One of the ways Charlie Goldschmidt of Daniel & Charles had of spurring his troops on was to play on this fear that copywriters have: he used to plague me with it and everybody else, too. "Well, kid," he would say, "what do you think? You haven"t had an idea in about three weeks. You"re starting to fake it, aren"t you? You"re trying to coast because it happens sometimes, you"ve got it one day and the next day it"s gone." And he would do this, he would pressure his people this way in the hope of shaking them up and getting them out of the doldrums.
Listen, somebody is paying you thirty-five, forty grand a year to do this thing, copywriting, or being an art director, and you"re bound to have this fear of going dry. A fantastic art director named Bob Gage at Doyle, Dane once made a speech on fear, what it was, how to combat it. He described it as the fear of going dry and then he discovered that you can never go dry, that there is no mystique, there"s no magic to it, you can"t turn off like that. Gage said that when he found himself going dry, it was a matter of being faced with a problem that had to be solved and that he could always solve the problem the same old way he had solved it years before. He said that going dry was simply becoming impatient with problem-solving in the same old way.
Most writers and art directors become impatient when they"ve got a tough problem, and that"s where they get into trouble. They play, they dance, they do everything in their power to look as though they"re producing advertising. And the minute they come in your office you know they"re pretending. They"re cold and they"re dry and they know it and you know it and they know you know it.
I"ve seen guys who couldn"t produce an ad for six or eight months, they"d be so tied up in knots. During that time, these guys would have to dance. Charlie Goldschmidt was a guy who started out as a copywriter and became a brilliant agency president. He"s a fantastic guy who could walk into a room, shake your hand, and tell you what your hang-ups were as he was shaking your hand. He always amazed me that way. He always knew everyone"s weak points, their panic b.u.t.tons, and he knew just how to push them to get you started.
When I was working for Charlie I went through a bad dry spell where I did zip for three or four months. Nothing. I would sit in the room and nothing would happen. And you know when you"re coming up with ads and you know when you"re not. I would fake it. I would come up with mediocre solutions to problems. And you start to think about it, and it starts to bug you and you don"t know quite what to do. So to get by you start to dance a little bit.
But Charlie caught it. He knew it. And he would walk into your room and say, "Did you ever stop to think that that"s it? You might have just dried up? You haven"t got another idea in you. Well, kid, stay loose."
Those were always his exact words. First a slap on the back and then, "Well, kid, stay loose." You didn"t stay exactly loose after he left you, but sooner or later usually sooner you shaped up.
Another problem with copywriters and art directors is the problem of recognition. There are a lot of copywriters who get mixed up and think they"re Faulkner or Hemingway. They sit there and they work and they mold and they play and when it"s over they"ve written something that"s absolutely beautiful but they forget one thing. It"s within the confines of a page that"s bought by a media director. What kills most copywriters is that people don"t buy Life magazine to read their ads. People don"t buy Gourmet to read their ad for Bombay Gin. People are buying Gourmet to read the recipes, and the ads are just an intrusion on people"s time. That is why it is our job to get more attention than anything else. n.o.body buys any magazine to read an ad. But a lot of guys act as though this is what is happening. This guy sat there, he"s written this thing, and as far as he"s concerned, this is it. Then he meets someone at a party and is explaining with a great deal of pride that he is a copywriter and the person says, "Oh, you put the captions on the bottom of the pictures."
I"ve had account executives who sit down and practically cry, asking me to change something because the client"s going to yell. "We"re going to lose the account." That"s the big word all the time from the account executives to the copywriters and the art directors.
Once a year the New York copywriters hold a party. Last year it was held in a photographer"s studio with maybe five hundred people jammed into a room that can really only hold about two hundred. With a rock-and-roll band that"s blasting so you can"t hear yourself think. Copywriters aren"t the kind of people who usually go to parties. But this is the party they all go to, this is where they"re going to get that job or they"re going to meet that guy or they"re going to do something that is going to change their lives.
They try to make their contacts. Any creative director who walked from one end of the room to the other had at least eight people tell him, "Can I bring my portfolio up and see you on Monday?" One after another. "Hi, how are you? I hear things are going very good. Can I bring my book up to see you on Monday? The place I"m at is really terrible; can"t stand it, I can"t stay there another day."
Then I met a guy at the party, and I knew him fairly well. He"s a very good writer and kind of a strange kid, very quiet, but nothing unusual about him. He was making about thirty thousand a year. At that party he was very uptight.
What was it all about? He"d been fired that morning. And he said, "I"ve got five hundred dollars in the bank, I make thirty thousand a year, and I pay two hundred and eighty-four dollars a month in rent." Who knows where his money went? Clothes, apartment, chicks, I don"t know. But he"d blown all his money and there he was, thirty-one or thirty-two, and I tell you he was a desperate kid, he really was. I had never seen him like that. "What am I going to do?" he asked. "How about some free-lance?" I said. He shook his head. He must have made twenty calls that day because every time I said, "Did you call Ned, did you call Ron, did you call Ed?" he"d shake his head yes. He"d called everybody worth calling. So he"s run out of names to call and he"s only one day out of a job. Now he starts with the headhunters and asks them to start setting up appointments for him.
He"s a good writer. That"s the scary part of it. He blew his last job essentially because he"s a very tough sport. He won"t take any garbage. He had been working for Leber, Katz & Paccione, and Patch finally couldn"t take any more lip from him. So out he went.
Before Paccione he had worked for Daniel & Charles and got fired because he couldn"t get along with Larry Dunst, who then was the creative director and now is the president. The job after Daniel & Charles fell apart the same way.
