"How do you like this?" he said. "We"ve got a nice shot of the hamburger, with a couple of potato chips on the side, and we"ve got a little piece of type." I"m sitting there writing copy now, mentally, and also talking it out. The excitement in the room is fantastic. Now we can"t sit down. We"re jumping up and down because we"ve a deadline to make and now we"ve got it and we know we"re going to make it. There is an electric feeling in the room and this is what this business is all about as far as the creative person is concerned. Ron finishes his comps at 9:15. The man from Hirsch showed up at 9:20. We had five ads ready to show him five complete layouts with the headline comped in, the body copy roughed in, with a slogan line that they can live with and go along with forever. It was ready.
The feeling in that room between 8:30 and 9:00 is like insanity. Ron is drawing as fast as he can, throwing papers around, and I"m chattering like a maniac. That"s when an ad comes together, this is how it happens. No one has ever written about it. No one"s ever come close to describing what it is. They talk about it as though it"s magic. There"s really no magic, nor is it very creative. You know what it"s like? It"s like two salesmen sitting down trying to find a handle on how they"re going to sell the car this morning. It"s nine o"clock and the door"s going to open, people are going to come in, and what are we going to say to get them to buy this car? That"s really the whole thing. People shouldn"t try to make it into a writer and an art director. It"s two salesmen sitting there trying to figure something out and coming up with an idea.
When the Hirsch guy came in he said, "What have you got?" We said, "Well, what we have is, these guys all want to be heroes, right?" He said, "Right." "And some of these guys," we said, "they really feel sorry for themselves when they work like dogs, right?" "Right." "Well, let"s do a campaign glorifying them for breaking their a.s.s, making them know that we know that they work hard. It"s inst.i.tutional, it"s long-run. It"s not going to mean a guy is going to call up Hirsch and Company and say, "I want you because you ran that ad." It means that maybe he"s got his choice between Hirsch and Company and some other schnook he"s never heard of before, he"ll vaguely remember that Hirsch and Company did something he was really happy with." The Hirsch man took one look at the ads and said, "I buy it."
The campaign ran, and it has been one of the good, successful campaigns in this area because the guys it was directed at they can feel for it, it"s them, it"s their life. Some of these investment guys have even called Hirsch up asking for reprints of the ad. They want to hang it up in their offices. "That"s me, you know?" they say. They show it to their wives and say, "You know why I come home late at night? Here"s why." They want to frame it. People are like that. They really do react to advertising.
It"s pretty easy to see how that morning would only work with Ron and me in the room. You couldn"t let anyone else in there, like an account executive. They would get in the way, interfere with the process. And you can also see the ease with which the guys who actually put together the ad can take it to the client and explain the ad and the campaign. What happens in the larger, older establishment agencies is that you"ve got copy chiefs, a.s.sociate creative supervisors, creative supervisors on top of the actual creators of the ad. That"s where the trouble begins. These copy experts, unless they"re actually doing some work, are nothing but judges and superjudges. They sit there and they tell you whether they think something will work or not. They"ve no more right to be in that position than some empty suit off the street. Who is to become a judge? What qualifies somebody to be a judge? Years? Or salary? Or desire? What makes somebody a judge? That"s why we never like to judge other people"s work at our agency. n.o.body is judged as far as their work is concerned. Sure, if a guy doesn"t produce anything or if he comes up with a number of campaigns that the client turns down because they"re bombs, well, then you"ve got to fire the guy. But n.o.body is ever told you can"t do this or you can"t try that or you can"t present such an idea. Everyone"s got the chance to bomb out.
Talk about the craziness of advertising. Where else do you hire a star art director or copywriter for $50,000 or $60,000 a year and then attempt to tell him what to do: "Okay, we"re paying you all this bread and now here"s what we want you to do. We want you to do this; you can"t do that." Figure it out; here"s a guy who"s making all this money, and he certainly should know how to do it and what to do. He"s being hired because he"s an expert. Yet agencies hire top people every day and then attempt to show them what advertising is. It"s strange and stupid.
What"s even stranger is when an agency doesn"t use two-man creative teams but instead they call these giant conferences where they have so-called creative meetings. These are a real study in insanity because it"s almost like a real group-therapy session, but everybody"s got a big stake in this group session. You"ve got maybe four, five, or even six guys at this meeting. You"ve got the big $90,000-a-year creative director who is not going to allow an idea to go through that room unless it"s his. The first guy who tries to sneak his own idea through will be killed by the creative director. He"ll kill because he cares. How could he accept an idea from a guy who"s making $60,000 a year?
The $60,000-a-year guy may be a creative supervisor and his job is to come up with an ad that will make the $90,000-a-year guy look silly in front of all those people. Wonderful situation! You"ve got maybe four other people who will have to say something in the course of that meeting so that the creative director will know they are alive. They"ve got to hang on. They don"t care if they say the wrong thing in fact they"re expected to say the wrong thing. But they have to be heard. They throw lines like, "Why don"t we try ...?"
Maybe you"ve got an account executive sitting in. His contribution is, "You"ve got to come up with something or we"ll lose the account." He sets the tone of the meeting. "We"re going to blow it," he says, and they all sit around throwing headlines at each other.
Maybe if the problem is big enough or crucial enough, the agency president will sit in. He"s always felt he had a flair for the creative ever since he wrote that fantastic term paper back at Dartmouth where he got a B-plus and would have gotten an A if the teacher didn"t dislike him. There they are, smoking and drinking coffee and playing creative. The first guy to try is always the $90,000-a-year guy. If he can score a big hit and rout the troops early, he"s got it made. So he casually turns to the president and says, "Look, "Fights Headaches Three Ways" has been working very well for us, it"s given us a very good share of the market. Now if we can say, "Fights Headaches Five Ways" ..." And the president will look at the creative director and always shake his head yes. Big-time agency presidents never say no. They"re like the j.a.panese. Always shaking their heads yes. They mean no a lot but they always say yes. The $90,000-a-year creative director doesn"t know how to interpret the president"s headshake so he plunges ahead with "Fights Headaches Five Ways."
