David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…This is how Rolex tells the story. After I had heard this told a few different times, I expected to see this full-page ad written in a certain way. It is buried. Maybe this is what the advertising style was back in the day. But the big words are not watch survives English channel Swim. The big words are Rolex Oyster. It says Rolex introduces for the first time the greatest triumph in watchmaking. Okay, I still don’t know what it is. Then I see a picture of a woman’s face. Then it says, send for this colored brochure. It’s free, telling you to send in for more information. Then there are four sketches of the different watch faces you can get of the Rolex Oyster. Then it says the wonder watch that defies the elements. There are words all over the place. You finally, finally get to the tiniest text in the entire thing, maybe the second tiniest font in this little corner. It says moisture proof, waterproof, heat proof, vibration proof, cold proof, dust proof. Either Rolex hadn’t found their groove in advertising yet, or maybe people just read a lot more words back then. But if you put this up today, our Tik-Tok-tified brains would be like, don’t care. Next. There are way too many words. They completely bury the lead that she did a channel swim with this thing and it survived. It’s hard to know how much of this is just the state of the art in advertising at the time, versus Hans designed and wrote all that himself. One of his maniacal control things was, I believe, up until he died or pretty close to it, he did all the creative for all the advertisement. Oh, I didn’t realize that.…

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