On about the fourth job out, he"s not going to be so quick to be such a smart-a.s.s. He mentioned to me that he had called a small agency which is really not an advertising agency but rather a dress house; they do all of that Seventh Avenue advertising you see in Women"s Wear Daily and the Sunday Times magazine section. Very big on girdle and bra ads. Anyhow, the owner of the agency told him to come on by on Monday, that is, the guy said, "I"ll see you Monday if you want to come in and say h.e.l.lo." Now this agency is one of the all-time bad places it may be the worst agency in America. And he"s thinking seriously of going there for a lot of bread if they"ll have him. So he"s scared, he"s got a bad weekend ahead of him, and when I left him he was quaking he was so scared.
Paccione already had replaced this guy. He found a twenty-two-year-old who thought advertising was the living end and hired her for eight grand a year. I had talked to her a couple of times about coming to work for us. No sooner do I finish talking to the guy who"s out of work when I run into this kid. "Hi," she says, full of life, "I got my job. I"m working. I"m starting with Leber, Katz, Paccione on Monday." "That"s terrific," I said, and I started to figure it out. Patch hired this kid for eight grand, and he"s saving twenty-two grand a year already by getting rid of the thirty-grand guy. Plus he"s gotten rid of somebody who was a pain in the a.s.s to him. And this young chick now is on her way to making a lot of money. Her next job she"ll be able to grab off ten grand, the one after that fifteen grand, then twenty-one and then up to thirty a year. And then she"ll find herself in the same position as the guy who just got fired. And she"ll start to get a little nervous because there will be somebody else hot coming up.
It"s really not unlike baseball. You don"t have that many good years to perform in. You"ve got about seven, eight, or maybe nine years when you"re hot and everything you do works and they"re calling you for a job and the headhunters are crying for you, and then there"s that long downhill slide. Which is why the shrinks are making out so well. And everybody knows that day is going to come to them. It used to kill me that I never saw a copywriter over forty. Very, very few. There are one or two guys worth mentioning but that"s it. I can"t figure out where they go after forty. But they leave. There must be an island somewhere that is populated only by elephants, copywriters and art directors. I can see it now. One tiny island jammed with old elephants, burned-out copywriters and art directors. That must be where they go.
I wonder what happened to most of the guys I started out in business with. I began in the mailroom of Ruthrauff & Ryan, and the only guy that I know of still in advertising from those days is Evan Stark, who is now at Doyle, Dane. Forget about where the guys are. Where are the agencies? Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone. I once went looking for a job at the Biow Agency. Gone. Donahue & Coe. Gone. Cecil & Presby. You ever hear of that one? Lennen & Newell used to be Lennen & Mitch.e.l.l. You"d better amend that thought about the island with the elephants and the ex-copywriters: they also got on that island one h.e.l.l of a lot of dead agencies.
Fashions change. So does advertising. The physical look of advertising changes from year to year. Last year"s ads don"t look as good as this year"s. I get tired of looking at my old ads. They bore me. The kids are changing everything language, clothes, style, and the visual arts.
The schools are breeding kids like n.o.body"s business. Don"t you think that when Patch got rid of that thirty-two-year-old guy that a lot of guys felt a cold draft down their necks? Of course they did. I know a $40,000-a-year art director working for Patch who"s thinking about that eight-grand-a-year copywriter and he"s saying to himself, "What if Patch goes out and finds an eight-grand-a-year art director where do I go with my forty grand a year?" Phones are ringing all over town. Everybody"s changing jobs. It"s like musical chairs you can"t keep up. The kids are death on forty-grand-a-year art directors and copywriters. Pure death.
Maybe we"re in the middle of a recession and we don"t know it. Advertising people can usually predict a recession a lot sooner than the rest of the country. I know when the economy is going to get a little rotten and I can smell it because the advertisers slowly start to pull back. Agency presidents start to get a little more nervous than usual, and the whole pullback works its way down to the copywriters who won"t get hired.
At that annual copywriter"s party I went to last year, there was a lot of fear and the whole room was kind of nervous. What is happening is simply that there aren"t enough jobs to go around. There have been periods in this business when the phones were always ringing and you couldn"t keep up with all of the openings. Not today and I wonder if it is going to get even worse. It"s interesting that in that room of five hundred people mostly copywriters there were only four or five people I would hire. Forget about the party; in the entire city there are maybe twenty-five copywriters worth mentioning. The whole city. You"re talking about an agency like J. Walter Thompson which had only one writer whose work I admire Ron Rosenfeld and he just quit there after one year. Forget it after that. An agency like Compton must have fifty or sixty copywriters. The only guy whose stuff I can look at is my ex-partner"s Ned Tolmach. Four years ago I went to that party and this year it was an entirely different group of people. I found about ten or fifteen standbys who always show up, and the rest, you know, it"s tall, gangly kids with pimples and girls who have decided it"s the most glamorous business in the world and they"re really out to make it.
The same sort of fear that copywriters show in public like at the party bugs them in private. For example, if a writer"s campaign is killed, forget it, the guy is lost for a couple of months. And these campaigns are like babies. These guys sit there and they love their campaigns and they look at their ads and they take them out and mount them. You"re talking about a piece of paper, and the copywriter puts it on a piece of mounting board and wraps it in Cellophane and he carries it around to show people.
The dilemma is that the good writers in this town are those who are really not afraid. You"ve got to be loose. It"s the one business where you"ve got to be so loose when you"re sitting down to work that you can"t sit there and worry about what"s going on next door or am I going to lose my job. And there are very few people like that in the creative end of advertising. Practically none. Most copywriters have the same background: middle cla.s.s to lower middle cla.s.s. All the copywriters in town have read Portnoy"s Complaint and they all say, "That"s my life. I was Portnoy except that I would never do such a thing to a piece of liver."
