Saturday, February 9, 2008

'63 Chevrolet SS Newspaper Campaign

NOW SEE WHAT'S NEW AT YOUR CHEVROLET DEALERS. This ad and the seven that follow are all part of the same newspaper campaign that ran during two months of spring in 1963. I know you people who collect old ads don't have these but I thought you might like to see them anyhow. I know Corvair owners will be happy to see stuff they haven't seen before. There is avery large Corvair Owners Association and they even have a very nice magazine of their own. But on to the ads at hand. I was the art director on all but one and responsible for all as I had been promoted to the Chevrolet Passenger Car creative leadership. This is the first ad in the series and the first one I made. I thought we should make the ads as poster like as we could and I designed the big SS and logo symbol to go in every ad. The SS cars were very exciting cars and were drawing a lot of people to dealerships. The year before in 1962 Chevrolet introduced a "real fine" 409 but it didn't get a whole lot exposure at least in print ads. Now with this ad series more emphasis was being placed on performance and excitement. The thing that got me promoted was the '63 announcement campaign and this is an extension of that. [ You can see it farther down in the blog.] At the time "Big Daddy" our chairman Ted Little thought the ads were not exciting enough and so added the words "it's exciting" to everything. He may have been right but I wish he had let me have a go at making them more exciting. Some of these ads begin to show what GO CHEVROLET might have become.

2 comments:

Jeane Goforth said...

Jim,
I am Dort and Wally's niece. I love your blog. My son was a visual arts major at the local fine arts high school and is now studying auto mechanics at the community college with a plan to somehow combine art and cars. Looks like you did it first! I can't wait to show him!
Isn't blogging a blast? I have several, but have most fun with this one:
http://blog.al.com/goforth/
I'm going to subscribe to your feed so I can follow your posts. Keep up the good work!

Jim Bernardin said...

Thanks and say hello to Dort and Wally. I am just now learning how to do this and I have been making some mistakes. Son Jim is helping me. He has a blog too. He owns a resort and you can get to it by going to www.pinesandpalms.com Then go to his blog that is attached. Thanks for looking in and good luck with your son--cars and ads do go together.