Old gas stations

[Fading Fast]

 

[Fading Fast]

 

[3fingers]

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I love shoebox Fords. That looks like a 1950 but it's hard to tell for sure with the hood up.

 

[David Conwill]

I love shoebox Fords. That looks like a 1950 but it's hard to tell for sure with the hood up.

Looks like the 1950 Ford crest rather than the F-O-R-D of 1949.

 

[3fingers]

Looks like the 1950 Ford crest rather than the F-O-R-D of 1949.

That's what I thought as well.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[Fading Fast]

 

[LizzieMaine]

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Great shot of the abstracted "Shell House" station format. The pylon is a chimney, designed by the Boys to evoke a warm feeling of suburban hominess. Doesn't it just?

 

[Ghostsoldier]

It looks like the prow of a steam ship, plowing through the building, lol.

Rob

 

[BobHufford]

This is so cool! If I had a truck from that era I would restore it to be a "Neon Patrol" truck!

 

[Fading Fast]

Great shot of the abstracted "Shell House" station format. The pylon is a chimney, designed by the Boys to evoke a warm feeling of suburban hominess. Doesn't it just?

If you put smart people in a room and give them money to come up with ideas, they will; and if they are really smart people, they will convince themselves and others that the ideas they come up with are really smart; and if there is no real objective way of judging those ideas, the smart-people-room-money-ideas-convince-others loop will just go on and on. That is a large part of the advertising business in a nutshell.

I've mentioned this before, but boiled down to its core: "Bank of Boston" paid smart people to sit in a room and come up with a million dollar idea (literally, that's what they got paid), which they did. The idea was to take the preposition "of" out of "Bank of Boston" to create, drum roll please, "BankBoston." (Seems worth $1,000,000 to me, right?)

The Bank was ecstatic with its new name (smart people will convince others that their ideas are smart), they had a big (and I mean big) roll out campaign, everyone was happy and two or so years later the Bank was bought out by Fleet Bank and bye-bye "BankBoston," name and all.

 

[3fingers]

A local banking establishment paid an obscene amount of money to an ad agency years ago to come up with a new advertising slogan. What they came up with for the Union National Bank was.......
"The bank that begins with U."
This was long before texting and other things that made such single letters and numbers commonplace as word replacements, so the directors were quite pleased with the catchiness of the effort. Once the cost of it became public knowledge though, the stockholders weren't so taken with it. The bank no longer exists, having been sucked up by another and the pieces absorbed by others.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It looks like the prow of a steam ship, plowing through the building, lol.

Rob

 

[LizzieMaine]

If you put smart people in a room and give them money to come up with ideas, they will; and if they are really smart people, they will convince themselves and others that the ideas they come up with are really smart; and if there is no real objective way of judging those ideas, the smart-people-room-money-ideas-convince-others loop will just go on and on. That is a large part of the advertising business in a nutshell.

I've mentioned this before, but boiled down to its core: "Bank of Boston" paid smart people to sit in a room and come up with a million dollar idea (literally, that's what they got paid), which they did. The idea was to take the preposition "of" out of "Bank of Boston" to create, drum roll please, "BankBoston." (Seems worth $1,000,000 to me, right?)

The Bank was ecstatic with its new name (smart people will convince others that their ideas are smart), they had a big (and I mean big) roll out campaign, everyone was happy and two or so years later the Bank was bought out by Fleet Bank and bye-bye "BankBoston," name and all.

And to this day there are those of us who gleefully call the "FLeetCenter" the "FleeceCenter." So thanx, Boys, at least, for that.

 

[Fading Fast]

And to this day there are those of us who gleefully call the "FLeetCenter" the "FleeceCenter." So thanx, Boys, at least, for that.

I lived up in Boston at the time of that shenanigan. One of the things I took out of my eight years in Boston is that NYC does not have a monopoly on crony capitalism, private sector and government corruption and that almost all politicians are distasteful no matter where you live.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[Fading Fast]

 

[LizzieMaine]

The use of the caduceus by Sunoco has to be one of the weirdest trademark ideas ever. It stood for their "mercury-refined" motor oil -- since Mercury carried a caduceus -- but given that then, as now, most Americans were not all that up on their Bullfinch's, it just makes it look like the station is leasing out office space to a doctor. "The proctologist will see you now, you'll find him in the back there, behind the air compressor."

 

[Fading Fast]

The use of the caduceus by Sunoco has to be one of the weirdest trademark ideas ever. It stood for their "mercury-refined" motor oil -- since Mercury carried a caduceus -- but given that then, as now, most Americans were not all that up on their Bullfinch's, it just makes it look like the station is leasing out office space to a doctor. "The proctologist will see you now, you'll find him in the back there, behind the air compressor."

Not the Boys best effort. That said, Sunoco had a good reputation in NJ in the '70s as offering a higher-quality gasoline, which we know is all BS, but that was the general image it had, so I guess the boys did alright by Sunoco.

 

[3fingers]

"The proctologist will see you now, you'll find him in the back there, behind the air compressor."

That gives new meaning to all purpose grease.