Everybody in advertising in mixed up but especially the creative people. Your whole life is screwed up. You"re not the same kind of guy once you get into the business. It"s hard to describe a business that really gets into your blood the way advertising does. After you"ve worked in it for a while, you"re not the same person that you ordinarily would be. I often wonder how I would have been or how I would behave if I had gone into the aluminum-siding business.
What happens to some guys is well, I"ll draw the a.n.a.logy to sports again. Baseball has its hot players and the next year the hot players cool off, and what happens is that their salaries drop and they get optioned out to Toledo.
There was a really good creative director in New York a few years ago who either lost it, blew it, or G.o.d knows. Anyhow, the next thing you hear he"s out in Chicago working for an agency. When you go to Chicago that"s like being optioned to Newark if you"re playing for the Yankees when the Yankees were the only thing going in baseball. I don"t know where you go after Chicago. He"s making a lot of money but it doesn"t mean anything. It"s still Chicago, the minors. Some guys go to Pittsburgh, the minors. You go to Cleveland, you"re still in the minors. When you talk about the major leagues you"re talking about New York, with Los Angeles coming up fast. In between New York and L. A. you have very little except for Leo Burnett in Chicago.
It"s very strange out of town, especially when a guy from New York is invited by some locals someplace to make a speech. There"s real hero worship. They all want to grow up and come to New York, and when you show up in their town they expect you to turn the water cooler into a wine cooler. They look at you and they say, "Jesus, he"s here. He"s going to tell us how to do it." And then you find they know everything about you.
I was down in Charlotte, North Carolina, one time to make a speech and I sat next to a guy who said, "Remember when you did that ad for Esquire Sox?" I didn"t even remember ever working on Esquire Sox, much less the ad the guy was talking about, but this guy wouldn"t let up: "Don"t you remember the ad? There"s a man in the ad who is talking and the girl is standing in the background ..." And then the ad came back to me. But this guy had like literally collected these things and was following me, and it"s crazy but I"m a sc.r.a.pbook someplace in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A friend of mine once went out to Cleveland to make a speech and when he came back he called me and said, "There"s a guy in Cleveland who knows more about you than your wife." He mentioned the guy"s name and of course I"d never heard of him, and my friend says the guy from Cleveland has a sc.r.a.pbook on me with every ad I ever wrote, every speech I ever made, and every advertising column I ever wrote for Marketing/Communications. This is the out-of-town story.
The standard word around Madison Avenue is that the out-of-towners love to be put down. If you want to make a speech out of town you"ve got to tell them that they"re no good. If you ever tell them that they"re good, they"ll hate you for it. They really sit there waiting for you to come in and say, "Boy, are you guys bad. I mean, are you bad. You know, in New York none of you would ever get a job." And they sit there and say, "Yeah, that"s New York advertising talking." It"s crazy.
In Los Angeles, the guy they"ve promoted to sainthood is Gene Case. Case is a beautiful, beautiful writer who recently formed his own agency with another beauty, Helmut Crone, an art director. Case had worked at Jack Tinker & Partners and Crone was from Doyle, Dane.
Case is invited out to the Coast to make a speech, and they pick him up at the airport. They"re driving away from the airport on their way to get a drink or something and Case is looking out of the window as they drive in. If you"ve ever driven in on Sepulveda Boulevard, you know it is not much to look at. Anyhow, Case makes the speech and immediately he says, "I"ve got to get out of here. I"ve got to fly out of this town, I hate it." The L. A. guys are looking at Case as if he"s crazy. They want to take him out to dinner. But he"s insisting that they take him back to the airport, he"s had his look at L. A., and he"s had enough. He says to them, "I know this place. I used to present to the Carnation Milk account out here when I worked for Jack Tinker, and they were always nasty to me. I can"t stand this town. You"ve got to take me to the airport." So they shake their heads, bundle Case back on a plane to New York and today. he"s a legend out there. "Gene Case, wasn"t he fantastic?" they say. Case, of course, produced the ultimate putdown.
It"s nice out of town. A different kind of advertising. It"s a slower and much easier life because, let"s face it, where could you be banished to if you"re working in Cleveland? I mean, where could they send you? Akron? In New York, you could always wind up in Cleveland, but like in Cleveland there"s nothing worse. So the people don"t have the same fears. They don"t have the same salaries, either. They don"t have the same relationships with clients. It"s not advertising the way I know it. In New York you have real stars copy guys, art directors, creative people, television directors who are good and they know it. Some of these creative people command higher salaries than the president of an agency in Cleveland might get. There is an emphasis on the creative guy in New York. Agencies put up with the craziness to get the creative. There"s no creativity in Cleveland, very little originality.
It"s a whole different game. It"s maybe advertising the way it used to be in 1942. The president of the agency still gets out on the golf course and plays with his client, the president of Acme Steel. The president of the agency lives very well and the rest of the people in the agency are just working people. They don"t make big salaries. There are no glamour people in, say, Cleveland. There"s n.o.body sitting in Cleveland saying, "I want to be like somebody else in Cleveland." They live vicariously and get their glamour from New York.
Cleveland will eventually change. The creative revolution will eventually get there. In New York, advertising is changing drastically and rapidly. Creative people are getting more clout. It is a provable fact that the so-called creative agencies are the ones that are growing the fastest. But I also have the feeling that life for the creative side of an agency will always be tough. Now you"ve got creative review boards made up of red noses and blue veins. Who knows? In twenty years perhaps pot will be legalized. It depresses me to think that in twenty years there still will be creative review boards, except that the board will not be made up of red noses. Instead, you"ll have a bunch of old guys with very funny pupils looking at your work. A bunch of dilated pupils checking you out. That kind of nonsense will never change.
