Читать книгу From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina - Страница 11

‘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 this 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?

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 maybe 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.