Somewhere West of Laramie

Why it works

In 1923 car advertising meant specifications and prices. Ned Jordan, a former newspaperman running his own small Cleveland car company, dropped both. His full-page ad for the Jordan Playboy in the Saturday Evening Post of June 23, 1923 paired a windswept Fred Cole drawing of a roadster racing a rider on horseback with a burst of breathless, slangy prose about a sun-browned Wyoming girl for whom “the Playboy was built.” Engine, price and features never appear. It is studied as the moment car advertising stopped selling machinery and started selling a feeling (youth, speed, open country), with a woman, not a man, cast as the car's ideal owner. The Henry Ford, which holds a tear sheet, calls it one of the most influential automobile campaigns, written when sales had flattened and later emulated by other carmakers; Ohio Magazine notes that Hupmobile, Buick and Duesenberg soon followed its lead. Ad Age ranked it No. 30 among the century's top 100 campaigns.