Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
27
Jul
2010
Man Men on Wheels: Vintage Car Ads
Babes, bumpers and Bentleys, or what Don Draper would’ve looked like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
After last weekend’s Mad Men season premiere, we felt a certain pang of nostalgia for an era we never actually lived in. Today, we’re celebrating this nostalgia with an intersection of two of the era’s greatest cultural landmarks — cars and advertising — with five fantastic collections of enough vintage car ads to make Don Draper’s portfolio look paltry.
AMERICAN CAR BROCHURES
Unassumingly and almost dryly titled, American Car Brochures offers an impressively vast archive of vintage car brochures and original factory documentation, equal parts eye candy, tech time machine and economic reality check. (Care for a “gay, young-looking” Aero Willys at $1,499, circa in 1943?)
Culled by Norwegian IT consultant Hans Tore Tangerud, the collection is catalogued by brand name and dates as far back as the early 1900’s.
SOVIET CAR ADVERTISING
While Don Draper was busy selling Cadillacs to the American classes, his Soviet counterpart — someone, we imagine, named Doncho Drapkov perhaps — was busy selling Ladas and Nivas on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
The always-excellent English Russia has a fantastic roundup of vintage Soviet car ads from the 1960’s-1980’s.
50′S VOLVO BOOKLET
It may be just a single piece of collateral, but this Volvo booklet from the 1950’s is a pinnacle of old-school art direction and storytelling. Aiming to introduce a foreign car into the American market, the book follows the journey of American couple Philip and (of course…) Janis Benson on their trip to “Volvoland” in (of course…) Sweden.
BRITISH CAR BROCHURES
Once you get past the crummy site design and awkward navigation, British Car Brochures is a treasure trove. Since he was a child, Romanian car enthusiast Hermann Egges has been collecting vintage car ads, brochures and articles. Now, his massive collection of over 1,250 brochures and 2,800 ads is available online for all to ogle, ranging from rare retro gems (1940’s Bentley, anyone?) to recent-vintage aesthetic atrocities (90’s Land Rover ads, we’re looking at you).
For more of the British vintage car advertising world, we recommend Heon Stevenson’s excellent illustrated anthology British Car Advertising of the 1960s.
PLAN 59
A museum and gift shop of mid-century illustration, Plan 59 has a formidable collection of vintage car ads from the 1930’s through 1950’s.
For a closer look at the fascinating history of car advertising, look no further than Classic Cars of the 20th Century: 100 Years of Automotive Ads, 1900-1999, which explores the lush visual language of automotive ads, decade by decade, in more than 500 advertisements from the collection of Taschen editor Jim Heimann.
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07
May
2010
Robin of Shoreditch: The 100 Brands Project
Robinhooding Subway, or how to make those doing well do good.
Despite the recession, the global economy is a massive force of commerce, shuffling billions of dollars around its ecosystem of goods and services. By comparison, the nonprofit sector — and humanitarian aid in particular — is microscopic. So what if could take a fraction of that fat commmercial mega-budget and allocate it to underfunded good causes? That’s what Robin of Shoreditch, a group of anonymous creative outlaws, is doing with The 100 Brands Project — an effort to take from the rich and give to the poor, or in this case, to the people of Haiti.
It’s a simple, brilliant idea — the team, composed of various ad industry creatives, do what they do best: They offer each company on BrandZ’s 100 brands index a creative idea that could help their business and, in return, they ask for 1/10000000 — that’s one ten-millionth — of the value of that brand as a fee, 100% of which goes to relief efforts in Haiti.
Every Monday morning, the crew released a new idea for one of these A-list brands, including FedEx, Nike and American Express. They then send the brand an actual invoice and hope for the best.
Why go anonymous?
The truth is we’d rather keep our identities secret so not to compromise our ‘normal life’ jobs at various advertising and marketing agencies. We’re creating ideas for the top 100 brands and some of these bring us into conflict with the brands we work on day-in, day-out through our jobs.” ~ “Little John”
None of the 12 companies approached so far have actually paid up, but we think this is a brilliantly innovative take on “corporate social responsibility” and any brand that embraces its incredible potential — to do good but also, perhaps cynically, to generate some solid buzz — would be deserving of an epic hat tip.
You can follow the project’s progress on the team’s blog and keep an eye on Vimeo channel for fresh videos every Monday.
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