Wednesday, March 12, 2008

'58 Chevrolet Magazine Ad -Impala Convertible

SERENITY...BY DESIGN !  A car is more than just the sum of good engineering. Here in the new CHEVROLET, superlative design has created a new dimension....a harmony of behavior, a serene personality that glorifies every mile you travel.   
    Wow, what a headline. I wonder who wrote that. I wonder if anyone believed it. I wonder how it got approved. I wonder. The illustration is a beauty and who wouldn't want to be there with the young lady in the tree and a good looking new convertible. Somewhere I remember seeing a layout for a newspaper ad with a very similar situation. Probably became the inspiration for this nice illustration. The art directors I remember being in the ad group that produced this are Bob Freeman, Doug MacIntosh, and Bob Hungerford. There were others too. George Guido did a lot of the newspaper ads and may have been there too. Maybe Joe Kidd had started by then. Anyhow Jim Hastings would have been watching over everything.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim,
I'm pretty sure that Barney Clark wrote this ad, he usually came up with some great ideas.
I left the sales promotion group sometime in early '59 and was AD on all of the magazine ads for about a year, these ads all were photographic, mostly shot by Todd Walker in California. I'm not sure just when I left Campbell Ewald, but Jim Hastings was moving up and offered me his job. I declined, as I wanted to pursue illustration and decided to freelance. What is funny , is that after I left Jim hired me to work on a secret project, the announcement ads for Corvair. They set me up in an offic near CE, everyone was wondering why I was still around. This project was so secretive that I had to set type by breaking up the headlines and copy and sending it to different typesetters and then reassembling the stuff, it was a real nightmare !
Harry

Anonymous said...

Hi Jim,
I forgot to mention that after I worked on the Magazine ads, Sy Lachuisa took over my job. I was then assigned with writer Fenton Ludke to be in a special group called PLUS ONE. We were to come up with our own ideas for ads, etc, we were in direct competition with the regular Chevrolet group. We were directly responsible to Henry Little and Clarence Hatch, a senior account exec. They wanted us to come up with some wild, far out ideas which we would present when the regular group presented. It was a lot of fun but I don't think that any of our things ever materialized into ads. This project lasted a little over a year, I believe that I left CE after it ended.
When I started freelancing I managed to illustrate a few newspaper ads for you and Joe Kidd and also worked on catalog illustrations for Tom Clarke. Those were great times.
Harry