The $60,000-a-year creative supervisor has been sitting there all this time trying to figure out how to bomb "Fights Headaches Five Ways." He can"t bomb it directly, like saying, "You"re crazy," or he"ll lose his job. So the way he gets the supervisor is not calling the headline bad; he simply says it"s not good enough. He"ll also have a good reason for not doing it, such as, Albert Lasker used it in 1932 for a similar project. For all he knows, Lasker wrote a headline that said, "Leeches Fight Headaches Five Ways." n.o.body else knows what Lasker said. To finish zapping the $90,000-a-year guy, the $60,000-a-year guy says, "We gotta do a Doyle, Dane type of thing. We"re going to lose this account if we don"t go Doyle, Dane. We have to come up with their kind of headline. What would Doyle, Dane say in a situation like this? I just happen to have ..." And with that he reaches into his pocket for the sixty headlines that he chomped away at the beginning of the meeting. He goes on and reads "some stuff that I think is really Doyle, Dane." And of course it really is terrible stuff.
The $90,000-a-year guy, who has been zapped once but who is very tricky, sees that the $60,000-a-year guy is very vulnerable after reading this garbage out loud to the meeting. He says, "Look, this agency wasn"t founded on Doyle, Dane"s style because we don"t do that kind of c.r.a.p. Leave that to those boutiquey guys to do. We"re going to hit them with solid advertising. That"s what they hired us for." Score one for the creative director.
The president is nodding all the time. The account man, by the way, is turning white because he really can see the account pulling out after all of this nonsense. The flunkies in the room are acting as if they"re at a tennis game: they nod their heads to the left, they nod their heads to the right. They don"t know where to nod first.
The meeting keeps going on. This year, it"s fashionable for one guy to say we got to have a Wells, Rich, Greene commercial, and then the other guy knocks that notion off as soon as he rings in tradition, the history of the agency. Maybe the president has an early lunch date and he"s had enough of the meeting. So he might suggest a compromise. He keeps the radicals happy who want a little Doyle, Dane ethnic humor and keeps the traditional guys happy by suggesting, "Oy, Fights Headaches Four Ways." Or something just as silly.
Do you think I"m kidding? I"m not. I"m dead serious. This kind of thing goes on all the time. They held this type of meeting at Fuller & Smith & Ross many years ago when the agency was trying to get the Air France account. The $60,000-a-year creative supervisor was trying to impress the $90,000-a-year creative director, and they all were throwing lines like, "What if we say ...?"
Sitting out of the main line of fire was a poor guy making $20,000 a year and he knew eventually he had to put his two cents" worth in, even though all the other people would dismiss it. He was a copy supervisor of some sort, but pretty far down the rung.
He spots a break in the conversation and says, "You know, I thought of something. Air France, like it"s French. Why don"t we say something like "Come Home with Us to Paris"?" The meeting stopped dead in its tracks; the line struck them as great. Before the meeting was over the $90,000-a-year creative director was spouting the line as if it was his. He started by saying, "Let me tell you, that is a good concept because we could ..." It was armed robbery the way he grabbed the line. The $20,000-a-year guy wasn"t heard from for the rest of the meeting. He kept raising his hand you know, he had scored something and he might be making $25,000 by the end of the year. The guy had a heart condition he later died of a heart attack. But he really was dead at that meeting. They ran over him. n.o.body wanted to know he was there any more. Everybody went for that bandwagon as fast as they could. The creative director, being the heaviest at $90,000, got there first. The $60,000-a-year guy saw what was happening and he tried to take a shot at the line, he was trying to score too, and he"s saying, "Well, it"s good, but what if we took part of the line ..." The creative director beat off that attack quickly. "Look, nothing is going to beat "Come Home with Us to Paris."
The creative director moved so quickly that before the meeting was out, people were convinced that the line was his. Each time somebody tried to bomb the line, the creative director would say, "I insist that this is the way we"ve got to go." People thought he came up with the line, he was defending it so much. Well, they got the Air France account and then things were even bigger and better for the creative director. I"ve seen it in different advertising trade papers crediting the creative director not only with the line but with pulling in the account. That creative director was making maybe $100,000 a year and riding high. The guy who came up with the line is dead and gone. The creative director was a hero at Fuller & Smith for a long, long time, just on the strength of that campaign. The only thing is that the creative director knows who came up with that line. He knows that he didn"t; that he had to grab it off some poor guy. He has to know this and very late at night that guy must shake just a little bit.
CHAPTER.
TEN.
CENSORSHIP.
"One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reasonto it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It"s one guy"s idea of what is right for him. It"s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws ..."
You don"t spend $50,000 or $60,000 to make a commercial and just put it on the air. It"s not that easy. There are rules and regulations and censorship. There is so much of this that it"s G.o.dd.a.m.n funny and stupid. Sooner or later every commercial is pa.s.sed on by someone. The National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters is the national bunch of censors and they pa.s.s on commercials on certain sensitive subjects, like cigarette advertising, personal products, feminine hygiene products, and parts of the body like the belly b.u.t.ton. The National a.s.sociation is very strong on belly b.u.t.tons. If you get by the N.A.B., then you"ve got to deal with the networks, which have their own censors. And the individual stations, they"ve got their censors too.
