From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Read online

  Destination advertising is the easiest stuff in the world to do. When I was at Delehanty we had the TAP (Portuguese) Airline account. You don’t have to show a plane. You show the place you get to if you get on that plane. We turned out beautiful ads because Portugal is a great place to do ads for. We were very careful not to mention Salazar or the fact that if you did something wrong in Portugal you could have the world’s first thirty-year vacation.

  Advertising agencies can take an off-the-wall country like France and do a terrific job with it. But I’m always amused by the fact that some of the country’s great liberals are in advertising and the ads these guys do for some of our better-known dictatorships in the world are terrific. They do great stuff for Spain, almost as good as Portugal. It’s interesting how some people drop their political convictions when it comes to advertising. I know guys who would make you fly Nazi Airlines in a minute or get you to pack your voodoo kit for a little trip to Haiti.

  The quality of most advertising really depends on what has to be said. You’re writing ads on insurance, it’s easy. It’s great to do ads on the stock market. It’s simple to do ads on a camera that gives you a picture sixty seconds after you shoot it. The big problem is the guy who has to do an ad for soap. Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn’t been said maybe twenty thousand times before. I mean, what do you say? Where do you go? No matter what you say, it’s still soap.

  This doesn’t mean that your average soap ad or commercial couldn’t be better. There are some guys who have given up a long time ago, but let me tell you there are reasons for a guy to struggle with a soap ad. It is very tough. If you’re a guy doing an ad for Tide, what do you say? What do you do about Axion? Well, you go out and get Arthur Godfrey or Eddie Albert to say a few kind words about Axion, or whatever enzyme you’re hustling.

  We’re having different problems with a product called Feminique. It’s a vaginal-odor spray, plain and simple, but the magazines and the networks have decided in their minds that this country is not quite ready for the word vagina. We can’t even say what our product is.

  Feminine hygiene is going to be a big business for agencies. Our stuff, Feminique, is selling well. FDS is doing well. Johnson & Johnson came out with Vespré and it’s doing well. The American businessman has discovered the vagina and like it’s the next thing going. What happened is that the businessman ran out of parts of the body. We had headaches for a while but we took care of them. The armpit had its moment of glory, and the toes, with their athlete’s foot, they had the spotlight, too. We went through wrinkles, we went through diets. Taking skin off, putting skin on. We went through the stomach with acid indigestion and we conquered hemorrhoids. So the businessman sat back and said, ‘What’s left?’ And some smart guy said, ‘The vagina.’ We’ve now zeroed in on it. And this is just the beginning. Today the vagina, tomorrow the world. I mean, there are going to be all sorts of things for the vagina: vitamins, pep pills, flavored douches like Cupid’s Quiver (raspberry, orange, jasmine, and champagne). If we can get by with a spray, we can sell anything new. And the spray is selling. In the first few months of 1969 the manufacturer of Feminique put something like $600,000 worth of it into the stores in test areas without one commercial ever being on the air. The maker of Feminique expects to break even if he has sales of $1,500,000 in the first year. But before the advertising even starts he’s got $600,000 in the till. He’s going to make it on reorders alone.

  The first commercial we shot for Feminique was almost a disaster. We had a Swedish model walking through the woods in a scene very much like a take from the movie Elvira Madigan. The trouble was the girl couldn’t speak English and then we discovered she couldn’t even speak Swedish. And she was wooden. We shot the commercial up in a place called Sterling Forest, which is near Tuxedo Park, New York. When you’re shooting commercials, people come around and ask you funny questions. A woman came up to me in the middle of the shooting and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Oh, this is a commercial for Feminique.’ Now she’s never heard of Feminique, nothing had broken in the New York market, and yet she says, ‘Oh, I use it all the time.’

  I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘And my husband uses it too.’ I raised my eyebrows a little bit. I said, ‘Do the children use it?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, no, we wouldn’t let the children use it. Just my husband and me.’ I politely thanked her and told her that the people at Feminique would be very happy to hear.