CHAPTER.
SEVEN.
THE.
JOLLY.
GREEN.
GIANT.
AND OTHER STORIES.
"There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster ... All the great advertising in the world can never straighten out the stewardess who wakes up cranky one morning. There is nothing in the world an agency can do about the gas station attendant in One Horse Stand, Nebraska, who has a hangover ..."
I don"t want to give the impression that the new creative agencies can do no wrong. They can do plenty of wrong, and in fact they can do so much wrong they can blow the whole thing. Creative or not.
Several years ago two guys got together to form a new agency. They planned the agency along the lines of William Esty. Now William Esty is a very successful agency. It must bill somewhere in the neighborhood of $140 million a year, which is good billing. And William Esty has a very shrewd concept: Don"t take on a lot of accounts, just a few high-ticket, very large accounts. I think Esty has Sun Oil, Colgate, National Biscuit, American Home Products, Hunt-Wesson and only a few others. They can"t have more than ten or fifteen accounts, but all of them bill very high. Esty supposedly has the fewest number of employees for the number of accounts of any agency in town. You"re supposed to have something like eight employees for every $1 million in billing. Esty handles their accounts with maybe six employees for every $1 million. It is a very efficiently run agency, beautifully handled, and they can"t lose. They make nothing but money at Esty. They don"t care for too much publicity at Esty; all they want to do is their job and count the dollars.
They hold onto their accounts because with that small a number you really pay a lot of attention to them. Figure it out: the president has maybe ten or eleven guys to worry about each day the chairman of the boards of the various accounts. He can make ten or eleven calls a day to see how his accounts are, he can have lunch with each chairman of the board in the s.p.a.ce of two weeks. Esty pays a lot of attention to their accounts and they make sure their accounts are happy. And, believe me, they are.
Anyhow, let"s get back to the two guys who formed that other agency a few years ago, and let"s call them Manny and Moe. The first year Manny and Moe began they had zero billing and then they got hot. At the end of the first year they had $6 million in billing, and they added a little bit to that the second year. During the third year they really got hot they got so hot their billing went up to like $20 million. The fourth year they must have hit $40 million. Well, they hit their high of $40 million, and then they died, absolutely died. They managed to lose more business than I"ll ever see in my lifetime. It got so you couldn"t pick up Phil Dougherty"s column in The Times without reading of another client leaving Manny and Moe.
When Manny and Moe set up their agency along the lines of Esty, they said to themselves, "We"ll load ourselves up with some high-ticket accounts and we"ll coin money." They forgot one thing. These people come and go, too. It is very hard to keep a long-lasting relationship with an account when you are bored with it. And they blew it all because they got bored. Manny decided he was going to save the world, which is O. K. if your business is good. Moe decided he was going to beat the horses, which is even tougher than saving the world.
Manny got very interested in gun control and political campaigns. That was good. But you"ve got to be careful. There are guys running around Madison Avenue who also have guns and they are always trying to knock you off. You might be an account sitting out in the waiting room with a h.e.l.l of a problem, and you"re looking for Manny. When you gave them the account, they promised you Manny would be working on it. Where"s Manny? Well, right now Manny is out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, working on a political campaign for a guy who"s running for sewer commissioner of Jackson Hole. Manny thinks this guy has a future in politics, and he"s trying to make him into something much bigger than the sewer commissioner. Terrific, except if you"re a client and you want to see Manny you"ve got to figure out how to get to Wyoming.
Where"s Moe? Well, Moe is studying the racing form, and when Moe starts handicapping the fifth at Belmont it can get a little confusing. Moe may have been the only agency president in America who would show up at meetings with binoculars around his neck. He became so track-oriented that he didn"t know what was going on at his own agency. A media guy would come in to Moe and ask him, "Where are we going to spend this million dollars from the client?" Moe would say, "How many furlongs?"
And there was no management. They hired a guy to be president but he was nothing but a caretaker. Manny was out saving the world through advertising, and Moe was out at the track every day losing his shirt. Clients were being left out in the halls waiting to see somebody. They used to wait hours. Creative people used to take them into their offices and give them coffee while they were waiting. Clients are human and finally they got to the point where they started telling Manny and Moe, "Screw you. I mean your advertising isn"t even good any more, and who needs all the abuse?" The agency folded a couple of years ago.
All of the newer agencies blow something now and then. Even the guys at Doyle, Dane. A couple of years ago they did a campaign for a new beer out by the Rheingold Brewery people the new stuff was called Gablinger"s Beer. The thing about Gablinger"s was that it was very low in calories, and the thought was, "We"ll sell this to all those guys who drink beer and want to lose weight."
Somewhere, somehow, they blew it. Somebody in research made the first mistake, which was thinking that beer drinkers wanted to lose weight while drinking beer. Not true. Twenty percent of the people in this country who buy beer drink about 80 percent of all the beer consumed. I have an image in my mind of your typical beer drinker: the man never has a shirt on. He"s always in his undershirt, one of those old-fashioned undershirts, not a tee shirt. I may be wrong there, but I could swear that your typical beer drinker is proud of his beer belly. There he is, swilling beer all day long, and the only thing he has to show for it is his belly. It"s his sign of masculinity.
