Based in the Chicago area, Nick Federowicz has made a business out of finding and preserving original magazine advertisements. Since launching Ad Patina almost a decade ago, he has built an extensive collection of Rolex ads, having thumbed through thousands of magazines, including discontinued titles.
Still, until this week, he had never seen this ad before which features a mountaineer immersed in his elements, his beard encrusted with ice. The tagline alone is worth writing about: “You cannot be broken by nature if you are part of it.”
Past ads from Rolex featuring the Explorer II would often include words like "survive" and "conquest" while showing bundled-up mountaineers ready to summit peaks against the elements. But in a first, this Rolex ad printed in 2001 presented nature and its harsh condition not as something to conquer but to embrace.
This marks a transition in Rolex's messaging, as discovered by Mr. Federowicz, from exploring and conquering nature to understanding one's place within it. Eventually, the brand's messaging would shift away from exploring for the sake of exploration to the focus on environmental awareness and the preservation of the planet, as seen in modern Explorer II marketing.