“Why didn’t I think of that?!” – it’s a line Gary Dahl has heard a million times. The Los Gatos advertising executive may be known to some as the author of Advertising for Dummies, but what he’s truly famous for is a marketing idea he had almost 30 years ago.

“It spawned from a conversation in a saloon. I was drinking with a bunch of advertising cronies and we were talking about animals and how expensive they were to keep,” laughs Dahl. “I don’t know where it came from, but I said, ‘I don’t have those problems, I have a pet rock.’” A pop-culture fad was born.

THE PET ROCK BOOK?
Dahl’s brilliant idea wasn’t originally so brilliant. When he first dreamed up the Pet Rock, he never envisioned selling a rock in a box. Instead, his plan was to write a book. He spent the next several months writing The Pet Rock Care and Training Manual.

“[The book] was the product! All of this stuff [the rock and carrying case] was just the prop,” says Dahl. “People think I was selling rocks. I wasn’t. Who in their right mind would pay $5 for a rock, when rumor has it there’s trillions out there available for free?”

While the manual claimed that each rock was handpicked from a beach in Mexico and carefully tested for obedience, Dahl actually purchased rocks from the U-Save Rockery in San Jose. At first, it seemed like a ridiculous plan. But it didn’t take long for the buying public to get the joke.

“My wife was very supportive of the idea but never really believed it was going to succeed, until one day, she went down to our mailbox and it was stuffed with checks from major department stores,” recalls Dahl. “We sold over 1,500,000 units. We had just come off Watergate, Ford was president by default, and I think the country was depressed and needed a giggle. The Pet Rock provided Christmas 1975 with a $5 laugh.”

GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
“The Pet Rock only had a five-month life span. People think they’re still on the market, but they haven’t been on the market for a very long time,” says Dahl, who still runs a one-man advertising firm from his Campbell office. “A friend of mine once said, ‘Do you know that when you die, your obit is going to be in every newspaper in the world?’ Now that’s depressing. At least the rock propelled me out of the land of the Honda Civic and into the land of the Audi A-8.”