Demure? Moi?

One day in 1967 Charlie White III and Dave Willardson were out for a drive and saw a billboard. Dave mentioned that it would be cool to advertise Charlie's studio with such a large scale format. So they went back to "The White House" and called the billboard company. Turned out they couldn't just rent one -- they had to rent five! Black and white was cheapest, so Charlie dug up a b&w promo photo he had from a photo booth, Dave set the type and before they knew it, they had five billboards up around L.A. advertising the man himself. This was very much in the tongue-in-cheek, pop style of the day. Advertise the man/brand ahead of the art! At the time Charlie was going full guns as the premiere West Coast pop-style illustrator. Charlie has since mentioned that it was taken the wrong way by some, who thought it was, um, a tad immodest. But nevertheless these billboards are still remembered by L.A. oldsters as an iconic image around the city. But the idea nicely foreshadow today's strategies (think Shephard Fairey) in its simplicity and persona-driven directness. The billboards begat a whole campaign, including the decal seen at right and the booklet below.