Now, you have a great example of one error compounding another error compounding still another error. So the first error thinking that these guys want to lose weight leads to the second error, which is that you can build a campaign on this att.i.tude and spend $5 million and tie up the whole beer market because all of these beer people want to lose weight. Campaigns will work only if the initial premise is true. But it"s like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: the first brick was crooked and after that everything started going sideways, and you wind up with a f.u.c.king silly-looking building or you wind up with a pretty terrible campaign. Since the first premise in Gablinger"s case was wrong, the thing went bad all up and down the line. Beer drinkers want to be fat. They love to watch their bellies. Figure it out: they like looking at their bellies because they never see their feet. Go into the bars right now. These guys start drinking at nine o"clock in the morning and they have their more than one by 9:05 a.m. And they drink and they drink and drink and drink, and this is the beer market.
The only thing you have to worry about in selling beer is to give these guys enough time to waste. I mean, don"t give these guys anything to do in which they have to use their hands, other than bowling. Bowling is O. K. because all they have to do is get up every seven minutes or so and roll a ball and then sit down as fast as they can and start drinking beer again.
Beer companies shouldn"t sponsor golf matches because golf is death on a beer drinker. If you"re out on the fourteenth hole, you can"t have a beer unless you throw away the clubs and lug beer around instead. Just find enough leisure time for the beer drinkers, that"s your only worry. Leisure time, in a beer drinker"s mind, means all they have to do is reach for a gla.s.s or for a bottle. Maybe they"ll have to get up from the television set and go to the refrigerator, but that"s it. Your real beer drinker can sit home watching television and polish off two six-packs a night. If he"s thirsty, or it"s hot out, make that even more. His wife will drink only four or five cans because she"s suddenly decided that she really shouldn"t drink more than a six-pack a night it won"t look good. So you"ve got like three six-packs a family a night. And you can count their kid in if he"s over ten years old.
Look at these people at the supermarket. They"re pushing market baskets piled high with beer, a couple of packages of hot dogs, and that"s it. Eighteen cans of beer a night except on Friday, which is party night when they switch to a clean undershirt. And on Friday you"ve got to figure that the guy is going to double his weekday consumption.
I went to a Yankee game one night last year and there was a real beer drinker in front of me, the genuine thing. I was watching him, and he made the night for the kid selling beer. He stopped once for peanuts, but that was a mistake because he didn"t finish them. He knocked the beer off just like pills I swear he must have drunk ten or twelve cans during that nine-inning game. He didn"t get up for the seventh-inning stretch, which doesn"t indicate that he wasn"t a Yankee fan. It was simply a matter that his legs weren"t moving too good at the time. There he was, sitting and drinking, and when the game was over he showed that he was a true fan. I got up to leave and he was still sitting there. Sitting there and looking out at the field, but he was staring straight ahead. A real beer drinker, with a real beer belly. Now you know if I had come up to him after the game and said, "Hey, buddy, do you know you just knocked off three thousand calories in all that beer? Why don"t you switch to something that won"t make you fat?" do you know what he would have done? He would have punched me in the mouth that is, if he could have gotten his hands free.
Now it is theoretically possible to sell Gablinger"s Beer. It"s a good idea, but not for Bohack, or A & P, or Piggly Wiggly. You sell it to Gristede"s because it"s a carriage-trade product. The lady who shops in Gristede"s might pick up one six-pack because she likes the notion that it"s low on calories.
The beer business is very strange. Go into Costello"s, which is an old-time bar on Third Avenue in New York go into there any night and pick the guy who has just staggered out of the men"s room and is trying to climb back on his bar stool. Go up to this cat and ask him what he thinks of Rheingold Beer. He doesn"t know zip about Rheingold Beer but he"ll focus his eyes and swear to you that Maureen Harrington got cheated out of winning the Miss Rheingold contest back in 1961 because a lot of votes for the girl named Beverly came in from Brooklyn on the last day of the contest. You think I"m kidding? There are guys in New York who went into mourning the day they discontinued the contest in 1965.
Interesting thing about the contest. One of the marketing geniuses behind the campaign was supposedly trying to make it with almost every Miss Rheingold who came down the pike. That is one h.e.l.l of a lot of Miss Rheingolds. But practically every one of them. And this marketing genius one day woke up and couldn"t feel his legs. So he went to Europe to dry out. I mean, he"s probably thirty-three or thirty-four now, but he can"t walk. He"s sitting there in his wheelchair with a little gray shawl over his legs and one h.e.l.l of a lot of memories. He got tired of the contest. Bored. It can happen; he"s ent.i.tled. So Rheingold went to Doyle, Dane and they produced those ethnic commercials Doyle, Dane, let"s face it, does not have a stunning beer record in New York City.
The ethnic commercials were beautifully done. Not only did they not sell beer; they antagonized a lot of people. Let"s say our beer drinker is an Italian. They had an Italian commercial with a lot of people running around and dancing and saying "Mamma mia" and things like that, and during the commercial the Italian beer drinker was very happy. He had a nice warm feeling for Rheingold. Then, one day he"s watching television and a group of Poles show up dancing a polka and carrying on a lot. This drives the Italian up the wall. He says, "I won"t touch the same beer those lousy Poles are drinking." They had a Jewish commercial, they had Germans, they had the Irish, they even had a Negro blues singer surrounded by a bunch of guys who today would be identified as Black Panthers. They had everybody but the WASPs, and everybody knows WASPs don"t know from beer. Instead of getting everybody together in the spirit of good fellowship and all that jazz, they blew the campaign because all of the groups really hated each other.
