‘Hey, that’s interesting,’ I said. ‘What happens when you have yellow vermouth? You can’t sell it now. Does everybody have this problem?’
‘Yeah.’
Later, back in our office, I said to Ron, ‘You know, yellow vermouth is an interesting notion. I wonder how you could make hay from something like this. What if you date the bottles? What if you put a date on the bottle telling the consumer when it was bottled. You could tell the people that when the stuff starts to go yellow you can’t make a good martini with it. You can throw it in food, you can wash with it, but you can’t use it to make a martini.’
But Ron doesn’t buy it. ‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘It’s too hard to do.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s pull it down to its simplest form. What do you do? You put a little tag on the bottle with a date on it. No other problem.’
Back and forth the idea went, for days. Every time we’d pass in the hall I’d say, ‘What about the dating of the bottles?’ Every time he’d say, ‘Ah, that’s bullshit. It’s a gimmick.’ I’d say, ‘All right, it’s a gimmick. Let’s present it to them as a gimmick. Let’s tell them what we want to do is that we have a gimmick that we want to show them.’
One of the key things in presenting a campaign is that you should never pitch a half-developed idea because you’re assuming that they can visualize what’s in your mind, which they can’t, and you’re taking a chance on having a good idea killed right in front of your eyes. If I had gone up to the client and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to date the bottles,’ the client probably would have said, ‘Ah, it’ll never work. How are you going to do it? It’s not practical.’ But if you go to the client with a bottle and say, ‘Here’s the label with the date. Here’s the advertising for it, here’s the thinking behind it. Here’s how it becomes advertising. Here’s a radio commercial, here’s a storyboard for a television commercial, here’s what we’re going to do’ – if you do it this way, you’ve got a better chance of selling it. I’ve seen guys blow good campaigns because they got so excited about them that they presented them not fully developed. In the end, my idea for Cinzano got shot down by Ron. He finally convinced me that basically the idea was too much of a gimmick and we dropped it.
Naturally the pace of the meeting between the art director and the copywriter varies, depending on when the ad or the commercial has to get out. Just the same, the chemistry is fantastic to watch. If you’ve got three days to come up with something, then you can really take your time. Or maybe it has to be out in a half hour, in which case the whole thing is speeded up.
One morning last summer Ron and I had to have some advertising ready to show at nine o’clock in the morning. We both got to the office at seven o’clock and neither of us had any idea what we wanted to say. The subject was institutional investing, and we had to have a campaign ready to run in a magazine called The Institutional Investor. That magazine is read by guys who have lots of dollars to spend in the market. Our client was Hirsch & Company, the stockbrokers, and through The Institutional Investor they were trying to reach the guy who is working for the ILGWU who’s got maybe a million dollars of union funds to invest in the market. He has discretionary power over a lot of money and the idea is to get him to buy his blocks of stock through Hirsch & Company. How do you talk to this guy? That was the problem.
Sitting there at seven o’clock in the morning we were really desperate, I mean desperate, because the guy is coming in at nine o’clock to see advertising and he doesn’t want to know from anything else. (Creative people in all agencies work best under the gun. If you were to give an agency three years to do something, they would wait until the last minute to do the work. Ron and I always wait until the deadline.) As far as he’s concerned he’s to be shown a campaign and he doesn’t want to know that we’ve been backed up and busy as hell. It’s a funny feeling; what are we going to do? Ron and I always work up to the wire but this was the closest we ever were. Maybe, we thought, this will be the time when we won’t make it.
Well, we started out talking about sex. Seven o’clock! ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, how are you?’ ‘Boy, did you see Norma walk by here last night? Wow, what a body!’ Comes 7:30 a.m. and nothing’s happening. Like at about quarter of eight I say, ‘What are we going to do with this problem?’ Ron says, ‘Aw, don’t worry. We’ll make it.’ All of a sudden he says, ‘I’ve been thinking about it all morning.’ We started feeling sorry for ourselves. ‘You know, it’s really a pain in the ass,’ I say. ‘You never can go home and like just think of nothing, right?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah. That’s interesting, isn’t it? That you always think of your job. I bet these guys in the institutional investing business feel the same way about themselves. I bet they think that they’re heroes the way we think we’re heroes for being here this early.’
I say, ‘Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ll bet they really think they’re hot stuff because they don’t get to go to lunch because they’re working so hard. Hey, did you ever notice when you don’t go to lunch you really feel better because you think you’re working so hard?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah, I know. I feel great when I’m working like a son of a bitch and I don’t go to lunch. I bet these guys feel the same way, sitting there with their millions of dollars to spend, they must really feel like they’re something when they miss lunch or they have to order a hamburger sent in.’
And I say, ‘Hey, a hamburger. Remember that day we were working with that guy Dave and he ordered a hamburger and it got cold? Remember how proud he was that he didn’t even have time to eat?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah, what a headline – “The Glory of the Cold Hamburger.” That could be it, the whole campaign. “The Glory of the Cold Hamburger.” That was the concept for the entire campaign, not just a single ad. The ideas started coming right out of the concept. The guy shaving in the morning saying that he thinks about stocks even in the bathroom and like he’s putting in a twenty-four-hour day. We know that we want to show the reader of The Institutional Investor a picture of a hamburger and we want to say to him, ‘You know, we understand exactly what it’s like. You’ve got too much money and sometimes you don’t know what to do with all of this money and there are too many people depending on you for you to run out and have a big expense-account lunch. So you order a hamburger in and it gets cold and you know what? You get a big charge out of it. You really think you’re hot stuff for eating this cold hamburger and you know, you’re right.’
The campaign started to grow from the guy feeling the way he does because he works so hard. The fact that he doesn’t get a chance to see his kids. The fact that he shaves and thinks about work. The fact that he hasn’t eaten a decent lunch in months. One by one the ads start to come: ‘The Glory of the Cold Hamburger’; ‘The 24-Hour Workday.’
Ron is drawing like a madman at this point. Now, how do we tie it all together? Well, why are these people working like this? Why are they breaking their necks? Because a lot of people are depending on them. Fine. That’s the whole thing. ‘Call Hirsch & Company because a lot of people are depending on you.’
By this time Ron is drawing with one hand and lettering in headlines with the other. There are four stages in making an ad: a thumbnail, which is just a tiny sketch; a rough, which is like a thumbnail, but big; a comp, which means the headline is lettered in and the drawing is much more detailed; and the finish.
‘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 complet
e 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 ass, making them know that we know that they work hard. It’s institutional, 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, associate 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. Nobody 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 nobody 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 Japanese. 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.’ Nobody 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 crap. 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 a
fter 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. Nobody 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.”
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 16