  Some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. My partner, Ron Travisano, was working at Marschalk when they got a cake mix that was almost too good for the marketplace. All you had to do to make a cake was add water, but the product was going nowhere. They ran tests and then they ran more tests. They found out that the average housewife hated the product because if she couldn’t do something physical in the making of the cake, she felt that she was being cheated. If all she had to do was add water, well, she felt that she really was nowhere as a homemaker and a cook. The product was just too slick.

  So they pulled it back and did whatever you do to cake mixes and they fixed it so now to make a cake you had to break an egg. In the instructions they said if you break an egg into this mix and add water, you’re going to have one hell of a cake. But without the egg the product is nothing. It worked. The very act of breaking an egg told the housewife that she was a cook again. The product worked, sold like hell. It was unbelievable.

  Ron also was involved with a problem dealing with a first-aid cream, a Johnson & Johnson product. This stuff was a painless antiseptic for cuts, scratches, things like that. Now here’s Johnson & Johnson, a hell of a good company, and they go and invent an antiseptic that doesn’t drive you up the wall when you put it on. They send it out on a test and nobody buys the stuff the second time around. The company can’t figure out what’s wrong. They ran tests again and they discovered that people have to feel pain before they’ll accept the fact that they’re getting healed. They have to feel a burning sensation. And what’s wrong with this stuff? It’s obviously no good because when you put it on it doesn’t burn. Forget that the cut is healing, there wasn’t any burn.

  So the guys at Johnson & Johnson who broke their backs to figure out this marvelous stuff put a little alcohol back into the cream for no other reason than to give the stuff a little wallop. I figure the research scientists really wondered what the country was coming to, but as soon as the alcohol got put in the sales started to go up again. People wanted to feel that burning sensation because when you’re burning that means you’re suffering, and everyone knows you’ve got to suffer in order to get better.

  The poor copywriter? He’s sitting there turning out the greatest campaign of all times that says this stuff doesn’t burn – when burning happens to be the one thing you need to sell the product. It really isn’t such an easy business at times.

  The Hertz-Avis campaign is a classic in so many ways. According to people I’ve talked to, the Avis ‘We Try Harder’ campaign by Doyle, Dane was never meant to beat Hertz. But that’s the way it looked in the ads and the commercials. When the Avis campaign began, Hertz was number one and Avis and National were running neck and neck for number two. But look how clever it was: Avis attacks the guy who is number one and makes it a one-two situation and nobody even remembers that National is still around. I really don’t think Avis took all that many customers away from Hertz; they grabbed them off from National, from Olins, from Budget-Rent-A-Car, from all the smaller car-rentals companies who are running four, five, even number six to Hertz.

  Everybody’s looking at the ads and saying, Wow, what strategy, they’re attacking Hertz! But they really weren’t. What happened is that the guy who used to rent from the number-four outfit decides to trade up: he’ll now try the number-two company. It also was a great campaign for the businessman who does a lot of renting of cars. He sits there and says to himself that his boiler-plate factory is mayb
e number six to American Standard and he feels sympathy for these Avis guys, so instead of going to National, he’ll try Avis.

  Now the Carl Ally people, who took over the Hertz account, were faced with the Avis problem. They helped Avis, really, because suddenly they acknowledged the existence of someone else in the field. For the first time the guy who was on top admitted that there was a guy under him. But they had to do this. Their surveys showed that the Hertz employees actually felt lousy about the Avis campaign, so it was necessary to come up with a campaign that answered Avis. In doing this, they helped cement the one-two situation that Avis had begun. They’ll be teaching the Avis campaign in advertising classes for years. It was brilliant, and it will be a classic.

