rock

bergthold

& wright

2081 Morrill Avenue

San Jose, California 95132

An ad inspired by our belief that America's police forces are operating under
conditions that make effective operation near impossible ... conditions brought
on by public apathy and public disassociation.

We believe this problem exists because a major part of the public no longer
regards a policeman as a fellowman, but rather, as a machine in blue.

And we felt that if something could be done to get people to see policemen as
people, the country would have a start on solving this pressing problem.

Thus ... "frustrating" came to be.

Our thanks to the San Jose Police Department, to Officer George Ozuna, to
photographer Marv Kawamoto, and to TIME.

“Frustrating”

The Creator

Back in 1969 the folks at Time magazine were looking for a way to show advertisers the power of print advertising. They decided to host a rather unusual contest. The nation’s 15,000 or so advertising agencies were each invited to submit an ad, their very best print ad. It could be an ad about anything, as long as it wasn’t about a for-profit Company.  Time would then select those which best demonstrated the power of print and run them — free —  in Time magazine, along with a facing one-third page for the agency.

As one might expect, agencies enthusiastically responded. Time magazine eventually selected the top 13, with one ad to run every fourth week over the course of a year. One of those 13 winning ads was ours. It was, in fact, the very first ad our then-fledgling agency had produced. We were just guys working nights and weekends in a garage out in the Berryessa area of San Jose, eager to quit our day-to­-day jobs and build our dream: our own ad agency.

“Frustrating” made it a reality. When the ad appeared in Time in September 1969, the San Jose Mercury News covered our presentation of framed copies of the ad to then-San Jose Mayor Ron James and Police Chief Ray Blackmore. The newspaper also ran a full-page reproduction of the ad in the paper. People bégan calling the newspaper to ask about it, and when a question and answer item about the ad appeared in the paper’s “Action Line” column, it generated our very first honest-to-gosh client.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of creating “Frustrating” and getting our agency going. We have since been fortunate enough to win more than 750 awards for the ads we have produced. But all of them taken together will never mean as much as “Frustrating.”