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, ‘Hello, Ted Bates, Hello Ted Bates, Hello Ted Bates.’ Doyle, Dane would answer, ‘Guten Morgen, what can we do for you?’ and PKL would say, ‘Papert, Koenig, Lois. Fuck you!’ In the old days Papert, Koenig was always a little hostile.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
FIGHTS
HEADACHES
THREE
WAYS
‘The average copywriter and art director never stop learning. You have to know your product so well you could go out and be a salesman for the company pushing the product. What you’re trying to do in all of this is to isolate the problem of the company – naturally they wouldn’t have switched their advertising to your agency if everything was going along fine. What you’re trying to do is to crystallize the problem. Once you arrive at the problem, then your job is really almost over, because the solving of the problem is nothing. The headache is finding out what the problem is …’
I know that a lot of people are talking about this so-called creative revolution in advertising. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on the subject last summer. But it’s interesting that when we talk about the creative revolution we don’t talk about the great creativity which has been part of advertising for decades. There’s a book out with one hundred of the greatest ads ever written and I would love to have written every one of them. Some of those ads go back to 1901. One of the ads is a tiny classified that says simply, ‘We’re looking for men who are willing to give up their lives.’ The whole story was that an expedition was being planned to go to the Arctic, and the guys behind the expedition said, ‘We’re looking for men who are willing to go out on an adventure of a lifetime, but they may die on this great adventure.’ Or get frostbit. A hell of a good ad.
Creative revolution may be an awkward way of saying there is good advertising and then there is garbage. It’s always been that way. Today, of course, you’ve got some pretty strange kids turning out advertising, so for lack of a better name for these kids you could call them creative. Clients today really aren’t aware of the extent of the weird behavior in agencies. They don’t know about the real loose nuts in the agency. Agencies keep these guys in closets during presentations; otherwise a guy is going to show up high or he’s going to do something pretty silly. The average client doesn’t get to see the real weirdos; he’ll get to see a guy he might consider weird, and by his standards is weird, but this guy is not agency-weird.
You take this guy Herb I had working for me, the fellow who wanted to own a live alarm clock. He wrote ads and commercials when the city was trying to pass a bond issue to improve the commuter railroads. One of the commercials showed what looked like a thousand people being pushed into a commuter train. That commercial was done from the point of view of the poor commuter. You could feel from that commercial how a guy like Herb could relate to the whole commuter problem. He works best on problems that are problems to most people. Nobody could know the little man better than Herb, because Herb is a little man who is concerned with the problems of life. He’s close to it. He knows what it’s all about. He can really feel and really relate to the consumer.
You can see a lot of Herb’s personality coming out in his advertising and he’s not unusual in this respect. A lot of people’s personalities show up in their ads. I was once turned down for a job when I was starting out by a guy who said, ‘You write like a street-corner wise guy.’ At that time, it could be that there was hostility in my copy and it showed through – and maybe I still do write that way, though I like to think my hostility quotient is way down.
Evan Stark once wrote an ad for an air conditioner that took place in hell. You know, this is hell, and the devil gets all the bad guys and shoves them in a room and turns off the RCA Whirlpool air conditioner. That’s what Evan felt hell was. The devil turns off the air conditioner. But this is Evan’s personality. He feels and believes this sort of stuff. And that’s what makes him such a great writer.
Guys like Charlie Moss and George Lois and even Ron Rosenfeld see things a lot differently from the average guy. I caught a real wild commercial the other day, a crazy thing with a car talking. Now how could a guy come up with a talking car in a commercial? Well, the chances are it was written by a copywriter who talks to cars – you know, he believes that cars do talk and if you talk to a car the car will talk right back.
All these strange guys eventually produce. At four o’clock in the morning, Herb was a fantastic writer. His personal problems never showed up in his advertising, but his personality did. I can sit and look at commercials and ads and tell you who wrote them. Guys who are wigged out write wigged-out stuff.
The giant accounts – they don’t care about the craziness. All a General Foods worries about is the bottom of the line. The bottom of the line as far as they’re concerned is that a guy showed up with an ad. The fact that it was done by a psychotic doesn’t mean anything to them. They couldn’t care less who did it. You could throw some copy and artwork into a machine, and if an ad came out they would be happy with it. The loose nuts are the problem only of the agency president who has to put up with them. Naturally it’s a strain. I had a guy come into my office one day and tell me he didn’t like the way the sun was shining in his window. I swear this is the truth. I said, ‘Did you ever hear of a shade?’ He said, ‘There’s something wrong, it’s bothering me and I want another office.’ Well, people usually come in and say, ‘I’d like to have a bigger office.’ No, he had to come in and say he didn’t like the way the sun was shining into his window. Loose upstairs. We had another guy working for us who would take maybe three or four weeks on one ad. He would sit there and order $1,000 worth of stats for an ad that eventually cost $400 when it was printed and finished. So I’m seeing a $1,000 stat bill, with hours and hours of time, that must have cost my agency $6,000 to produce and when it runs it costs maybe $800 to place so the agency nets $120. I had to get rid of him and one day he met someone on the street who said, ‘You were fired by Della Femina, weren’t you?’ He talked the way he worked. ‘They … said … I … didn’t … work … fast … enough …’
Most of the loose nuts in town work for the boutique agencies, which is the derogatory term used when the large agencies want to put down the small agencies. As far as I’m concerned, boutique advertising is the new advertising. Someone once made an analogy comparing the problems that we’re now having in our schools with the problems now going on in advertising. In advertising, just like the schools, there is a group of people who are threatening an establishment and the establishment is fighting the threat. Perhaps the only difference is that a lot of us don’t want to burn down the place, but we are a threat to the established group, which is made up of agencies like Ted Bates, J. Walter Thompson, Lennen & Newell, Foote, Cone & Belding, Compton, D’Arcy and others. They’ve been here many years and they haven’t been bucked for many years, and all of a sudden guys are starting agencies and they have the audacity to take business away from the establishment.