Beer advertising can be very tricky. Young & Rubicam turned out some terrific ads on Bert and Harry Piel, the Piel Brothers. Everybody liked Bert and Harry, all the intellectuals loved them. Good old Bert and Harry: they laughed at the product, they had fun. The big mistake with that campaign was that it got people to taste Piel"s Beer. A guy would take one sip of it and say, "Screw Bert and Harry, like they were a lot of fun and I like to look at them on the late news but they"re not going to make me drink this stuff." It"s a case of "You can lead a horse to water but you can"t make him drink," especially if he"s tried the stream once and it tastes terrible. And that was it. Bert and Harry never came back.
As far as I"m concerned, the best beer advertising today is Schaefer"s. It really gets to the beer drinkers; it has a very simple, very meaningful message for the real drinkers. "The one beer to have when you"re having more than one." Boy, does that message come across to those guys. They really understand it. Wow! And the guy grabs another can of beer. What a red flag that line is! Here I am, having more than one. As a matter of fact, I"m having seventeen at one sitting, and my eyes are getting gla.s.sy. And Schaefer is the only beer that will make me feel great when this binge is all over.
Schaefer is done by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne. They"re an agency that hasn"t distinguished itself for much other than Schaefer, Pepsi-Cola, Dodge, and Chiquita Banana. (But they were brilliant with Chiquita Banana. They sold bananas without laughing. They gave the banana an ident.i.ty and, you know, they literally made banana history. I mean, you never see any other banana commercials, do you?) It"s an interesting thing when a good campaign comes out there usually are a hundred guys who take credit for it. I know of at least nine guys who modestly say they came up with the line about the one beer to have when you"re having more than one. A number of friends of mine at B.B.D. O. tell me that a guy named Jim Jordan, who is a creative director, is the guy who did the campaign.
Compare the Schaefer campaign with the Ballantine Beer campaign created by Stan Freberg the campaign using the takeoff on Portnoy"s Complaint, except they call it "Ballantine"s Complaint." Very cute stuff but it falls into that trap of having the wrong initial premise: How many beer drinkers have read Portnoy"s Complaint? Forget the book. How many beer drinkers can read? One of the commercials shows a guy named Ballantine lying on a shrink"s couch complaining about how he left the brewery in the hands of his family while he went on a trip and the family loused up the beer. How many beer drinkers give a G.o.dd.a.m.n if Ballantine had a problem with his family? How many beer drinkers have ever been to a shrink? How many of them ever heard of Philip Roth? As far as they"re concerned, that beer is off the books. They might have had a can of Ballantine at a ball game once, and that"s it. They won"t drink Ballantine for anybody any more. These guys know where they"re understood and loved and I mean loved: Schaefer.
Rheingold nowadays is doing things with ten-minute heads. Nonsense. There isn"t a beer drinker alive who will sit and watch the head on his beer disappear in ten minutes, timed, by the way, with a stopwatch. Your beer drinker figures he can put two and a half beers away in ten minutes, forget about your head.
Pabst Blue Ribbon does nice commercials with a nostalgic twist usually a bunch of people in straw hats at a picnic. But I"m convinced that the only kind of nostalgia that will sell beer is a guy standing in a bar saying, "Hey, let"s have a beer for good old Joe DiMaggio. And hey, what about Dixie Walker? And now let"s have one for Carl Furillo." Nostalgia is not a bunch of guys clowning around at an old-timey picnic. Nostalgia is Joe D. picking one off in center field. That"s what nostalgia is all about for the beer drinker.
The last figures I looked at for beer sales showed Schaefer climbing out of sight. Budweiser is still the biggest-selling beer in the country. But their sales aren"t climbing the way Schaefer"s are. They"ve tried a number of campaigns and a bunch of commercials. So they"ve got their horses schlepping, and that"s O. K. if you like horses, which I don"t happen to. The best commercial of theirs I"ve seen lately has Ed McMahon, who is a great guy to sell beer, standing there and saying, "Folks, it"s that time you"ve all been waiting for. It"s time to pick up two packs of Bud." There is no particular reason why a guy should pick up two instead of one, but it gives a lot of beer drinkers inspiration. And these drinkers are usually pretty short of inspiration. So they say to themselves, "Gee, you"re right, Ed, I should have picked up two instead of one." So people are buying double. You don"t save any money. They just tell you this is the time of year you"ve got to buy two of them rather than one.
Bud does very well and Schaefer but that"s about it. Not long ago Jack Tinker did a campaign for Carling"s Black Label, which said that we have our breweries close to every city so our beer is always fresh. They were trying to sell quality to these guys. Fresh as opposed to stale. Beer drinkers know the difference in quality. They know what stale beer is: it"s what they taste in their mouth the next morning when they wake up. They know that taste well, but they wouldn"t buy Carling"s because it"s fresh. So the campaign bombed out.
Although Doyle, Dane is so-so with beer, they"re absolutely great on hard booze. I don"t know why. Maybe it"s because most of the guys working at Doyle, Dane drink only hard booze and couldn"t care less about beer. They took a perfectly ordinary scotch, Chivas Regal, and upgraded it, gave it sn.o.b appeal. They convinced people to trade up in booze so that when somebody spent $7.50 for a fifth of Chivas Regal he was convinced that the booze was worth it. The ads they did for Chivas were beautifully designed elegant. Another great booze campaign of theirs, which was done by Ron Rosenfeld, was the Calvert"s "soft whiskey" line. To this day I don"t know what the h.e.l.l "soft whiskey" means, but it evidently meant something to the guys who were pouring rotgut down their throats, because "soft whiskey" sold like h.e.l.l.
The worst idea for a booze campaign that I can remember was the one put out several years ago by Schenley"s. A marketing executive at Schenley insisted that their agency have a mascot, and the mascot was named Sunny the Rooster. Sunny the Rooster was supposed to equal that sunny morning flavor. The marketing executive was convinced that if he could tell people that they wouldn"t be hung over and feel like dogs the next day he could sell a lot of booze. What they were trying to say and couldn"t was, "Listen, buddy, if you drink our booze you"ll never wake up having to look in your wallet to find out who you are and all that kind of nonsense. You drink our stuff and you"ll be perfectly all right."