One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reason to it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It"s one guy"s idea of what is right for him. It"s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws. The problem is, the Code of the National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters changes every week; each week a new directive comes out of the N.A.B. I don"t follow any rules or standards or laws when I do commercials because how can I? What is O.K. this week may not be good next week. There are no rules. There"s only Miss Cheng.
Now Miss Cheng is a very nice chick her first name is An-Shih who is about thirty-one or thirty-two years old, and she is the lady whom you see at the National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters when you want to clear a commercial. Miss Cheng sits in her little room up on Madison Avenue, which is a strange place for a censor to be, she sits there saving the Great American Public from being offended. She has no stake in any of the commercials, no money stake, all she wants to do is keep America clean.
Although Miss Cheng is cute as h.e.l.l, I have had my biggest problems with her in doing commercials for Feminique. All right, Feminique is a feminine hygiene product, to coin a phrase. Women use the spray so they will smell nice around their v.a.g.i.n.as. This is what the stuff does. But you can"t come within miles of saying this in an ad or a commercial. So what we tried to do was get a movie star to endorse the product in a commercial. We tried everybody. Vanessa Redgrave sent us a letter saying that we Americans were crazy over our clean armpits and so forth. She said that she thought Feminique was just one more example of the American craziness about cleanliness. As far as the v.a.g.i.n.a was concerned, Vanessa Redgrave said women ought to use bidets, soap, water, and baby powder. I"m standing there looking at the letter, and it dawned on me that we"re not going to be able to get anybody.
I mean everybody turned us down, everybody but Linda Darnell, and she"s been dead for three years. I"m sure that if she was alive she would have turned us down. Finally, the word comes from one of those endors.e.m.e.nt outfits that Dorothy Provine, the television star, would do the commercial for $50,000. There was much rejoicing in the agency when Provine said she"d do it. Even though $50,000 is a lot of bread, we would have the only commercial on the air that will be able to get past all the things that the Code says you can"t say. You can"t even mention s.e.x but Provine is s.e.x. You can"t say attractive but Provine is attractive. My theory was that when the compet.i.tion looks at our commercial and we really start to fly and take off in sales the compet.i.tion is going to say, "We"ve got to get a star too to neutralize these people." I figured out as I looked around that the only star left for them to get is Arthur G.o.dfrey. He"s doing Axion commercials now, but I mean he"s the only star left.
We shot the commercial out in Los Angeles in a big mansion. We"ve got a great photographer, a director, script girls, dozens of people running around, and we"ve got a lot of bread tied up in this thing. I go into this mansion, which must have had forty rooms in it, to talk to Provine, and when I saw her I almost fainted. She was under the hair dryer and you know, this is not a good place to talk to a lady because ladies usually look lousy under hair dryers. I went downstairs feeling very uptight and nervous. I mean, here we are with a crew of twenty-five people, spending $50,000 for Provine and maybe another $25,000 for the commercial, and what are we going to do?
Finally, the time comes for Provine to come down. And she"s beautiful. A f.a.g makeup man has put her together and made her into something. I started talking to her and I said, "I want you to give this a Sandy Dennis reading." She said, "What"s a Sandy Dennis reading?" I said, "A Sandy Dennis reading is as though you were mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded for the first eighteen years of your life and you just learned how to talk but you can"t remember words too good. So you say things like "This is the first time I"ve ... uh ... ever done ... a ... commercial." " I said, "It"s got to be natural, like Sandy Dennis, you know fake natural."
She did it and she did it very well. There"s one part where she comes on and says, "This is the first time I"ve ever done a commercial. It"s about a product that I ... ah ... feel very strongly about.... It"s a feminine ..." And she gave us a terrific Sandy Dennis reading. A marvelous commercial. Then our troubles started with Miss Cheng.
The offices of the National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters are very deceptive. It"s like another business office. You walk in, and there"s a girl behind the desk and you say, "Miss Cheng, please." And out comes Miss Cheng. She"s very soft-spoken, very nice, and I don"t know, maybe she"s the brains behind the whole thing. Her t.i.tle is Senior Editor. All I know is that I"ve never seen many people up there. All you do is show your stuff to Miss Cheng. She always talks vaguely about people in the back she has to consult with but I"ve never seen more than one of those people. She goes away, and then she comes back with some of the stupidest decisions I have ever seen in my life.
You usually go up to Miss Cheng with your storyboards those cardboard things with the various shots of the commercial drawn in and the audio typed out. With the Feminique commercial Miss Cheng did such a job on the storyboards that she knocked two-thirds of it out. Miss Cheng says we cannot say "It"s safe." But we can say "It will make you feel safe." "Well, doesn"t this mean that the woman is safe?" "Yes, but you can"t say that it"s safe." Miss Cheng also does not like the use of the word "feminine" three times in the commercial. "Is feminine good enough to use once?" "Certainly, you can use it once." "Well, why can"t I use it three times?" "Well, when you use it three times you"re stressing it" Plus: "You"re not allowed to use your compet.i.tors" name, even though you"re saying something nice about them." Plus: "You"re not allowed to use the phrase "feminine hygiene." However, Miss Cheng is cheerful throughout. "Good luck with your commercial," she says.
You could, of course, shoot the commercial without Miss Cheng"s approval but you can"t put it on the air. Oh, I guess you could put it on any station in the United States which doesn"t subscribe to the Code of the National a.s.sociation of Broadcasters. There may be two stations which don"t subscribe to the Code maybe one of them is in a big market like Monahans, Texas (KMOM-TV).
