There were other instances also regarding ads that were groundbreaking for their time. Harvey Probber made elegant modern furniture, and my dad says he came up with the ad, a beautiful chair with a matchbook under one leg, and the line: "If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor," and a piece of copy that went with it that he thought was very good.
Lately, it's been coming up more, or at least more publicly, so I started asking questions.Īccording to my father, it all started with the Harvey Probber account.
But I've also thought there's something inherently undignified about the whole thing, like it's beneath my father to care whether or not George Lois is taking credit for this or that slogan from 1962, so I never really paid attention to the details. Of course I want to stick up for my father, take his side. I've had mixed feelings about this fight. "I'm not going to get into a sophomoric fight with a disgruntled ex-partner," he wrote in an email. George Lois wouldn't talk to me for this story. In 1960, they both left DDB and joined up with another guy, Fred Papert, to form their own upstart agency called PKL: Papert, Koenig and Lois. But before that, George Lois worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach, and so did my father. He's well known for a lot of things, but maybe especially for his provocative and funny Esquire magazine covers from the 1960s, like the one of Muhammad Ali posing as Saint Sebastian. If you've heard of anyone in the advertising industry, it might be George Lois. In this scene, the agency's creative team contemplates the Lemon ad.
That ad was followed by Lemon, another VW ad so iconic it made it onto the TV show Mad Men, the show set in 1960 about an ad agency that's slightly behind the times. A picture of a tiny car on a big, white page and some amused self-deprecating copy. The Marlboro Man is on it and the Energizer Bunny, "Good to the Last Drop" from Maxwell House and the "Keep America Beautiful" crying Indian.īut the number-one ad, the top of the 100 list? "Think Small." That was Volkswagen's American campaign to sell the Beetle in 1959, and my father wrote it. The magazine Advertising Age made a list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century. He wrote "Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking." He named Earth Day "Earth Day." It falls on his birthday, April 22. That, he's willing to fight for, and he has been fighting for it for decades. His real legacy, though, in advertising, that's another story. But he's not going to make a stink if they don't. My dad would like people to recognize him for his contributions to shrimp and character and thumb wrestling. You can't prove the origin of any of this stuff, and it's annoying when people like Norman Mailer take credit. Because as we now know, my dad invented it at Camp Greylock for boys. Mailer, who died in 2007, was a famous thumb wrestler, but not its inventor.
We crave the obstacles.Īccording to my father, Norman Mailer also said he invented thumb wrestling. We want him to be having hand-to-hand combat with his crew en route.
They noticed that, if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first, and then the mast later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play.Īnd again, here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent, and yet, we want more from this guy. Most people at that time already knew that the Earth was round. And furthermore, there was no element of is the Earth round or flat here. There's a lot of disagreement among historians that even Columbus' best-known biographer isn't totally sure where he was headed. That, in fact, we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going. So there's a guy named James Loewen, a professor at University of Vermont, who has pointed out that virtually every element of this story is false. And, in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the Earth, and they almost mutinied. But no one believed his crazy theory that the Earth was round. Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west.