From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Read online

  At the swinging agencies – Wells, Rich; Doyle, Dane; Delehanty; Carl Ally, Papert, Koenig, Lois; Lois, Holland, Callaway; Smith/Greenland; Daniel & Charles; Spade & Archer – all of them are more casual, looser, more fun. Even the dress is a lot different. I’ve got a twenty-two-year-old art director who wears Uncle Sam pants, see-through shirts, and God knows what else. But he’s good, and as long as he’s good he can work naked for all I care. One day at Ted Bates, a girl wore a pair of culottes to the office. She really was great-looking, a beautiful chick. The next day there was a memo saying, you know, bug off, no more of this culotte jazz, this is an office of business. All of the giant agencies try to maintain their offices as a place that you would want to put your money into. It’s got to be very banklike, and very sleepy.

  When I say things are looser, the average person immediately makes rampant orgies out of that statement. Everybody knows the story about the wild Christmas party they supposedly had at Young & Rubicam years ago. According to one version, the wife of the president of the agency walked into one of the offices and found a copywriter making it with his secretary. Well, I don’t believe it. But everybody on Madison Avenue swears it’s true. When I was working at Fuller & Smith & Ross it supposedly took place at Fuller & Smith & Ross. It’s probably apocryphal. I just don’t think that that many guys can get caught in the saddle. Another one of those stories: A guy used to go to work at six in the morning and make it with a chick on the conference-room table. Don’t believe it for a minute.

  Take the president of one agency where I once worked. This guy always thought that we were making it in his office. He was very, very shook about that. Well, here’s a case of a guy who’s in advertising but he’s also living this vicarious life. He goes back to Darien every night, but he would like to feel that there is a lot of screwing going on in the business because it makes him feel happy to think that his boys are out there carrying on. He likes the idea of having a bunch of Peck’s bad boys working for him. He doesn’t do any of this carrying on, but he likes to talk about his crazies when he’s out at some party in Connecticut. It’s nice for him to say to himself as he rides home on the train: Gee, there’s a lot of screwing going on in my agency – why, right this second I’ll bet they’re making it on my couch. When he comes in the next day and finds a girl’s bobby pin on his couch he immediately decides that they were making it the night before.

  A couple of summers ago we started playing a few games of strip poker in our office. Nothing serious, just for a few laughs. I was walking through the hall one day and this nice girl came running out of a guy’s office buttoning her blouse. I looked into the office and there was this guy, with a deck of cards in his hand and a smile on his face. He had said to her, ‘Do you want to play strip poker?’ She said, sure, why not, and she lost her blouse. So the mood in the office that week was sort of strip-poker-oriented. But nothing more serious than that.

  A lot of people have accused the younger creative people in advertising of being a bunch of potheads. Let me say a few words about grass. As I walk around New York City, it seems to me that a good 50 percent of the population under the age of thirty looks like it’s either stoned, about to get stoned, or coming down from a high. None of the kids drink any more. All of the drinking at our agency is done by those of us who are over thirty. Throughout advertising, you’ve got a hell of a lot of young kids working who laugh at anyone who drinks. I guess you’d find that hundreds of the younger people have tried grass at one time or another – in advertising and out of it.

  An art director I know had a freelance assignment to do some work for an avant-garde publisher down in the Village. While he’s sitting in their offices the other day, a secretary says, ‘Would you like a smoke?’ He says innocently, ‘Sure.’ And the chick hauls out the whole business, complete with a water cooler or hookah or whatever the hell they call those things. So he fired up. Little does he know that the cops have been keeping binoculars trained on this publisher for quite some time, and just as he and the chick are about to go up, here come the cops. He got busted, which I guess goes to show you that you shouldn’t accept a smoke from a stranger.

  Despite all the talk about romance, boozing, and carrying on, the advertising business is not what you think it is. Crazy? Yes. Romantic and glamorous? Not one bit. The wild stuff, I’m afraid, is very much overrated.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  WHO

  KILLED

  SPEEDY

  ALKA-

  SELTZER?

  ‘Good advertising gets exposure. People talk about it, notice it, think about it. The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he’s dying to be stopped by his buddies. He is dying for them to compliment him on his new campaign. Everyone wants to be praised. “Boy, you’ve got a hell of an ad there.” That’s what the client wants to hear. Plus the cash register …’

  In the beginning, there was Volkswagen. That’s the first campaign which everyone can trace back and say, ‘This is where the changeover began.’ That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born, and it all started with Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. They began as an agency around 1949 and they were known in the business as a good agency, but no one really got to see what they were doing until Volkswagen came around.

  Volkswagen was being handled in the United States by Fuller & Smith & Ross. Doyle, Dane took the account over around 1959. One of the first ads to come out for Volkswagen was the first ad that anyone can remember when the new agency style really came through with an entirely different look. That ad simply said, ‘Lemon.’ The copy for ‘Lemon’ said once in a while we turn out a car that’s a lemon, in which case we get rid of it. We don’t sell them. And we are careful as hell with our cars, we test them before we sell them, so the chances are you’ll never get one of our lemons.