In 1969 I went down south and pitched a giant tobacco company and picked up some business. Ten years ago I couldn’t have gotten into any place in the whole state of North Carolina. They’d have taken one look at me at the state line and turned me away as some kind of menace. This is what is driving the establishment crazy.
By definition, a boutique is small. The establishment says that boutiques are cutesie-poo, very superficial, very flowery. Their idea of what a boutique is comes from what their wives tell them about the cute little boutique they found on Madison Avenue. The guy running this boutique might be standing behind the counter without a shirt on, maybe just some beads, and in the mind of the establishment this is no good. So they sat around and tried to come up with the worst name they could call this new type of agency, and boutique was it.
Doyle, D
ane, Bernbach grew too fast to get into the boutique thing. Just as the establishment was starting to call Doyle, Dane a boutique it turned into a department store right before their eyes and just kept clobbering the hell out of them. They don’t call Mary Wells a boutique because she opened and all of a sudden she’s a department store. The boutique is the call given to maybe twenty to twenty-five agencies.
But think about the boutique for a moment. It means you’re going to be dealing with the man who owns the store and you’re going to get a lot more service and a lot more attention from him. Second of all, the item you buy from a boutique has to be perfect, otherwise you would go to another store. It’s as simple as that. If you’re running a Macy’s, you sell everything in sight – you sell high-priced, low-priced, anything you can get your hands on. The object of Macy’s is to sell, and the hell with service; the object of a boutique is also to sell, but with a maximum of personalized service into the bargain. So the boutique stays open until 10:00 p.m. Macy’s closes at 6.00 p.m. A big difference.
You might go to Macy’s because R. H. Macy was a great merchant and a great salesman and a brilliant man who got everyone to think Macy’s when he wanted to buy anything beyond five-and-ten stuff – but whom do you find? You find a $90-a-week sales clerk with aching feet. She is R. H. Macy. The same thing happens in an agency. People might go to Ted Bates because Mr. Ted Bates is brilliant, but they might wind up with the equivalent of a $75-a-week trainee writing the stuff for their account. Chances are if an account goes to a boutique agency, they wind up working with the guy who did it all – the guy who started the agency. The word boutique used in a derogatory sense is a misnomer, it’s a joke, and it’s wrong.
But the small agencies are going to win, no matter what they call us. We win unless the kids who are striking in the schools take over, in which case nobody wins. The establishment is talking to a dying generation. They’re not on the same wavelength as the younger kids today. That’s why they’re in trouble. The establishment can’t change, it can’t give the people anything different, it can’t make the turn. The establishment doesn’t know what makes people think; they don’t know what makes people go any more. That’s where they lose it, that’s where they blow it. They’ve lost their ability to tell how people go, how people move, how to sell them their bra, how to sell them their hair lotion.
You think an establishment agency could have produced a campaign for Love cosmetics the way Mary Wells did? Never. It is a brilliant campaign and the packaging of the cosmetics themselves is phenomenal. The kids like the bottles so much they keep them after they’ve run out of lotion. The campaign is talking to kids the way they like being talked to. The kids they’ve used in the ads and the commercials are hippie-looking. They’re also very good-looking, and all they talk about is love. In one of the commercials the guy had longer hair than the girl. In fact, his hair was so long and so nice I almost identified with him more than with the girl. They’re very love-conscious, love-oriented. The Love cosmetics are selling like hell and they’ve got a problem in that they can’t make the stuff fast enough. Now maybe it’s a one-year phenomenon. The cosmetics business is a terrific jungle. But the fact that Love is selling means that they’ve got good advertising. The fact that they might stop selling means that maybe the product isn’t there. But right now they’re selling, they’re doing a good job.
What’s happening in business throughout the country is that these younger kids are beginning to work their way up in management. They’re in marketing, in sales, in promotion, in finance, and in a lot of cases, they’re running things. The president of a sleepy corporation who is in his late sixties and is trying to get to retirement without blowing an artery is not going to take his account and give it to an agency like mine. He’s going to keep it at his establishment agency where it’s been for, like, fifty years. The seventy-five-year-old chairman of the board who has been friends with D’Arcy forever, he’s not going to switch agencies. But the next generation – they’re ours, we’re going to own them. The next generation belongs to us; they’re all ours.
