of ads you've posted on your blog here that appear in the Chevy Classics. Did you assist in this book's production? I didn't get the Ford/Chevy books today but I'm sure I will...and it was interesting to stand there and compare the Ford and Chevy ad styles year by year...not only how they changed but to see what Ford was doing at the same time you were doing some of these.