The Voice That Shattered Glass
It's the stuff of legends: an urban legend and a jazz legend combining into a legendary advertising campaign.
In 1970, the Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago had an imaginative idea for selling Memorex's new line of blank cassette tapes. They'd prove the old myth that an opera singer could shatter a wine glass with a high note — and then claim a Memorex cassette had such exacting sound precision that its recording of the singer could break a glass, too. Leo Burnett made a couple TV commercials with this theme featuring tenor Enrico di Giuseppe and soprano Nancy Shade. The tagline: "Memorex Recording Tape ... Reproduction so true it can shatter glass."
It was a good enough start, but opera was too elitist for Memorex's larger aims. After first reaching out to audiophiles — early cassette advertising was placed in magazines like Hi Fidelity and Stereo Review — the company wanted to target a broader demographic with TV commercials aired during football games on CBS. The glass-breaking cassette campaign needed a spokesperson whose musical style embodied a more casual brilliance.
Enter Ella Fitzgerald: jazz legend, gold standard for vocal excellence and paradigm of high fidelity sound, thanks to her influential mid-century recordings. Music historian Judith Tick, who's finishing a book about Fitzgerald, says the singer's career was a perfect fit for the campaign, as