So you go ahead and rewrite the commercial to make Miss Cheng happy and you go out to the Coast to shoot it and you spend I don"t know how many thousands of dollars putting it together and then you take it back to Miss Cheng so she can screen it. She looks at it in her little screening room, nodding her head sagely, and then the next day she calls you up and starts to hack away. One of the lines that Dorothy Provine says is, "There are a lot of other great products, but the one I use is Feminique." Miss Cheng doesn"t want the "but." The "but" indicates that we"re trying to put down the compet.i.tion. Miss Cheng wants Provine to say, "There are a lot of great products the one I use is Feminique." Miss Cheng says we have a line in the commercial saying that Feminique has a fresh, clean fragrance you couldn"t get from a shower or a bath. Miss Cheng says that the line indicates and this is the way she puts it "you still stink" after a shower or a bath. So help me, "you still stink."
We"re killed again. She held us up, more problems, more hang-ups. It will go on and it"s a never-ending battle. The more power the censors get, the more I will have to fight them. And it"s a fight that the agencies don"t win. Eventually we got the commercial on the air. We dubbed, we cut, we made a mess out of a nice commercial to keep Miss Cheng happy.
I ran into censorship again when trying to run a print ad for Feminique in McCall"s magazine. Art Stein was the publisher of McCall"s at the time and he despised the thought of feminine hygiene. We went to him with the Provine commercial, which by now had been completed and cleared, and we showed him that the same ad had been accepted by the Ladies Home Journal and the Washington Post and a lot of other papers and magazines. Stein read the copy, part of which said, "Now that the pill has freed you from worry, the spray will make all that freedom worthwhile." "What makes you think the women who read my magazine take the pill?" he said. "Well," we said, "we have a story that you ran in your magazine six months ago about the pill and pregnancy and the whole thing." We showed him the story. He said, "That"s the editorial side. My side is advertising. You can"t tell women that the pill has freed them from worry. I won"t accept it." "Fine," I said, "we"ll take that line out."
"You have another line here," he said, pointing to a line which said something to the effect that when you bathe, take care of the most important part of you. "This line," he said, "about take care of the most important part of you you can"t say that." I said, "Well, look, I wrote the ad and I happen to think that that is the most important part of a woman."
Stein got very red in the face and he looked at me and said, "Mr. Della Femina, did you ever hear of the heart?" I told him that when I went to bed with a woman I didn"t particularly look for the heart. He said, "You are not going into my magazine with this ad; you"ll never get into my magazine with this ad. The story is closed." Boom. And he got rid of it. Since then, Stein has been fired and the man who took his place came up to our agency last summer asking if he could have the very same ad in his magazine. Censorship is just somebody"s hang-ups. I was censored because Mr. Stein could not bring himself to believe that the women who read his magazine had v.a.g.i.n.as.
Don"t think for a moment that we"re the only ones having trouble with the censor because of the nature of the product. Once, at Bates, they turned out a commercial for a toy company that showed a kid with a little machine gun on top of a mound of dirt blasting away at n.a.z.is or whomever we"re killing or fighting with these days. Maybe Vietcong. The commercial was sent over to the censor and the answer came back, "This commercial is not acceptable to the Code."
The account man says, "Why not?" He"s obviously very shook about their reaction to the commercial. The account man figures he hit somebody up at the censor"s office who hates war and is trying to downplay violence on the screen.
Not so. The censor said, "Well, it"s obvious that the mound of dirt is part of the game." The account man said, "Mound of dirt? What mound of dirt?" "The mound of dirt the boy is shooting from."
The account man blinks his eyes and steps back. "The mound of dirt is part of the game? How could any kid think that the mound of dirt is part of the game? It"s just a mound of dirt."
The censor said, "Well, the kid will obviously think that it"s part of the game since it"s on the screen for the entire commercial and the kid spends his time on the top of this mound of dirt." The censor feels that the kid is going to expect to be given a mound of dirt with every machine gun. The censor told the account guy that Bates had a choice: either give the kids a mound of dirt with every gun sold or they could run a visual on the screen during the commercial saying, "The mound of dirt does not come with the gun." The account man, who"s a very bright guy, suddenly feels that maybe he"s in 1984 already. "What kid," he says, "is going to believe this?" The censor had an answer for that one, too. "It"s not the five-year-old we"re worried about. It"s the one-and twoyear-olds who might be swayed." The account man, just to make sure, said, "For the two-year-old kids who can"t read I must flash on the screen "This mound of dirt is not part of the game"? The five-year-old, who can read, is going to think we"re crazy anyway." The censor said, "Yes, if you don"t use a visual, the commercial doesn"t play." So it was flashed on the screen for the benefit of the two-year-olds who couldn"t read. Nowhere in all this did anyone say, "Gee, do you really think we should have a commercial running which shows a bloodthirsty little kid killing a bunch of kids with a realisticlooking machine gun." No, that"s fine. Kids can kill and everything else. The whole thing was the mound of dirt. That"s censorship at its best.
I mentioned before that you just don"t have one censor, sometimes two or three. Miss Cheng is the N.A.B."s censor. The network censor is usually a woman by the name of McGillicutty or something to that effect, who is over forty, a little heavy, a virgin and a professional virgin I mean not just a virgin virgin. Her job is to sit and look and read and see as many commercials as possible; that"s the only job she has. The only thing she has to do all day long is to look for filth. If she doesn"t find dirt, she really didn"t earn her salary that day. So her job, day in, day out, is to find dirt. When she gets up in the morning and she"s having her coffee, all she can think of is dirt and garbage and filth. You know, was that a breast I saw yesterday in that commercial? Did I catch a leer on that model or did she smile? Was that guy in the shower showing a little bit of his hip? "Run that back, please, I think I saw a little bit of hip." That"s the whole day and the life of these people. You can imagine how twisted they are at the end of the day. It"s a crazy job they have. Maybe I"m trying to get something across in a commercial; maybe I"m trying to say s.e.x in a commercial and I"m beating her. And she can"t be beaten, she"s got to find it. It"s a great big game: she"s got to find the little bit of hip, the leer, the eyebrow that went up, the dirt.
