Everyone has a golden age these days. Golden age of television. Golden age of podcasting. Golden age of whatever the algorithm is currently rewarding. The phrase has been used so many times it has lost most of its weight, which is a shame, because there was an actual golden age of advertising and most people writing about it were not there.
I was there. Not making the work, but close enough to feel it. In high school I was spending real money — my own money — on D&AD annuals and Graphis books. These were not cheap. They were the kind of purchase a teenager makes when something has genuinely gotten under their skin. I was not buying them to decorate a shelf. I was buying them to understand how the work was done and why some of it stopped you cold and most of it didn't.
Then I landed at the University of Texas from 1982 to 1985, in the School of Communications, in Leonard Ruben's class. Ruben was the head of creative sequence and he was not interested in producing students who were comfortable. If he didn't like your layout, he'd rip it off the wall and say, "Who did this? Who did this? No, I don't even want to know." He was interested in producing students who were ready. He told us directly that what he demanded in that classroom was what would be demanded of us in an agency. He was not wrong. He was also teaching us at the precise moment when the agencies we were studying were doing the best work of their generation.
Chiat/Day. Ammirati and Puris. Fallon McElligott Rice. These were not historical examples in Ruben's classroom. They were current events. Apple's "1984" aired in January of my junior year. Fallon McElligott Rice won Ad Age Agency of the Year in 1983, my sophomore year. The BMW campaign was running live in the magazines I was buying with my own money. We were not studying the golden age. We were sitting inside it, with a professor demanding we understand why it worked.
The BMW work in particular has stayed with me for forty years. Two agencies, in succession, each building on what the other established, together producing the most consistently intelligent run of automotive advertising in the history of the business. What they understood about car buyers and about the relationship between a brand and its audience is something most of the industry has spent the last twenty years actively forgetting.
The Ad That Started It All
There is a print ad from the 1980s that stops me every time I see it. Full spread, two pages. On the left, a headline in the kind of bold black type that does not ask for your attention so much as it simply takes it. The words read: "Be one of the 1,200 fastest families in America." On the right, a BMW M5 sedan shot head-on, coming at you, all business. No lifestyle imagery, no smiling family loading luggage, no aspirational nonsense about the open road. Just a car and a claim.
The body copy explained that BMW was making 1,200 units of the M5 for the United States. Four doors. 256 horsepower. Zero to sixty in under six seconds. A four-door production sedan that Road and Track had called the fastest in the world. The ad did not apologize for the price. It did not suggest the car was for everyone. It told you exactly what it was, exactly what it cost in performance terms, and then it got out of the way and let you decide.
That ad was written by Ammirati and Puris. So was everything else BMW sold in America for nearly two decades. And when Ammirati and Puris were done, Fallon McElligott picked up the account and somehow made it better.
Two Guys, a Hotel Room, and One Idea That Changed Everything
In 1973, Martin Puris and Ralph Ammirati walked away from Carl Ally Advertising, left the Fiat account behind, rented a room at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan, and gave themselves four weeks to find a paying client. After three weeks, nothing. Week four: UPS. The very next year, BMW.
At the time, BMW was trying to extricate itself from a longstanding distribution deal with Max Hoffman and build a real American identity for the brand. Bob Lutz, then a board member for sales, understood the problem clearly. BMW's dealers had been running their own advertising through their own agencies, which meant the brand meant something different in every market. Nobody could agree on what a BMW actually was. The research said the market was old men at country clubs. Lutz knew the research was wrong.
BMW put three agencies into the pitch. Ted Bates, Benton and Bowles, and the two-man operation at the Delmonico. The established agencies flew to Munich in first class. Puris and Ammirati flew coach. They won anyway, because they had done something the bigger agencies hadn't. They spent weeks with BMW's engineers instead of the marketing department. They came back understanding that the car was not a luxury product in the traditional American sense. It was not a Cadillac with a German accent. It was something else entirely.
Puris later described the buyer they were after as the "Affluent Activist." Not old money. Not country club culture. The first generation of Americans who were jogging, eating differently, thinking about their bodies as instruments rather than accessories. People who wanted a car that responded to them the way a good piece of equipment responds. People who read the engineering specs in Car and Driver and actually understood them.
The tagline Puris wrote was four words. "The Ultimate Driving Machine." Not "The Ultimate Car." Not "The Ultimate Luxury." The driving. The machine. Every word was load-bearing.
What the Ads Actually Said
The early BMW ads under Ammirati and Puris ran long copy. Not a paragraph but actual essays, sometimes eight hundred words in a print ad, making a sustained argument for why a BMW drove the way it drove and why that mattered. BMW's then-PR manager Tom McGurn described the work as ads that compared "being involved with driving in a BMW versus going down the road on a sofa." That was the essential distinction. Not better than the competition on a features checklist. Categorically different in what the experience of driving one actually felt like.
The long copy worked because it was written well. There is no other explanation. Readers finished it because the writing rewarded finishing it. The ads assumed intelligence on the part of the audience and the audience rewarded that assumption by paying attention. This sounds obvious. It was apparently not obvious to most of the industry at the time, and it is apparently not obvious to most of the industry now.