  Next to destination advertising, the easiest kind of campaign to produce is public-service advertising. Anybody – but anybody – can write great public-service stuff. Every year agencies win all kinds of awards for their public-service campaigns and there’s a reason why: the subject matter lends itself to dramatic advertising. I don’t want to sound cynical, but think about it for a minute: you’re talking about starving people, diseased people, Korean kids without families; you’re talking about bigotry, about people who can’t rent apartments; you’re talking about Vietnam and nuclear explosions. Who couldn’t do a great ad on rats and roaches in New York City housing?

  I tell the kids who come in to see me for a job to write me ten public-service ads. The kids want to know what the story is. Well, the story is that in this terrible world there is always somebody starving. The children in Europe may not be starving but they’re starving in Biafra. There are always kids starving someplace in the world. One kid produced an ad that said, ‘There’s more protein in a can of beer than a kid in Biafra gets in a week.’ Another kid came into my office with an ad that said, ‘You’ve got the cure to heart disease in your wallet.’ I used to teach advertising at the School of Visual Arts and one of my students there produced this headline on an anti-Vietnam ad: ‘Will Your Son Be a Light-to-Minor Casualty or a Heavy-to-Major Casualty?’ Y. & R. did the great ‘Give a Damn’ campaign for the Urban Coalition in New York City. Great stuff. And someone produced a classic commercial showing a Negro trying to rent an apartment. The renting agent showing the apartment tries to flush the toilet but it doesn’t work. ‘Ah, a ten-cent washer will fix that,’ he says. The place is falling apart, and the agent keeps pressing the Negro: ‘Come on, are you going to take it or not? I’ve got people waiting to rent this place if you don’t.’ Very powerful stuff and beautifully done.

  Where advertising starts to get tough is when all of the products are almost alike. If you take a close look, the rates on a lot of cars you rent are pretty much the same. For Hertz and Avis, they’re almost identical. The plane fare to London is the same whether you fly Pan Am, TWA, BOAC. If you want to go to London by way of Iceland, then the fare is cheaper, but otherwise it’s the same. So the advertising has to come up with the difference. When you look for differences, sometimes you have to stretch a bit. George Lois’s agency – Lois, Holland, Callaway – did a series of commercials for Braniff using two celebrities sitting in a Braniff plane saying, ‘When you’ve got it, flaunt it.’

  Shep Kurnit, the president of Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller, once made a remark about that campaign that is pretty accurate: ‘I wouldn’t want to fly on the same plane with Andy Warhol or Sonny Liston.’ Most people in advertising don’t like the current Braniff campaign but that could be their jealousy of George Lois. I’ve got a feeling that the jury is still out on the campaign. ‘Flaunt’ is a very tough word for people to grasp. Actually, if you’ve got it, you usually don’t flaunt it. I think that Mary Wells did a much better job with Braniff when she painted the airplanes because there was something real, something you could see.

  What do you do with gasoline? There’s very little brand loyalty in gasoline, so the companies are breaking their necks with their contests. The gas companies are in trouble and they know it. They know the consumer couldn’t really care less what kind of gas he puts in his car. You’re running out of gas and you go into a gasoline station. So to point up the difference they come up with lucky bucks, lucky dollars, the Presidents game, the antique-car game, the professional football players game and every other game they can think of. Not only are the games a must, but the government is going to make the rules for them a lot tougher. People realize you can’t win, that the chances are one in a million of winning.

  Mobil has a pretty good campaign going now, the one that says, ‘We want you to live.’ Shell is telling me I have to have Platformate. Esso, I don’t even know what they’re telling me – maybe they’re still trying to shove tigers in your tanks. Somebody else is saying, ‘Visit a gasoline station this week,’ like it’s a great experience. Other people are saying, ‘Our rest rooms are terrific, you’d be proud to have them in your own home.’ That’s crazy. Nine-tenths of the rest rooms in this country are pigsties, and nowadays gas stations are putting in locks so you have to pay to use them.