Take the Noxzema commercial with the great-looking blonde, the one in which the blonde is sucking her thumb very, very suggestively and she"s saying, "Take it off, take it off." That commercial is very s.e.xy.
Somewhere along the line an account guy did a beautiful job. He must have taken the commercial in and sat down with an over-forty censor lady and they looked at it. Now if the censor raised any doubts about the blonde sucking her thumb, what"s she going to say that the thing looks like f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o on the screen? The account guy must have said, "She"s sucking her thumb. If you can tell me anything else that it might suggest, I"ll be glad to take it off the air." What a job! The woman obviously couldn"t bring herself to tell him what she thought the commercial suggested. I am sure that"s how it happened.
Most of the time, though, you can"t fake a censor out so easily. Smith/Greenland, a very good agency, was doing a commercial for Fresh, which is a deodorant. Why is it such clean products have such big troubles? Anyhow, they got past Miss Cheng, I mean they showed Miss Cheng what they wanted to do and she said, "Terrific."
They wanted to picture a belly dancer at her work, showing that she leads a strenuous, active life. Of course this belly dancer is terrific to smell all the time because she uses Fresh, which, h.e.l.l, I don"t know, doesn"t wear off even if you want to spend a night belly dancing. They cut the commercial at a great deal of money, and when Miss Cheng saw the cut she said swell.
They figured they were in. What they didn"t figure on was the NBC censor, who takes one look at the commercial and says, "That"s a belly b.u.t.ton. My G.o.d, you can"t show a belly b.u.t.ton." The theory was that kids might be watching and would see the belly b.u.t.ton. Of course the NBC censor didn"t realize that when kids go into their tub every night they look down and they see their belly b.u.t.tons. But no belly b.u.t.tons on the air. Not good. Forget that every kid has a belly b.u.t.ton. Forget that.
All of a sudden Smith/Greenland has got this expensive commercial and no place to go with it. The censor at NBC absolutely cut the commercial to ribbons. There was a great deal of bitterness on both sides. The people at Fresh don"t need these kinds of problems and here"s an agency that has spent a lot of money and has no place to run it. Smith/Greenland had shown the commercial in storyboards to a censor. Who knows? Maybe the artist didn"t draw a belly b.u.t.ton, or if he did, maybe it wasn"t a real, live, pulsating belly b.u.t.ton, which would have caused them to stop the commercial at that stage. Smith/Greenland lost the account and it must have been billing more than a million dollars. What"s so sad about this story is that you really can"t win, you don"t stand a chance.
The answer is, no censorship at all. The answer is, if you do something that"s really tasteless, you"ll be off the air I mean you"ll be off the air because people will stop buying your product. Sure, there"s a lot of bad stuff on the air. The guy with the hammers in his head. The guy with the transparent sinuses. Terrible. It dies, it will die, but let it die under its own power. Who am I to say that that stuff is tasteless? I happen to think that quite a few agencies in this city put out a lot of tasteless garbage. But I don"t have the right to tell them, No, you can"t do this or you can"t do that. My feelings on censorship are very simple: I haven"t got the right to censor somebody else.
Sometimes the client steps in and tells the agency the commercial is no good. But that"s censorship by the guy who"s paying the bills. A lot of clients don"t want to see their products portrayed in a certain way. Lots of clients don"t even want to be on the borderline of bad taste. But it"s different when the client tells you to tone it down than when some third party censors you. Miss Cheng says navels are all right, the Mrs. McGillicutty-type lady said that navels are out. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars are going down the drain. Miss Cheng is not worried about money. She has no stake in it at all. As I told her on the phone the other day, "If I could say feminine once in the commercial, whom do I offend by saying it three times?" But in her little world, three times is too many times to say feminine. Once is all that she can allow me. And I lose again.
There"s a cla.s.sic Lenny Bruce bit. He"s doing a father talking to his son while they"re both watching a p.o.r.nographic film. Bruce says, "Son, I can"t let you watch this. This is a picture of a couple making love and this is terrible and dirty and disgusting. Son, I"m going to have to cover your eyes now. That man is going to kiss that woman and they"re going to make love and there"s going to be pleasure and everything else and this is terrible, it"s not for you to see until you"re at least twenty-one. Instead, son, I am going to take you to a nice war movie. We certainly can go see a John Wayne war picture where there"s blood and guts and killing and everything else. Because somebody"s decided you can see that, son."
If you"re doing cigarette commercials, forget it. You can"t say anything on cigarette commercials. Nothing. You"re allowed to have a f.a.g run up and down for a while in your commercial but he"s not allowed to have fun in a cigarette commercial. Characters can"t look like they"re having fun. They can"t be endorsed by an athlete, can"t be endorsed by anyone. Characters can"t be too young and they can"t look too bright. Right now, cigarettes are vulnerable. Who can"t be a hero by not knocking cigarettes? The cigarette fight is really the most hypocritical form of censorship going worse than Miss Cheng or Mrs. McGillicutty.
It"s very hip to attack advertising right now and we"re vulnerable because we"re so segmented. Someone can get up in Congress and say, "Well, the money that"s being spent on selling soap could be spent on saving Harlem." Everyone will agree to that except those people who are concerned with the making of and selling soap. It becomes easy, or seemingly easy, for a politician to swoop down and attack, but very few of them are so dumb as to attack advertising as a whole. Listen, politicians are some of the greatest advertisers going. Rockefeller spends a fortune on advertising every time he runs for office. Javits shrewd as h.e.l.l. Treats himself like a product. When he takes a look at the surveys during a campaign and sees he is winning by a big margin, he"s like any other advertiser he simply cuts back on his advertising.
