28/06/2023
Does anyone remember a time before BMW? Unlikely. The German import has been on U.S.A. streets since before most people were born. But in 1973, two advertising guys named Martin Purvis and Ralph Ammirati ditched Carl Ally Advertising and the Fiat account to rent a hotel room in midtown Manhattan. They gave themselves four weeks to get a paying advertising client. After three weeks, they had no one. On week four, they got UPS. The next year, BMW followed, an upstart German automobile manufacturer trying to follow Volkswagen’s enviable lead in the U.S. market. The new account required a new art director, so they hired Clem McCarthy, a San Francisco native. Clem and Marty Puris had worked together in Detroit. (NOTE: Marty was the first copywriter Clem worked with; I was the last.) Clem grew up in San Francisco went to high school in Marin County and drove his cars along the curving roads of nearby Mt. Tamalpais. When it came time to shoot BMW’s first television commercial, Clem knew exactly where to go. Just like perfume ads, car commercials like to show a lot skin during performance. The camera lens typically adores the shapely automobile silhouette in slow motion beauty shots as steering wheels and suspension systems absorb the curves and the passionate thrill of driving. Not BMW. The first BMW commercial spot featured the front end of a BMW coming toward us, then descending into a hillside, then reappearing and disappearing downhill again. The full length BMW did not reveal its sporty self until the final scene. “They leveled and straightened the road the week after we shot,” McCarthy grinned. There were no reshoots. And the landscape was so unexpectedly stunning, auto manufacturers shot on Mt. Tamalpais roadways as a matter of course for the next 30 years. The first ad for BMW (shown) started as a pencil sketch. On his last day in the business, Clem McCarthy pulled the sketch from the flat file in his office and handed it to me. The front grille of the 300 Series luxury car is heading toward the viewer. The headline is accompanied by sophisticated long copy that went to great lengths to describe what made BMW “the ultimate driving machine.” There is some erasing on the original penciled layout where the theme line went—as if there had been another set of words waiting in the sidelines. “‘The ultimate driving machine’ was always the best line,” recalls Marty Puris. Notice that the layout changed to an equally sexy wide-shot of the car in the finished version. According to The One Club Hall Of Fame, "The Ultimate Driving Machine" still defines the BMW luxury car today, over thirty years later. Arriving just as baby-boomers were launching their professional careers, BMW became a symbol of independence, success and authentic performance. (NOTE: Clem’s career bumped between Marty Puris in New York City and Hal Riney in San Francisco. He remembered sitting on the floor with Hal Riney and Gallo one afternoon, thumbing through telephone books trying to find the words “Bartles & Jaymes”.)