  Mobil is smarter than this. They’ve got games but they’re also asking you not to wrap your car up. They want you to live long enough to play their game, which is the best of both worlds. Most of the gasoline companies play it safe and stick with the heavy, starchy agencies. The heavy agencies have difficulty with unique products; and with something like gas they’re really stuck. A bright young agency might run into trouble with gas but at least they would approach it in a different way. A small agency, Smith/Greenland, got a shot at Flying A gasoline, and they turned out a very good job. Their pitch was that we design the gasoline for the way you drive in city traffic instead of country traffic. And they show a guy stuck on the Long Island Expressway someplace, trying to get through traffic. In the history of gasoline commercials, nobody has ever been stuck in a jam. You’re always seeing guys zipping down empty roads at ninety miles an hour. No one has ever hinted that you can get stuck in traffic. The campaign was good: they told motorists that most driving in the city is stop-and-go and that Flying A is the best gasoline for such conditions. It was the first time a small agency had a chance to do something with gasoline and I think they did a good job. (In January 1970 the account moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty. My guess is it’s because the copywriter who conceived the campaign, Helen Nolan, had herself just moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty.)

  Of course some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. There’s a big New York agency about to lose a very big account in the Midwest. Nobody talks about it, but what happened is that the agency guy was having an affair with the wife of the president of the account. He got caught, and his agency got him the hell out of town by promoting him to the presidency of the New York office, which as far as I’m concerned is the ultimate promotion. Despite the agency moving this guy out of town, they’re still going to lose the account. Getting caught in the saddle is almost always grounds for losing an account.

  * Delehanty changed its name to D.K.G. late in 1969, but mostly I call it ‘Delehanty’ throughout the book – which is how the place continues to be known in the business.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  FEAR,

  SON OF

  FEAR,

  AND FEAR

  MEETS

  ABBOTT AND

  COSTELLO

  ‘Copywriters and art directors have cold periods. If they’re not professionals about it, they show it, and they’re cold out loud – I mean, they’re cold to the whole world. They just can’t come up with anything. Instead of cooling it and relaxing, they act cold and they lose it all. That’s the time when the killers move in. They smell it. They smell it better than anybody else does. They know when a guy’s about to die …’

  One Friday night a guy working late at the Marvin, Scott, and Friml agency decided to pack it in and go home about 11 or 11:30 at night. He walked out of his office, and luckily there was an elevator at the elevator bank. This guy – he was an account man – looked around and there was no
one in sight so he climbs into the elevator, closes the door and manages to get it down to the ground floor. He opened the door and stumbled out of the elevator, he was that tired.

  Monday morning, someone comes into his office and asks him if he had been working late Friday night. The account man says yes he was, in fact until about 11:30 p.m. ‘Did you sign out at eleven-twenty-five p.m.?’ The guy says it was about that time he signed out. ‘Well,’ says the fellow, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m very sorry, but you’re fired.’ The account man was shocked and he says, ‘For what?’ The other guy says, ‘I know it sounds crazy and I really don’t know how to explain it to you, but you stole Marvin L. Marvin’s personal elevator Friday night. That elevator you took was waiting there for him; it was his own elevator that took Marvin L. Marvin up and carried him down.’ Marvin L. Marvin is the chairman of the agency, and this story, by the way, comes to you from another account man at the same agency who never worked late, so he had no problems.

  Even if it’s more fiction than fact, it still figures that the account guy in this case will probably go through life terrified to get in an elevator. The story also shows the kinds of craziness that go on on Madison Avenue and how fear can grow. In 1967 and 1968, when a large agency was going through a very, very tough shakeout to save their skin, they must have fired about six hundred people. Many of those six hundred people were secretaries, clerks, and so forth, but there must have been several dozen biggies. They all were on one floor – and that floor was called ‘The Floor of the Forgotten Men’ by people in other agencies around town. The floor was manned by only one girl, who sat out front answering phones to give that last shred of dignity to those guys so they wouldn’t have to answer their own phones. These were the Forgotten Men. They all had offices and they all were working out the employment contracts they had with this large agency.