Senator g.a.y.l.o.r.d Nelson of Wisconsin held some hearings a couple of years ago and decided that U. S. tire makers of this country should spend less money on advertising and take that money and build a better tire with the money they saved by not advertising. He was saying they should cut the h.e.l.l out of their advertising budgets. On the surface this sounds fantastic. As far as I"m concerned, if the tire manufacturers could make a better tire, they certainly would, because it would be a h.e.l.l of a lot easier to market. But Nelson says they"re spending too much money on advertising. I wrote a column in Marketing/Communications about Nelson and I happened to find out how much money he spent on his last Senatorial campaign. This politician who is yelling at the tire people spent and it"s a matter of public record at the State Capitol in Madison spent like $486,338.34 on advertising himself in his last campaign. All right, why doesn"t he cut down on his advertising and maybe use the money to make a better Senator? Maybe he could spend the money on hiring experts to cram him full of knowledge. He could do a lot with that money. What this country needs are more great Senators and Nelson ought to divert some of that ad budget into building better Senators. I could even write a pretty good campaign for him on that concept.
What the politicians use is the salami technique: they attack one group at a time. Now it"s the cigarette companies" turn, next time maybe it"ll be the drug guys again, and then the cars. They"ll get down to the soap guys eventually. Just watch. When somebody tries to stop them their rationale is, "Look, it"s only one slice of this great business and we"re doing it for your own good."
The salami technique also has been used in truth in advertising and packaging. The U.S.Government has decided that you cannot call your cherry pie cherry pie unless it has thirty-two cherries per pie, or something like that. Now who"s going to yell about the cherry pie? Not the bread manufacturers they don"t care. The bread guy is sitting there saying, "Good for them, you show "em, those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds should do something about the cherries in their cherry pie." The guy down the block who"s making cigarettes, he doesn"t care: "Serves those guys right, it"s about time they got after those b.u.ms who"re selling cherry pie."
The cherry-pie manufacturer, he gets it full force. Because one man in Washington has arbitrarily set a figure of cherries per cherry pie, the pie company comes up with an instrument that measures exactly the number of cherries per pie. It"s almost like a sieve used in panning for gold. They dip this thing into a vat of guck, they sift it, and when the other guck falls through they"ve got to be able to count thirty-two cherries. Before they turn the sifter into the pie, they"ve got to have a minimum of thirty-two cherries in it. The Government feels that the average guy who digs into his cherry pie doesn"t have any protection if he doesn"t have enough cherries in the pie. The only person who gets outraged at this is the pie maker and he"s doing it because he doesn"t want to have to say that he has "cherrylike" pie instead of "cherry" pie. So he"s going to comply with the ruling. Down the block another guy is thinking, "Good. Get that cherry-pie b.a.s.t.a.r.d." n.o.body"s together on this thing.
The Government goes on the theory that my wife or your wife or everybody"s wife is too dumb to know the difference between the supercan and the monster can. That"s their theory: We better take care of the people because the people are too stupid to watch out for themselves. What happens is that we get people like Bess Myerson or Betty Furness to watch out for us. It"s amazing the people they recruit to be watchdogs for the people. I"m waiting for Frances Langford, or maybe Dorothy Lamour. Gloria De Haven would be good, too. Or Ann Miller. I can see Ann Miller doing twenty minutes on truth in packaging. I can"t understand how the thing is so screwed up. Why do they go to the entertainment world? How about Mickey Rooney? Or Shirley Temple? No, she"s out, because she"s representing us at the UN.
What gets me really mad is that the Government gets so hypocritical about the whole business. The Government says cigarettes are a hazard to your health. O. K. Why don"t they make the sale of cigarettes illegal? It would be very simple, no trouble just cla.s.sify cigarettes along with gra.s.s, heroin, hash, and whatever. Make them illegal. Well, I think the Government can"t see its way clear to making them illegal because there is one h.e.l.l of a lot of tax money coming in to the Government on the sale of cigarettes. The Government is making a lot of money on cigarettes right now and who knows what the state and local governments are making on their taxes? The Government is a beneficiary of cigarette advertising. And this is the double standard.
The networks" giving up cigarette advertising is a joke. The networks are saying, "Right, no more commercials." But the reason is simple economics. The pressure had been great on the stations to run the American Cancer Society freebies. They"ve had to give up so much time from their programs that it no longer becomes economically feasible for them to continue to carry cigarette advertising. The networks can"t keep carrying cigarette advertising and then give equal time to the anti-cigarette advertising and still stay in business. To get out of this bind, they"re giving up the cigarette business.
If advertising agencies are such seducers, if they sway so many people to buy cigarettes, how come they can"t sway people to stop smoking with anti-smoking campaigns? You either have a right to smoke or you don"t. Either make it illegal or leave it alone. But enough of the double standard. Gra.s.s is illegal. Doctors are saying that maybe it"s dangerous, maybe it isn"t. The Government is sure they say it"s illegal, and depending upon where you are you can be put away for a long time for using it or selling it. In 1969 they held a rock festival at Bethel, New York, and like 400,000 kids sat out in a field and got stoned. Strictly illegal, and one sheriff said there weren"t enough jails in three counties to hold all those who were smoking gra.s.s so they said the h.e.l.l with it. Double standard, just like prohibition.
What the cigarette people did was to hire their own censor. They felt it would be easier to hire a guy to censor them now even more than the Government ever could. So they went out and hired Robert Meyner, formerly Governor of New Jersey. And the industry tells Meyner, "Censor us. Keep us from doing things that the Government will get mad at." He went so far that he"s censoring them now even more than the Government ever could.
