Advent Blog

Somewhere around the age of 36, Howard Gossage fell into the field of adver­tis­ing. His first job was at San Francisco’s Brisacher, Wheeler and Staff. Of his hir­ing, he noted, “I got into adver­tis­ing, actu­ally, because there wasn’t any­thing else I knew how to do.” While there, he would rise to the posi­tion of Vice President before the firm was bought out by Cunningham and Walsh, a com­pet­ing agency. In 1957, he joined forces with Joe Wiener and at that point began his self employment.

From his hall­mark adver­tis­ing offices in San Francisco’s Original Firehouse #1, he cre­ated a num­ber of clas­sic ads through which he sin­gle hand­edly devel­oped the field of Experiential Marketing. In his first adver­tise­ments for Eagle Shirtmakers, he asked cus­tomers to send in to the com­pany for their com­ple­men­tary Eagle Label, thus insur­ing that their store label shirt would be for­ever iden­ti­fied with it’s maker (Eagle, at the time, was a white label pro­ducer of store brand shirts). Thousands of read­ers sent in for the free label and the adver­tise­ment was an imme­di­ate suc­cess, mak­ing the steady brand a house­hold name.

In his later work, Gossage would implore read­ers to write in for ‘Pink Air’ from Fina Gasoline sta­tions (on the idea that since every­thing else at a Fina sta­tion had already been per­fected with addi­tives, mak­ing the air that goes in tires pink was the only addi­tional improve­ment they could think of) and to send their paper air­plane designs to the Scientific American headquarters.

Every time Howard Gossage ran an ad with a tiny coupon in the lower right cor­ner, thou­sands of peo­ple would cut it out, put it in an enve­lope with a stamp and mail it in. This idea of involv­ing the con­sumer in the mes­sage was one of Gossage’s pri­mary con­tri­bu­tions to our craft, and has been car­ried on to the present day in the form of expe­ri­en­tial marketing.