Main > In the Press > Valley developer says his 3-D advertising collection is 'largest assemblage in the world'

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Date: 05-30-2008
Phoenix Business Journal

Michael Pollack calls his collection "nothing short of phenomenal".

The 53-year-old business mogul has amassed what may be the world's largest array of 3-D advertising pieces. The 8,000 items are on display at the Pollack Advertising Museum in Mesa.

"The largest collection next to mine in the United States has 900 pieces," he says.

Although the 7,000-square-foot facility is closed to the public, Pollack gives private tours twice a month to locals. He also welcomes collectors from around the globe who come specifically to meet him and explore the museum.

"It's the largest assemblage in the world of thee-dimensional advertising, and I know this because I collaborated with the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France," Pollack says. "I have a much bigger collection and many, many pieces the French museum does not have. The Louvre also has picture of some of my pieces hanging in the museum."

Antique dealer and collector Mike Karberg of Indiana specializes in the advertising statues Pollack collects, and he has been buying and selling to collectors around the world for over two decades. Ten years ago, Karberg was rounding up between five and 20 pieces a month for Pollack to buy for his collection. Now it's 30 to 60 pieces a year, because it's harder to find items the museum does not already have.

Karberg visits Pollack about six times a year, so he knows exactly what his customer is looking for and the amount he is willing to pay.

Karberg says collectors and dealers of three-dimensional advertising are a small group.

"We know there are other people with big collections," he says, "but no one has a collection the size of Michael's, or a museum dedicated only to advertising and motion displays."

Pollack Advertising Museum was built in 2000, at the same time the advertising buff was building a 31,000-square-foot Mesa headquarters for Michael A. Pollack Investments, which he founded in 1973. The investments firm owns, operates, manages and leases a portfolio of more than 100 commercial and industrial properties.

Pollack controls more than 3 million square feet of developed real estate in Arizona, California and Nevada, including more than 60 projects in the Phoenix area.

His penchant for advertising memorabilia started when he was 14. He bought electric beer signs on Saturdays at a flea market near his home in San Francisco, then sold them on Sundays to antique dealers around the Bay Area.

"I discovered the beer signs when I was shopping with my parents, and I thought they were really cool, so I started buying and selling them to make some money," says Pollack. "Of course, I was too young to drive myself to the flea market, so I had to pay someone to drive me. We had to get there real early, like 5 a.m., to get the best signs before they were sold."

Pollack continued buying and selling beer signs for a couple of years. Eventually, he stopped selling them and started collecting beer-related products such as statues, signs and tap handles. A short time later, he began collecting all types of 3-D advertising pieces - lunch boxes, banks, motion displays and more, ranging from $100 to $25,000 each.

His vast collection also includes rare life-size characters. Hamm's Beer made five "Bear on a Motorcycle" moving displays, and Pollack owns three of them. He also owns the worlds' only full-scale character display of the Old Crow on a unicycle, valued at $25,000.

His favorite pieces are store-window mechanical displays created between 1935 and 1955 by Baranger Studios in Pasadena, Calif. Most of them were leased to jewelry stores and changes out every 30 to 90 days. Baranger made 130, and Pollack owns 100 of them.

His museum also has a large representation of miniature mannequins, 12 to 28 inches tall, which were used decades ago to advertise clothing.

Pollack has flown all over the world to buy individual items or entire collections for his museum. On one occasion, he spent $20,000 on an extremely rare item from the 1700s that advertised Cognac. The chalk statue was so old and delicate that he bought an extra seat for it on the plane to get it home safely.

Pollack's 28-year old son, Daniel, remembers traveling to trade shows with his father during his childhood. Although he's not a collector himself, he says he enjoyed sharing in his fathers' thrill of the hunt.

"One time, when we were traveling in Europe, we met up with a guy my dad corresponded with and ended up traveling all over Berlin with him looking for rare collectibles and advertising memorabilia," Daniel says. " Back then people didn't list things internationally, so we had to go to these countries to find what we were looking for. That's how we spent our vacations."

But this was before the museum was established, he says, so "we had a basement full of stuff."

Caption: Michael Pollack started collecting 3-D advertising pieces at Sat Francisco-area flea markets when he was just 14 years old.