A friend of mine said to me not long ago, "I"m going to beat them. I"ve got to get a cigarette commercial on the air." Finally he came up with an idea. He would get the rights to the "59th Street Bridge Song" which has a line in the lyrics that goes "feeling groovy," and he would show a guy and a girl walking through Manhattan, smoking, and in the background, "Feeling Groovy." The Code said no good: "Feeling Groovy" is a young song. It"s young music. Get some older music. My friend was dead, finished.
Do you remember the famous ads made by Colonel Elliot Springs for Springmaid sheets? Lewd, tasteless stuff. He would have an Indian maiden with her dress up to her belly b.u.t.ton and next to her would be an Indian guy. It was obvious that they had just finished s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around. If you couldn"t figure that out for yourself, the headline helped you out: "A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet." You don"t see that any more. In the end, the public killed it. They decided not to buy the sheets. Eventually tasteless advertising doesn"t work, and there"s no percentage in trying it.
The people kill bad advertising in a very good way. They don"t write too many letters to the manufacturer; they just don"t buy the product. All of a sudden you look around and you see sales dropping right before your eyes. The letters that the networks get are few and far between, as far as commercials are concerned. But when companies or networks do get letters, they get very uptight. I could control the entire advertising business with five little old ladies and five pens. All a company has to do is get more than twenty letters on a single commercial and it"s out, it"s dead. The company gets very nervous and the commercial is finished, washed up.
I once wrote an ad for men"s socks and the ad showed a man standing next to a dog. I don"t know why or can"t even remember why we had a dog in the ad but it doesn"t matter. The dog was there. Well, Kayser-Roth, the company that made the socks, got a letter from somebody in Ohio. The letter said that the dog is the filthiest of all animals and it went on to describe the habits of a dog it was a pretty nauseating letter. But the letter got up to Chester Roth, the president of the company, and he thought enough of it to send it down to somebody, who thought enough of it to send it down to someone else, and it caused a little stir. Obviously, the guy who wrote it was a real nut. Four other dog haters could eliminate a lousy dog from an ad. We left our dog in but it was a close call.
The story that the censors put out is that they"re doing it for the public good. That"s all you ever hear about why they do it. They"re going to ruin commercials, they"re going to damage advertising, all because of the public good.
CHAPTER.
ELEVEN.
RUMORS.
AND PITCHES.
"The outsider who reads about this kind of infighting might be horrified, but strangely enough I enjoy it. I think it"s a lot of fun. I like it when somebody zaps me. The guy who said we weren"t taking small accounts did a beautiful job he really got me. He put me in a position where I couldn"t fight back and I can admire the job he did. The thing to remember about the entire rumor game is that you can"t touch a solid account and you can"t bother a solid advertising man ..."
I once made a presentation to an account when I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. The guy who owned the company zapped us out. He was straight as an arrow, greatlooking guy, big, tall, basketball-playing type. I ran into him about six months later on the ferry to Fire Island. He was with another guy and they had their arms around each other. As I walked by I caught him from the side of my eye and I said to myself, "I really didn"t see that." So I kept walking, like I didn"t really want to meet him and talk to him on the ferry. My wife was sitting in the front of the ferry and since he saw me alone he figured, Well, golly, here we go. "Jerry," he said, "how are you?" I couldn"t remember his name, I only remembered that we pitched the account. He"s there, grinning, with his four buddies, and he said, "Who are you here with?" "I"m here with my wife," I mumbled. "Oh," he said, "Oh." That was that.
Now, if I had known about this guy when I made the presentation, why you can"t tell, I might have done something to get an edge on the account. Like wear a dress. No, of course that"s not true, but it is true that you work like h.e.l.l to pick up the business.
Before you even get a chance to present, you have to know that the account you"re going to pitch to is loose that is, you have to be aware that the account wants to listen to you. You hear about possible new business through rumors. Rumors are very important in this business. Whether you start them or whether you"re the victim of them, rumors are crucial to advertising. This is one of the few businesses where people are so rumor-conscious. You"ll almost never find two lawyers sitting around discussing whether Sullivan & Cromwell is going to lose a client.
Rumor, gossip, whatever you want to call it, it"s essential to advertising. People use the advertising trade papers to push their careers, make a pitch for an account, or to zap guys who have an inside track on an account. The most important trade papers for rumors are ANNY (Advertising News of New York), The Gallagher Report, Ad Age and Ad Daily. ANNY also has a counterpart in Chicago and on the West Coast. People sit down and read ANNY and The Gallagher Report to find out if they"re going to lose their accounts. The New York Times is the single most powerful force in the business as far as straight advertising news is concerned. The Times does not go in for rumors, just plain news, when an account finally moves from one agency to another and items like that.
The trade papers print rumors on purpose when the rumors come from a reliable source. One of the trades printed a rumor in 1969 that a soap company was thinking of developing an enzyme which would be compet.i.tive, really compet.i.tive, with another soap. The story said that if the company did bring out this soap they would give the account to a large agency, which then would have to drop their soap account because of a product conflict. I happen to know that the guy who planted that rumor did it because he wanted to be able to say to Soap Company No. 1, "What"s with the story? Is it true? And if so, we"d like to be in the running for the account that was to be dropped." This was a legitimate rumor that went to the press, and who knows if something will come of it? You can"t tell.
The press is of value to someone in looking for new business or in solidifying his position with an account. As far as I"m concerned the rumor business is not all dirty pool. It"s like a race toward an account and everybody does everything in their power to get it. Agencies hire stars to impress the account, guys do anything to get the account. Part of the race for the account is the rumor. It"s true that there are some bad people who immediately go out and try to kill the other agencies who also are pitching the account. They"ll spread rumors that an agency"s best people are leaving. There are cases when people will sit down and spread liesnot rumors that may have a basis in fact. A good example of this recently was the rumor spread that Doyle, Dane"s best people were leaving for other agencies. Now Doyle, Dane was about to get a big chunk of business, and somebody spread this rumor about them so the account might think that it might not pay to go to Doyle, Dane if the people working there were leaving.
