Just A Car Guy: So very late 60's and 1970, it's art, it's imaginative, it's colorful, and fun billboard advertising

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

So very late 60's and 1970, it's art, it's imaginative, it's colorful, and fun billboard advertising

Bob Taylor, the in-house art director at JWT advertising company, designed this 1970 dirigible-themed UnCola billboard

Learn a tiny bit about each artist and what they say about their billboard at https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/6267760503

Example:

If it weren’t for hippies, 7Up, the clear lemon-lime soda pop many use to calm the stomach flu, might not exist today.

In the late 1960s, just when the company was about to go out of business, brilliant advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago pitched a complete rebranding of the soft drink.

Declaring 7Up “The UnCola,” paper billboards posted above highways mere months before Woodstock in 1969 exploded with colorful and trippy cartoons of pretty girls, rainbows, sunbursts, flowers, and butterflies. Creatives at the agency mined the popularity of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase and appropriated the “peace, love, and understanding” zeitgeist of the youthful antiwar counterculture—all in the name of selling sugar water.

The “Uncola” struck a chord with the younger generation as the first ads appeared in 1968. They portrayed Coke and Pepsi as “the Establishment,” and tapped into the counterculture

and it worked

vintage UnCola billboard poster by John Alcorn, 1969

much of the so-called “Peter Max look” actually originated at Push Pin Studios, an innovative New York City art and design group founded by Milton Glaser ( also known for the “I [heart] NY logo” ), Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel in 1954. Several 7Up billboard artists, including John Alcorn and Barry Zaid, studied under Glaser, who designed the swirling psychedelic poster for Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” record in 1966.

The highway billboards, 21 feet wide and 10 feet tall, were made up of 12 paper panels, which were pasted up piece by piece. But 7Up wasn’t content to just hang them alongside freeways. The images were offered to college students as posters, as “Fallpaper” to cover their textbooks, and as the actual giant, 12-sheet, 10-foot-tall billboards.