The M5 ad is the purest expression of the approach. BMW was making 1,200 of them for America. The ad said so. The car was ferociously fast for a four-door sedan. The ad said that too. There was no hedging, no demographic softening, no attempt to make the car sound like something it was not. It was a performance sedan built for people who understood what that meant and were willing to pay for it. If you were not that person, the ad was not written for you. Ammirati and Puris understood that writing for everyone means writing for no one.
BMW's US sales in 1974 were 15,007 cars. A decade after the campaign launched, they were approaching 100,000. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when advertising is honest about what a product is and trusts the right buyers to find it.
The Handoff and What Fallon Did With It
In 1992, BMW put the account up for review. Ammirati and Puris, having built BMW's entire American identity over nearly two decades, declined to pitch a new proposal. The account was worth $70 million a year. They walked away from it rather than compete for something they had already earned. That tells you everything about how they understood the relationship between an agency and a client. Some relationships are not meant to be bid on.
After a brief and forgettable period with Mullen, BMW landed at Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis in 1995. The timing was interesting. BMW was climbing out of a genuine sales slump. From a peak of 96,759 cars in 1986, sales had fallen to 53,343 by 1991. The brand needed something. Jim McDowell, BMW's Vice President of Marketing, knew Fallon from his time at Porsche. He went and got them.
Fallon brought humor without condescension and emotion without sentimentality, which is a harder combination to pull off than it sounds. Their first major opportunity was the Z3 roadster's debut in GoldenEye, the 1995 James Bond film. Fallon did not treat the product placement as a gift. They used it as a launching pad. One television spot showed British lords in Parliament expressing outrage that Bond was driving a BMW on the wrong side of the road. Another showed various English people browsing classified ads for Bond's old Aston Martin, complete with missiles and ejector seat. "I wonder what he's getting instead?" they asked, as the ad cut to Pierce Brosnan behind the wheel of a Z3. The entire first production run of the Z3 sold out.
But Fallon's sharpest work came in black and white. Their Responsiveness campaign shot BMWs from the driver's point of view on winding roads, using infrared photography at speed, scored to early techno music. The copy was minimal and precise. One ad for the Z3 read: "Science. Technology. All worthless. Unless they make you feel something." Another declared the relationship between driver, car, and road a love triangle. BMW's people who were there during the shoots described the work as labored over line by line, shot over ten days, retouched in London. Every detail paid attention to.
"Happiness is not around the corner. Happiness is the corner." Six words that describe what a performance car actually is and why someone would choose one over anything else.
The Films and What They Proved
In 2001, BMW had a problem. There were no major new models coming. The marketing budget existed but there was nothing obvious to spend it on. Fallon's answer was so audacious that it should not have worked, which is usually how you know an idea is right.
They proposed a series of short films distributed on the internet. Not commercials. Films. Directed by John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, Wong Kar-wai, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Starring Clive Owen as a driver for hire, with various passengers including Madonna, Mickey Rourke, and Forest Whitaker. Produced by David Fincher. Distributed online before YouTube existed, at a time when downloading a ten-minute film required genuine patience and commitment.
Fallon flipped the traditional production math. Instead of spending 80 percent of the budget on media distribution and 20 percent on production, they inverted it. Make something extraordinary and let people seek it out. This was not conventional wisdom in 2001. It was barely even a theory. The series was viewed 100 million times. Many of those viewers downloaded the films over hours. Time magazine called it the ultimate in new-media, high-end branding. BMW sales grew by double digits following the release.
One of the executives involved described BMW's role in the films as that of a great horse in a Western. A big part of the story. Not the entire story. The car earned its place in eight different narratives by doing what BMWs actually do. No announcer. No price graphic. No 0-60 time stamped over slow-motion footage. Just the car, the driver, and whatever the director wanted to say.
What Both Agencies Understood That Most Do Not
Leonard Ruben told us in his classroom that what he demanded was what would be demanded of us outside. What he was really telling us was that the work had a standard and that standard existed whether or not it was convenient. Ammirati and Puris spent weeks with BMW's engineers before they wrote a word. Fallon shot in black and white on infrared film and labored over every line of copy. Both agencies took the position that the buyer they were writing for was smarter than the average client assumed, more emotionally complex than the demographics suggested, and more than capable of making decisions based on something other than feature comparisons and monthly payment calculations.
Neither agency was selling transportation. They were selling a specific relationship with a machine, and they understood that relationship well enough to describe it with precision. When Puris wrote "The Ultimate Driving Machine" he was not writing a tagline. He was writing a position. When Fallon wrote "Happiness is the corner" they were not writing a headline. They were writing a truth about why a certain kind of person buys a certain kind of car.
Look at automotive advertising today. Most of it is either a lifestyle montage set to music chosen by an algorithm or a compliance document dressed up with cinematography. It tells you about available technology packages and driver assistance systems and connectivity features. It is written by committees and approved by legal teams and tested in focus groups until every edge has been sanded off and what remains is something that could be an ad for almost anything.
Nobody is writing "Be one of the 1,200 fastest families in America." Nobody is shooting in black and white on a mountain road and writing six words about what a corner feels like. The budgets are larger. The media landscape is more complex. The tools are better. The ideas are not.
Puris said the tagline could last forever as long as BMW kept building the same kind of car. "If they produce true BMWs, they can use the line forever." He was right about the line. The question nobody at BMW wants to answer in 2026 is whether they are still producing true BMWs. The advertising has certainly changed. You can decide for yourself what that means.
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