What they did was to hang about seven agencies with Sunny the Rooster. So there you have seven agencies trying to come up with a campaign built around that sunny morning flavor and feeling. They turned out Sunny the Roosters galore. Thank G.o.d, the campaign never ran. n.o.body came up with anything that was halfway decent. n.o.body knew whether the agencies they tried were bad or whether Sunny the Rooster was just another crazy notion who should have had his head chopped off early in the game. A lot of guys spent a lot of money on Sunny.
Sometimes great campaigns work, bring in the customers, but then there are other things happening that kill you. Ed McCabe, who now has his own agency of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, used to work at Carl Ally. Ed McCabe is maybe one of the five top writers in town. He did the Horn & Hardart campaign when he was at Ally, and it was great. It was so great that it reached all kinds of people including a girl I"ll call Betty-Sue. Now Betty-Sue comes to New York from Kneejerk, North Carolina, and she goes to work for Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller when I was working there. Betty-Sue is a terrific kid except she had a little problem with the English language she couldn"t speak it. That is, she spoke but you couldn"t understand her. One Monday morning she comes up to me and she says, "Jer, I bin reading those Horn and Hardart ads, the ones which say "It May Not Be Fancy but It"s Good." I said, "What"d you say, Betty-Sue?" She said, "Bin reading the Horn and Hardart ads, "It May Not Be." "Oh," I said, "you"ve been reading the Horn and Hardart ads?"
She said, "And I decided to go to Horn and Hardart, and I had some of their beans and the beans were gooooood, and I had some lemonmrang pah and it was gooooood, and then I had some coffee and it was gooooood. And then the man sitting across the way exposed himself."
Unfortunately, this was one of the problems that Ed McCabe faced. He could come up with the selling line that reached a Betty-Sue, but he couldn"t go around and take care of the occasional guy who was walking into Horn & Hardart wearing a raincoat and making quick flashes. But the guy wrote a cla.s.sic line that sold and got a lot of people to come to Horn & Hardart.
There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been some cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.
Let"s take the airlines again. They have great advertising and the problem is, planes get stacked up, the air-traffic controllers are either walking out on strike or threatening to walk out, you can sit on the ground at La Guardia Airport for two hours trying to get out of town, and what sometimes happens to baggage shouldn"t happen to a dog. The airlines that don"t have service which lives up to the advertising have trouble. The greatest living commercial of all time for Mohawk Airlines will not get me on a Mohawk plane. Let me change to an airline that"s a lot larger: the greatest United Airlines commercial of all time will have trouble convincing me to fly United. I"ll get on a United plane only if it"s like the only airline going at the moment; I don"t like to fly United because they once did a job on my baggage that you wouldn"t believe. Fortunately this kind of foul-up is on the ground.
All the great advertising in the world can never straighten out the stewardess who wakes up cranky one morning. There is nothing in the world an agency can do about the gas station attendant in One Horse Stand, Nebraska, who has a hangover. An agency can try to help with better dealer programs. Maybe. Or take TWA. They obviously felt that this customerrelation problem was enough of a headache to go out and run a campaign offering a million dollars in bonuses to its employees for being nice and polite.
The TWA campaign was excellent. First of all, the million dollars in prizes going to the nice TWA people comes out of the advertising budget. This is absolutely nothing when you"re spending something in the neighborhood of $20 million. Second, the campaign probably cheers up these people working for TWA; it makes me feel that the people are going to be working harder.
Wells, Rich, Greene is doing the TWA campaign and it"s interesting because the same campaign was to be presented to Avis, but they never saw it. An art director at Doyle, Dane came up with the campaign, the idea being that he was going to spend less money on advertising and more money in getting the Avis people to work. They"d give out bonuses and so forth. But the campaign never got out of the agency to be shown to Avis. The art director who had the idea was not the top art director on the account so the notion was kind of pushed off to the side. Mary Wells had the same idea and turned it into a multimillion-dollar campaign.
The idea has to work. It"s just too good not to. It"s got all the elements of a good campaign: it"s amusing, it"s got a good commercial situation around it and it gives people a reason why they can expect good service on TWA. You can"t help but think something good is going to happen on TWA the next time you fly with them. And you"ve got the best of all possible worlds when you get your employees to back up your campaign. Forget all that c.r.a.p about wearing little b.u.t.tons. Here your employee is actually taking part in the campaign, and when the employees of a service organization feel they"re important, it"s everything. If you can get somebody at TWA to smile and act pleasant just because it"s part of this whole thing and she feels like she"s part of something, you"ve got a great campaign going for you.
Great campaigns that reach down to the employees of an organization are very rare. "We Want You to Live" from Mobil reaches all the way down. Avis and Hertz do, too. When Avis said, "We"re number 2, we try harder," the people who worked for Avis responded very well. Research was done at the time, and it showed that the Hertz people were actually affected by the Avis campaign. They found that the Hertz employees were feeling low and deflated. Here Avis is jabbing away at them, and the company they work for is running commercials showing a crazy guy who flies into the front seat of a convertible. Norman, Craig & k.u.mmel were the inventors of that flying fruitcake, and when Avis started hammering away, Hertz pulled the account out of Norman, Craig and gave it to Carl Ally. It wasn"t that easy for Ally, either. He had to come up with what essentially is a very unpopular notion: taking on a guy head to head who admits he is second. And of course he also had the employee problem as well. The Hertz people felt rotten, and here was this aggressive young compet.i.tor coming up on the outside.