There is a great difference in the way ads and commercials are produced at the creative agencies and at the oldline places. Before Bill Bernbach, old agencies used to produce advertising by the assembly-line method. This method, by the way, is still being used at most of the establishment agencies. First off, in the assembly-line way, a copywriter used to type up thirty, forty, even fifty headlines. All on the same subject. ‘Aspirin Does This,’ ‘Aspirin Does That,’ ‘Aspirin Is for You,’ ‘Aspirin Is Your Friend,’ ‘Aspirin Likes You,’ literally dozens of these things. Then the copywriter takes his headlines and goes to a copy chief, who sits there and looks at them and finally says, ‘All right, number thirty-seven looks like you might be able to work up into some kind of a concept. Number forty-three, if you change this word, might work, too.’
When Rosser Reeves was running Ted Bates every writer would have to put each of his headlines on a single sheet of yellow paper. Then the writers would pin their headlines to a long wall in one of the rooms. Then Reeves used to come by, almost like a general reviewing the troops. He’d have his big red pencil with him and he’d look at the yellow sheets and say, ‘All right, that one. Work that up. You might have something there.’ One guy might have ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways’ and Reeves would say, ‘That’s not bad, that’s not bad. Work up that one.’
You figure he had maybe twelve copywriters taking part in this thing, with something like fifty headlines a copywriter, which gives you six hundred ways to fight something. Out of the six hundred Reeves might pick four or five, and out of those he would sit down one day and come up with his concept of what the problem was, using maybe one of the headlines as a hook.
That was Reeves. At other places the copywriter would sit there and type like a son of a bitch and then go running into a copy chief who would look at it and say, ‘That’s got some merit. Why don’t you work on that?’ When it was all through bouncing back and forth between the copywriter and the copy supervisor, they would ship it into the art director. To the establishment agencies, an art director is a guy who draws. ‘He’s our drawing guy.’ So they go in to their drawing guy with a headline that says ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ Maybe the copywriter has got a little scribble of how the ad should look. Now the art director is, first of all, chained to his desk; they don’t want art directors roaming the halls at large agencies. So he can’t move around too much. He usually is between forty and fifty years old but even if he’s a young guy his mind is fifty. He’s sitting there minding his own business when the copywriter comes in and says, ‘Okay, here’s what we did. We want to say, “Fights Headaches Three Ways” and I think we should show a big pill.’ The art director says, ‘Terrific.’ The copywriter says, ‘We got to have a layout by this afternoon to show to the creative director.’ The art director says, ‘No problem,’ and he puts it together. It’s in the hands of the creative director by that afternoon and that’s it. There’s little relationship between the art director and the copywriter. They hardly know each other. They meet once a year at the Christmas party and the copywriter says to the drawer, ‘Hey, how are you? Boy, we really turned out some great work together this year.’ But they don’t really work together, they don’t get to see each other. It’s really not two minds working on the same problem.
What Bernbach did was put the art director and the copywriter together in a room and let the chemistry take over. He has a lot of respect for people and people’s minds. I think he got the feeling that it was a lot easier to have two bright people sit there thinking about the same problem than to have one bright person using himself as a judge. When Ron and I are working, when we’re really on and really good, that door is locked. Like nobody exists. That room is a different place. A crazy chemistry takes over and suddenly the two of you think alike. With every art director I ever worked with I reached a point where I would start to say something and the art director would finish the senten
ce. I would say, ‘What if we said, “What’s the ugliest …”’ and the guy would say, ‘I got it, I got it!’ Without going any further.
The client knows nothing of this chemistry, this process. Why should he? He should care only what comes out of that room. Most clients, I’m sure, think that there’s a magic something going on. That if a guy is called creative the guy has somehow been touched by a special ray of light from the hand of God. People think the creative guy can do things other people can’t do. Nonsense.
The big agencies today are buying the mystique of the creative man – the big phony mystique. They buy the mystique and they pay top dollar for it and they don’t know what to do with it. Why is it that an agency can hire a guy who is so good at one agency and turn him into a stumblebum in their own agency? Because they think creative advertising is a mystique; they think it’s some kind of magic.
No one knows what it’s like. No one knows what it is, no one knows the feeling. No one except other art directors and copywriters have ever been in on the excitement. That’s why when clients sometimes try to do ads by saying, ‘Well, what if you had a headline that said …?’ they have no idea what the feeling is about turning out an ad and what it is to achieve that feeling. There are things that I might say to Ron and he’ll say, ‘Are you crazy? You can’t say that.’ He’ll then say, ‘But what if we did this?’ And he’ll come up with something that’s completely outlandish, but out of that outlandish thing there might be like one tiny dot there that says, ‘No, you’re wrong by doing it this way but if you tried it this way … ’
The way the whole process starts is that the art director and the copywriter do a lot of listening. When you’ve landed the account you’ve got to go through a lot of bullshit. There’s research and marketing, the account executive, the agency president, the advertising manager of the account – everybody gets into the act. Everybody has something to say about the problem. The account executive, if he’s good, can help. He’s there because you might forget something and he’s liable to say, ‘Look, did you ever notice …?’ He might come up with a concept for you. He’s another body.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 14