Below are eleven newspaper advertisements for Fina gas stations, in chronological order (1961-1963), written by legendary ad man, Howard Gossage. At the time,...View More
Fina was a popular up and coming gas station that wanted to compete with big brands like Shell and Sunoco. Back then, the trend in gasoline advertising was to talk about the different additives in your gasoline that make it unique. Not one to follow the crowd, Gossage sent someone out to work at multiple gas stations and do exhaustive customer research. After weeks of surveying the market, the consensus was that no one cared about gasoline or what was in it. This humorously led them to the idea that they could stand out by coloring tire air. The story is told by Gossage himself in this rare audio clip: http://www.adbuzz.com/OLD/GossageGallery/pinkair.mp3 In the ads below, you'll see that they had a "five year plan" to develop the pink air, even stating that on May 12, 1966, all Fina gas stations will have pink air. Unfortunately, they never figured it out and had to end the campaign. However, pink air was the basis of their advertising for three years and to make up for the lack of it, they offered customers and children a pink Fina ballon (which was placed inside a bigger clear balloon). Gossage also created a hilarious tagline that mocked common gas station advertising, "If you’re driving down the road and you see a Fina station and it’s on your side so you don’t have to make a U-turn through traffic and there aren’t six cars waiting and you need gas or something please stop in." Lastly, because Fina was an asphalt company too, Gossage created a contest where you could win 15 yards of pink asphalt. The person who had the best explanation of why they wanted it would be the winner. Overall, Gossage's Fina campaign was a bold and exciting endeavor that breathed new life into gas station advertising and actually made it fun.
