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Jul 12
Hal Riney “Morning in America” Ad
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler rightly compares Apple’s FaceTime advertising to Don Draper’s Carousel speech at the end of Mad Men Season 1, which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to blog about the man I’ve come to suspect is one of Don Draper’s real-life antecedents: Bourbon drinking San Francisco adman Hal Riney.
Like Draper, Riney had a hard, depression-era childhood with an absent father, and consequently his work is suffused with exactly the sort of intense nostalgia Draper mentions in the Carousel speech (“the pain from an old wound”). He created iconic works of idealized, emotive Americana for Crocker Bank (an ad that incidentally spawned the Carpenters hit “We’ve Only Just Begun”), Saturn, Bartles & Jaymes, and many others, but he’s perhaps best known for one of the most devastatingly effective political ads of all time: Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” TV spots.
If you’re as fascinated as I am by the emotional power of great advertising like these Riney spots or the FaceTime ads, I highly recommend watching the documentary Art & Copy, which tells the story of advertising’s creative revolution through interviews with many of its most celebrated revolutionaries, including Riney himself (I wish I could more easily link to one of his interviews, but his voice starts the trailer). I watched it on Netflix awhile back and came out of it completely inspired.
Jul 04
Jun 20
“ Be careful, he said to himself, it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
— Ernest Hemingway in “The Garden of Eden” (via Buster McLeod)
Jun 13
“ The 72-year-old Yorkshireman thinks that the iPad’s ability to share images will also have profound effects, both artistically and politically. “As it empowers more and more people to distribute their own images it weakens the older suppliers of images and perhaps governments as well.
Jun 09
Jun 07
Jun 02
“ You know…(long pause). I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.
I think this is a great analogy, and perhaps Steve could have carried it even further: as people move into city centers, owning a car becomes unnecessary because alternative modes of transportation like mass transit or cycling become more efficient and less costly. You may lose some flexibility when you move from owning a car to taking the subway, but for most city dwellers, the tradeoff is more than worth it.