  For the first time in history an advertiser said that he was capable, on rare occasions, of turning out an inferior product. An advertiser was saying that all wasn’t sweetness in life, that everything wasn’t fantastic in the world of business, and people took to it immediately. Volkswagen became a successful campaign, and an overwhelmingly successful product.

  No one had ever called his product a lemon before. By today’s standards, of course, this is pretty ordinary stuff. It was the first time anyone really took a realistic approach to advertising. It was the first time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.

  Before ‘Lemon,’ they ran an ad that said, ‘Think Small.’ Now the average American car buyer, who has been raised on chrome and plastic and tailfins all his life, looks at that ad and starts to think small. The Detroit reaction to all this was: It will never do. What is this, calling your product a lemon? It was the equivalent of a politician saying, ‘I’m not going to keep all my promises. I’m going to lie on occasion.’ It was the first time anyone ever told the truth in print. And the reaction was immediate – people started talking about Volkswagen advertising.

  The Volkswagen ads didn’t make a big fetish of the company’s name. They kept their name down in a very small logotype at the bottom of the ad. It was handled in such a way that somebody was talking directly to the consumer in a language which the consumer was dying to hear. It was a tremendous success. ‘Lemon,’ ‘Think Small,’ all of them not only built up Volkswagen but led directly to the advertising we have today.

  Detroit, of course, not only ignored the advertising – they ignored the message of the small car, too. After Volkswagen came Renault and Volvo and Peugeot and dozens of others. Detroit figured what this country still needs is a large boat that you can’t park and falls apart in three years. First Detroit brought out the compacts, like the Corvair and the Falcon. These really weren’t small cars and the public realized it by not buying them in droves. The compacts were cheap imitations of what the foreign small cars were all about. In 1964 Detroit finally admitted there might be something to t
his small-car stuff, and Ford produced the Mustang. Mustang was still selling very strong in 1969. Only fifteen years after Volkswagen.

  Advertising still downgrades the consumer’s intelligence because the people who are doing the ads are often as stupid as the people they think they’re talking to. The advertising industry is full of thickheaded guys. Just recently a creative director of an old-line agency was quoted in one of the trade papers as saying that this direct method of talking to people won’t work. This guy says that Doyle, Dane, Bernbach is a passing fad; it’s going to go away and quit bothering him someday.

  Some passing fad! They passed his agency five years ago. His agency was doing about $125 million a year ago. Who knows what Doyle, Dane are doing? They pick up business so fast you can’t even keep up with it. They’re billing maybe $255 million and they’re booming. They just don’t stop.

  Anything Doyle, Dane touches turns to gold – with the exception of beer. They did a great job with the Polaroid Land Camera. If you want to say that anyone could have done a terrific job with Polaroid, because the product is so unique, O.K., let’s not waste time on Polaroid. Take Levy’s Rye Bread. They get Levy’s bread and maybe an ad budget of $100,000 and all of a sudden pictures of Indians are appearing all over town saying, ‘You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Enjoy Levy’s Rye.’ As far as I’m concerned, all rye bread tastes the same, but look what Doyle, Dane did for it. What happens is a guy at General Foods looks at all those Indians and Chinese and pictures of Godfrey Cambridge pushing Levy’s and he says, ‘What the hell are we doing with the agency we have? Look at what these guys are doing for $100,000.’ The next thing you know, Doyle, Dane gets a piece of General Foods. They start doing great work for General Foods and the guy over at Kraft says, ‘Look at this. For years we’ve been hanging around doing nothing. Let’s get somebody like these guys and quit getting killed by General Foods.’ The cry is going out all over town, ‘Give me a Doyle, Dane agency, give me a Doyle, Dane ad.’

  Good advertising gets exposure. People talk about it, notice it, think about it. The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he’s dying to be stopped by his buddies. He is dying for them to compliment him on his new campaign. Everyone wants to be praised. ‘Boy, you’ve got a hell of an ad there.’ That’s what the client wants to hear. Plus the cash register. He loves it when his friends say, ‘You people are really doing a job.’ He wants that desperately. There’s a myth that the client is not interested in awards. Nonsense. Clients love awards because they love recognition just as much as agencies do. They want their accounts to win as many awards as possible.

  Doyle, Dane’s advertising has that feeling that the consumer is bright enough to understand what the advertising is saying, that the consumer isn’t a lunkhead who has to be treated like a twelve-year-old. People are more sophisticated today. It’s not just because of television, although that’s part of it. It’s a matter that I’m brighter than my father, and my son is going to be brighter than I am. I don’t understand what the new math is, but my kids will; they’re going to be way ahead of me. They’re much sharper, they know exactly what’s going on in the world. The average consumer, you know, doesn’t buy the junky advertising any more. He doesn’t buy a line like Luckies tasting milder. He doesn’t believe the male model decked out in a fruity sailor suit claiming that the cigarette he’s smoking has that ‘lusty’ taste. It’s archaic. Guys who do this sort of advertising may be twenty years behind their time. In a sense, even Doyle, Dane may be behind its time. We still haven’t really learned to communicate with the consumer to a point where he can understand us all of the time. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I sometimes don’t understand why we can’t talk in commercials and ads the way we really talk – well, there are Government agencies that stop us from talking the way we really talk so I suppose that ends that.

