Just two years after this commercial….the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in October 1986….was a victim of a Greenmail attack….as British financier James Goldsmith in conjunction with the investment group Hanson….purchased 11.5% of Goodyear’s outstanding common stock…. and threatened to take the company over….when on November 20, 1986…..Goodyear acquired all of the 12,549,400 shares of stock held by Goldsmith’s group at an above-market price of $49.50 per share…. which resulted in Goodyear also making a tender offer for up to 40 million shares of its stock from other shareholders at $50 per share. The tender offer resulted in Goodyear buying 40,435,764 shares of stock in February 1987. As a result, Goodyear took a charge of $224.6 million associated with a massive restructuring plan. The company closed plants in Cumberland, Maryland, Toronto, Canada and Windsor, Vermont….then it sold its Goodyear Aerospace business to Loral Corporation for $588 million….and its Motor Wheel business to MWC Inc. for $175 million…..plu two subsidiaries involved in agricultural products, real estate development, and a resort hotel in Arizona were sold for $220.1 million. The last major restructuring of the company took place in 1991….when Goodyear hired Stanley Gault, former CFO of Rubbermaid, to expand the company into new markets. These moves resulted in 12,000 employees being laid off.
We can’t find a bit of information about Harris 3M Copiers….so, we tend to think that this might have been the only year that they advertised on television….which makes this a pretty rare piece of footage….as this commercial is followed by a Coors Beer commercial unlike any other throughout the history of Coors Beer ads on television….as it never mentions the cold springs of the Rocky Mountains or their famous cold-filtered process.