We in advertising really would be kidding ourselves if we didn"t admit that the rumor business existed. Agency presidents use it: they put in a call to Gallagher and they drop whatever news they want to drop. It"s not unlike Hollywood around the time when the Oscars are given out. "Joe Whateverhisname is a sure bet to get an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor." That"s Joe"s agent at work, planting rumors.
The trade papers check out rumors. They"re not innocent victims and you just can"t get them to spread anything that they can"t check out. You can"t buy them because they"re not buyable. They"re extremely careful to protect their sources. No one ever gets to know where a rumor comes from. You only can guess. You read a story about yourself in ANNY and you can"t find out who fed it to them for love or money.
When we first went into business and we were having a h.e.l.l of a time just staying afloat, a story appeared in Ad Age saying that two of our partners were unhappy with their setup and thinking of leaving and going to another agency. At the time, I just didn"t want a story like that printed even though it had a basis in fact and obviously the rumor had been fed to Ad Age by somebody. I called them up and said, "What"s this all about? It"s not so. Who said it?" And they said, "Just as we would protect you if you were to talk to us, we have to protect our source on a story about you." A rumor about our agency got into Ad Daily last year and all it said was, "Jerry Della Femina successful. Will no longer talk to small accounts."
Now that"s not so. Ed Buxton of Ad Daily is a very good friend of mine so I called him up and said, "Hi, how"s everything? What"s this I hear about me not talking to small accounts? You know, some of them pay a lot of money to come see an agency like this. You"re going to turn off a couple."
He said, "Jerry, I"ve got to protect my sources. We heard that you"ve established a limit now on the size of an account you"ll take, and that"s it for a small account. We heard that n.o.body gets in unless they"re billing such and such."
What a beautiful rumor somebody fed Ed. Do I now come out and say, "Jerry Della Femina & Partners announce that they"ll take any small account they can get?" I mean, any kind of reb.u.t.tal that I issue is deadly for me anything short of silence is no good. If I come out and say, Yes, I want small accounts, that will be read by people to mean that Jerry Della Femina is in trouble and he wants all the small accounts he can grab. The guy who fed that rumor was very brightand I know exactly who it wasbecause he zapped me out of maybe ten accounts that might be able to bill say $150,000, $200,000 or even $300,000. Who knows what "small" means? A guy billing maybe $1 million might say to himself, "Gee, I"m not big enough for them any more. I might not have a chance."
It"s a very tricky business. Let"s say that a new agency has opened up and they have a.s.surances that the account which is loose over at the Joe Doakes agency is going to go to them. No papers have been signed, but everyone has agreed to the thing. The account is making this move partly to take advantage of the big publicity that comes when a new shop opens with a big new account. Now ANNY calls guys every Wednesday, they"ve got a list of sources all over town, and they get on the telephone and say, "What"s new around town?"
They might call a guy who is familiar with the situation of the new agency opening and getting the loose account at Joe Doakes. And this guy they call might decide to zap the new agency and take a shot at the Doakes account himself. What he does is to tell ANNY that the big Widget account over at Doakes is going to leave and go to the new agency. "It"s too bad," says the guy to ANNY, "but that"s what I heard. Why don"t you check it out?" ANNY calls the new agency and asks if it"s true that they"re going to pick up the Widget account. The guy who is forming the new agency is dead. He has his head between his hands because part of the big mystique in his talking to the Widget people was, "Well, we want you to be our first account and we expect it to make a big splash." If ANNY prints a story which says that Jim So-and-So, one of the partners of the new agency, said there is no news to report at this time concerning the Widget account, the issue is dead. It"s now a dead story as far as the business trade is concerned. With a dead story, the Widget people just lost the one big reason why they want to go to the new agency. Everyone had been saying to each other, "Well, we would be their first account and we would get the full treatment, the whole splash, like, "They opened today and they opened with this particular account."" With the news out it"s not going to happen that way. What may happen is that the Widget people will say, "Gee, this new agency must have blabbed it around about our leaving the Doakes people. What do we need with a bunch of bigmouths?"
The clients all read the trade papers, but very few of them realize the infighting that is going on all the time. All they know is whenever their name is mentioned in the wrong way they get upset. They don"t know of the blood being shed behind the lines. I saw a story recently about an agencyand the agency was namedsaying that they were doing some work for Carter-Wallace, Inc. The story said that the project "is under wraps. No details available." I don"t know anything more about this story but I do know that somebody just got zapped out. An executive at Carter-Wallace must have seen the story and then called the agency which was doing the project- "We thought that this was very confidential, and if it"s not confidential why didn"t you tell us that you couldn"t keep a secret?" Somebody bombed the agency. Who knows why?
There are some agencies that just are not aware of what"s going on. Day in, day out, these agencies constantly take it on the chin. Some agencies" guys are nice, sweet, warm guys who want to go home to Rye at night and they don"t want to know from rumors. They no more know how to handle rumors than the man in the moon.
Very few people go around telling out-and-out lies in the rumor game this is where you tend to draw the line. But if there"s a piece of news, some guys use it to their best advantage. That"s all it really is. People also draw the line at taking unfair advantage of a guy. They would not call up a trade paper and say outright that somebody"s about to lose an account. They don"t call up a paper and say, "Hey, I"ve got a tip for you, baby." Like that"s bad news. They let the press call them. I once got a phone call from one of the trade papers: "What do you hear?"