What Doyle, Dane had done for Avis was take a concept that had been around for years: You know, we"re not as big as the next guy but we do a lot more. n.o.body had ever quite crystallized this concept into "We"re number 2, We Try Harder." I"ve done ads for Univac that said basically the same thing, trying to use the notion of Univac versus IBM, but not as well. Everybody"s always got a situation where they"re second but n.o.body had ever come right out and said it point-blank. And that"s the difference between a so-so campaign and a great campaign.
In my opinion, one of the agencies that consistently produces superior campaigns is Leo Burnett. The interesting thing about Leo Burnett is, first of all, he must be seventy-five years old. So immediately he"s not some long-haired kid. Second, his agency is in Chicago, and Chicago is really not major league. What makes him so brilliant is that he"s got his roots in the Middle West. He"s an ex-newspaperman and he really knows the people, he knows how people think, and he knows what makes people go. He produces very simple advertising, so simple that it"s deceptive. You almost think it isn"t good. It isn"t sophisticated, and it doesn"t make you laugh. But boy, it sells goods.
Burnett is the agency that figured out a way to sell vegetables: they invented this green eunuch called the Jolly Green Giant. The giant stands for great quality and he comes from the Valley of the Green Giant and the people look at this big green guy and figure, "Gee, it"s got to be good stuff." And they buy. Who knows what the Green Giant stands for? Maybe because he"s so big he means quality. If I had a product to market in the Middle West, I would go right to Burnett. Burnett even tells people what a corny agency he has, but he"s not corny. He is a very brilliant man. That big green son of a b.i.t.c.h, that Jolly Green Giant, is fantastic. He sells beans, corn, peas, everything. When you watch the Jolly Green Giant, you know it"s fantasy and yet you buy the product. Do you know what Libby does? I don"t. Do you know what other food advertising is? I don"t. Most food advertising is like gone by the boards, you don"t even see it. But the Jolly Green Giant, it"s been automatic success when he"s on that screen.
For years Marlboro cigarettes had a selling line something like "escape from the commonplace." The advertising was fourth-rate. Burnett got his hand on Marlboro and went out and signed up a bunch of very masculine, very rugged guys and did a great campaign about the Marlboro Man. Now most of these were genuine rugged guys, not masculine-looking f.a.gs. He sold the daylights out of Marlboro. Then he switches from the Marlboro Man to Marlboro Country. Everything Burnett touches works. It"s not the way I might do it, but boy, it sells the h.e.l.l out of the product. Marlboro is now ranked around third of all the cigarettes in the country.
Burnett has a knack for finding a category of people to sell a product to. Another example is Virginia Slims cigarettes. Burnett decided to direct his pitch to one group the liberated woman. This doesn"t mean that other groups won"t be influenced, but the direct appeal of his message is to only one group. Virginia Slims are telling women, "You"ve come a long way, baby," and do you know what? A woman has been dying to hear somebody tell her that. She really secretly feels that she has come a long way, and it"s a good, s.e.xy campaign, a very good campaign, and great thinking. Burnett also sells cake mixes like n.o.body sells cake mixes. The Pillsbury advertising is great, great stuff. My wife sits there and looks at those ads of chocolate cakes and decides she wants to go out and learn to bake. He has an ability to really hit the consumer where he lives. Maytag appliances. You know, here"s a shot of Mrs. Clancy and her thirteen children and Mrs. Clancy looks like she"s been through the dryer herself after those thirteen children but there she is in an ad and she"s saying that she couldn"t have survived Mr. Clancy or the thirteen kids without her Maytag dryer which is still working. I mean, I don"t care who you are, that"s bound to sell. It also helps immeasurably that Maytag is a first-rate product with good word-of-mouth about it.
There is a tremendous creative revolution going on today in advertising. But the Bernbachs, the Rosser Reeveses, the Leo Burnetts, the Mary Wellses, despite their outward differences, are really not all that different. Different in execution but not different in basic premise.
Take Rosser Reeves, an authentic genius. His method of execution is to discover one thing about the product that you can make hay out of. Then you zero in on it and you make a lot of noise about it, forgetting everything about the product except this one unique selling proposition.
The key is to find out which b.u.t.ton you can press on every person that makes him want to buy your product over another product. What"s the emotional thing that affects people?
The advertising that I had to do for Pretty Feet is a good example. My thinking was that people feel all their lives that they hate their feet they"re ugly, they"re crinkly, they"re embarra.s.sing. I figure the average woman goes into a shoe store and she"s so embarra.s.sed by her feet that she twists them underneath her. The salesman"s got to see them in order to fit her for the pair of shoes, and she doesn"t even want him to see her feet. That to me is the key to selling Pretty Feet.
The execution might be different. My ad might say, "What"s the ugliest part of your body?" which is a bit of a street-corner wise guy talking. David Ogilvy might say, "Twelve ways your feet can look better." Leo Burnett would have his Sally Claussen of Omaha, Nebraska, saying, "I couldn"t stand my feet for the first thirty years of my life but now I"ve found this wonderful thing that made them beautiful."
When I was at Daniel & Charles, we always had a bit about how different agencies would answer their telephones. It shows you what I mean by the difference in execution. When you called Bates, they would answer by saying, "h.e.l.lo, Ted Bates, h.e.l.lo Ted Bates, h.e.l.lo Ted Bates." Doyle, Dane would answer, "Guten Morgen, what can we do for you?" and PKL would say, "Papert, Koenig, Lois. f.u.c.k you!" In the old days Papert, Koenig was always a little hostile.