David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, was among a handful of people who influenced my career bigtime. So when I read a recent comment by Tom Messner on the Bob Bly blog regarding the origin of Sir David's famous advertising concept, I was more than a little interested.
Tom wrote, "A guy I knew at BBDO had an ad for Pierce-Arrow circa 1932 in his office. (Jerry Gerber was his name.) Framed. It was the Rolls-Royce headline done first for that company, Pierce-Arrow. So another Madison Avenue tradition was observed by Sir David, borrowing."
Right after I saw that, I did a Google search and realized that Tom wasn't the first advertising professional to question the provenance of Ogilvy's headline.
Then I began looking through images of Pierce-Arrow ads on the Internet -- including tear sheets being auctioned off on eBay -- but couldn't see anything from PA that resembled the Ogilvy line.
While on eBay, I found a CD-ROM containing hundreds of Pierce-Arrow ads. It's called A History in Advertising -- Pierce Arrow: 1904-1937. The publisher, McBride, has a ton of fascinating old advertising available for students of the business.
Anyway, back to Ogilvy. From the looks of things, I'm holding the best resource available to answer an important question -- one that's going to keep coming up as people do advertising-related Internet searches.
I'd love to meticulously review the headline and body copy of every single Pierce-Arrow ad on the CD-ROM, but because of my day job, I don't have time. Is there a student of advertising out there who'd like to take on this task? I'll do a future post on this and give you credit. You'll contribute a little something to the history of advertising. If interested, please email me at robert@themothersofinvention.com.
Until we do the review of the Pierce-Arrow advertising archive, let's give David Ogilvy, who gave a ton back to the industry, the benefit of the doubt. And if anyone has anything to contribute right away, by all means add a comment or shoot me an email.
