"Be The First Highbrow In Your Neighborhood To Own A Beethoven, Brahms, Or Bach Sweatshirt"
The two ads below come from a very successful campaign for Rainier Ale, created by ad man Howard Gossage. Rainier had recently sponsored...View More
a classical music station & asked Gossage to create a radio ad. For days Gossage found himself stumped. As a last resort, on the day of the first show, he dashed off a commercial that offered to send listeners sweatshirts adorned with the face of either Beethoven, Brahms or Bach. Within two days there were 600 orders & Gossage decided to run an ad in California & eventually nation-wide. The campaign ended up netting 60,000 orders & the shirts landed in 1000+ department stores. The shirt-marker (also a client) had to retool just to keep pace with the orders. The first ad you see below is the ad he ran in California. The second is a national ad placed in the New Yorker. Read the annotations to find out why he changed the headline on the national ad.
