IBM, Three dimensional ad
In 1970 I was working in New York as a rookie art Director, on a very basic salary of about $8000 a year. One of my accounts was IBM, who had an advertising development budget which, if it wasn’t spent by the end of the financial year, was deducted from the next year’s budget.
I was briefed by Ogilvy & Mather, the agency to create the most expensive ad I could possibly create. The result was this three dimensional ad, which cost somewhere in the region of $30,000 and almost caused a New York printer’s strike.
$30,000 was a load of greenbacks in 1970 - the equivalent of $250,000 in 2025! I think it was printed once in the Catholic ironworkers Gazette to make it legitimate and then it collapsed into history.