  There’s a magazine out right now called Screw and if you can pick up a copy at your local newsstand without getting arrested, it’s worth a look. Quite honestly, they may be overboard on one side, and yet they’re talking closer to the way people talk and think and feel than the Saturday Evening Post did when it folded. Screw has more of an appeal; it’s closer to what the people are.

  Doyle, Dane is as close as you can get to what people really are and what people really think. When you run an ad in New York City for El Al Airlines with a headline that says, ‘My Son, the Pilot,’ you are talking the language of the people. It’s a beautifully written ad, supposedly done by a woman who is talking about her son, a pilot for El Al, and her son is going to really take care of you on the flight. In fact, he’s even going to take care of your heartburn from all the horseradish.

  I love the El Al ads. Once, when I was at Fuller & Smith & Ross, those ads got me into a bit of trouble. We had just picked up one of the Arab airlines as an account. All I know is that there were a lot of guys wearing funny white things on their heads. I was instructed by the people at Fuller & Smith to take down all the ads tacked up on the walls of my office and keep the place absolutely spotless for the big meeting. I took this as a personal insult. I called up a friend of mine who worked at Doyle, Dane; this guy had every El Al ad and poster they had ever done. I loaded my wall with those El Al posters.

  When the guy walking the Arab through the office opened my office door he started to say, ‘And this is Mr. Della Femina, one of our creative …’ He took one look at the walls and turned the Arab completely around and ran out of there. Later on, he called me down to his office and said, ‘Jerry, that was a terrible thing you did. If Abdul had seen those ads it would have been very embarrassing to him as well as to the agency and it could have cost us the account.’ But they all smoothed it over and I kept my job.

  To get back to Fuller & Smith when they had Volkswagen, it’s interesting how an agency thinks of an account after it leaves and becomes a smash success. The attitude is, Gee, isn’t it amazing that Volkswagen, which was run by lunkheads when they were at Fuller & Smith, went over to Doyle, Dane and became a very hip group of guys. Same management, same people. They’re at Fuller & Smith and they’re turning out crap. The next day they go to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach and they turn out great advertising. So how can you blame the management of Volkswagen?

  Eastern Airlines was considered a terrible account in the industry when it was at Benton & Bowles in 1964. One day they went over to Young & Rubicam, which turned out great advertising for them. The management of Eastern didn’t change overnight, the advertising did. Benson & Hedges was regarded as a dumb, rotten client at Benton & Bowles. They go over to Mary Wells in 1967 and she produces a great series of commercials showing people getting their extra-long Benson & Hedges stuck in elevator doors, and suddenly they turn out to be a bright, intelligent, great client.

  There is no such thing as a bad client. But there is such a thing as bad advertising. This list is endless. Talon Zippers, when it was at McCann-Erickson in 1961, was considered to be one of the worst clients of our time. McCann would present campaigns, which were turned down by Talon. Talon hated the stuff McCann turned out and became very frustrated. They couldn’t get what they wanted, and naturally McCann, seeing all these rejected campaigns, thought that they were a lousy client. They weren’t. So with the same advertising manager, the same management guys, they move over to Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller and suddenly Talon has great advertising.* I know for a fact that the Delehanty people don’t regard Talon as a difficult client to deal with.

  The blame isn’t with the client. He’ll take whatever is right for him. If he can’t get it out of an agency that may be giving him garbage, he’s stuck with that agency unless he makes a change. Braniff was at a little agency in Wisconsin when it moved over to Mary Wells, who then was working at Jack Tinker & Partners. The advertising improved right away. Take Alka-Seltzer. An agency called Wade had invented this little fairy, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, who could have passed for the son of Johnny from Philip Morris.
They were trying to sell Alka-Seltzer with this little Speedy creep. Well, one day they moved the account over to Jack Tinker and the first thing Tinker did was to kill off Speedy. Or if they didn’t kill him they had him arrested in the men’s room of Grand Central Station on a charge of exposing himself. And they came up with a great campaign, ‘Alka-Seltzer on the Rocks.’ In 1969, Miles Laboratory pulled it out of Tinker and gave it to Doyle, Dane. I don’t know why, but I do know that everybody concerned with the move praised Tinker for the superb job they had done.

  Too many agency guys spend their time complaining about their clients. ‘My client won’t let me do anything. My

  Good advertising comes from a good subject. Amend that: Good advertising is easier to come by when you have a good subject. Most airline advertising is terrific. In fact, almost all destination advertising is very good. They are talking about romantic spots throughout the world. I mean, who could fail when he’s doing an ad for Tahiti? But have you seen a good ad lately for Korean Airways? You’ve got to admit their advertising isn’t as good as, say, the advertising for Eastern where they used to show a kid jumping off a cliff into the water in Acapulco. You would really have to be a total incompetent to mess up an ad for Jamaica or actually a commercial for any city in this country. You can usually make something out of a city no matter which one it is. The airlines have produced commercials that make Chicago almost look like a palatable place. I mean, that’s great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you’d want to spend more than three hours in. It gets a little tougher when you take a place like Detroit. Have you ever seen a good commercial for Detroit?