All of a sudden Smith/Greenland has got this expensive commercial and no place to go with it. The censor at NBC absolutely cut the commercial to ribbons. There was a great deal of bitterness on both sides. The people at Fresh don’t need these kinds of problems and here’s an agency that has spent a lot of money and has no place to run it. Smith/Greenland had shown the commercial in storyboards to a censor. Who knows? Maybe the artist didn’t draw a belly button, or if he did, maybe it wasn’t a real, live, pulsating belly button, which would have caused them to stop the commercial at that stage. Smith/Greenland lost the account and it must have been billing more than a million dollars. What’s so sad about this story is that you really can’t win, you don’t stand a chance.
The answer is, no censorship at all. The answer is, if you do something that’s really tasteless, you’ll be off the air – I mean you’ll be off the air because people will stop buying your product. Sure, there’s a lot of bad stuff on the air. The guy with the hammers in his head. The guy with the transparent sinuses. Terrible. It dies, it will die, but let it die under its own power. Who am I to say that that stuff is tasteless? I happen to think that quite a few agencies in this city put out a lot of tasteless garbage. But I don’t have the right to tell them, No, you can’t do this or you can’t do that. My feelings on censorship are very simple: I haven’t got the right to censor somebody else.
Sometimes the client steps in and tells the agency the commercial is no good. But that’s censorship by the guy who’s paying the bills. A lot of clients don’t want to see their products portrayed in a certain way. Lots of clients don’t even want to be on the borderline of bad taste. But it’s different when the client tells you to tone it down than when some third party censors you. Miss Cheng says navels are all right, the Mrs. McGillicutty-type lady said that navels are out. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars are going down the drain. Miss Cheng is not worried about money. She has no stake in it at all. As I told her on the phone the other day, ‘If I could say feminine once in the commercial, whom do I offend by saying it three times?’ But in her little world, three times is too many times to say feminine. Once is all that she can allow me. And I lose again.
There’s a classic Lenny Bruce bit. He’s doing a father talking to his son while they’re both watching a pornographic film. Bruce says, ‘Son, I can’t let you watch this. This is a picture of a couple making love and this is terrible and dirty and disgusting. Son, I’m going to have to cover your eyes now. That man is going to kiss that woman and they’re going to make love and there’s going to be pleasure and everything else and this is terrible, it’s not for you to see until you’re at least twenty-one. Instead, son, I am going to take you to a nice war movie. We certainly can go see a John Wayne war picture where there’s blood and guts and killing and everything else. Because somebody’s decided you can see that, son.’
If you’re doing cigarette commercials, forget it. You can’t say anything on cigarette commercials. Nothing. You’re allowed to have a fag run up and down for a while in your commercial but he’s not allowed to have fun in a cigarette commercial. Characters can’t look like they’re having fun. They can’t be endorsed by an athlete, can’t be endorsed by anyone. Characters can’t be too young and they can’t look too bright. Right now, cigarettes are vulnerable. Who can’t be a hero by not knocking cigarettes? The cigarette fight is really the most hypocritical form of censorship going – worse than Miss Cheng or Mrs. McGillicutty.
It’s very hip to attack advertising right now and we’re vulnerable because we’re so segmented. Someone can get up in Congress and say, ‘Well, the money that’s being spent on selling soap could be spent on saving Harlem.’ Everyone will agree to that except those people who are concerned with the making of and selling soap. It becomes easy, or seemingly easy, for a politician to swoop down and attack, but very few of them are so dumb as to attack advertising as a whole. Listen, politicians are some of the greatest advertisers going. Rockefeller – spends a fortune on advertising every time he runs for office. Javits – shrewd as hell. Treats himself like a product. When he takes a look at the surveys during a campaign and sees he is winning by a big margin, he’s like any other advertiser – he simply cuts back on his advertising.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin held some hearings a couple of years ago and decided that U. S. tire makers of this country should spend less money on advertising and take that money and build a better tire with the money they saved by not advertising. He was saying they should cut the hell out of their advertising budgets. On the surface this sounds fantastic. As far as I’m concerned, if the tire manufacturers could make a better tire, they certainly would, because it would be a hell of a lot easier to market. But Nelson says they’re spending too much money on advertising. I wrote a column in Marketing/Communications about Nelson and I happened to find out how much money he spent on his last Senatorial campaign. This politician who is yelling at the tire people spent – and it’s a matter of public record at the State Capitol in Madison – spent like $486,338.34 on advertising himself in his last campaign. All right, why doesn’t he cut down on his advertising and maybe use the money to make a better Senator? Maybe he could spend the money on hiring experts to cram him full of knowledge. He could do a lot with that money. What this country needs are more great Senators and Nelson ought to divert some of that ad budget into building better Senators. I could even write a pretty good campaign for him on that concept.
What the politicians use is the salami technique: they attack one group at a time. Now it’s the cigarette companies’ turn, next time maybe it’ll be the drug guys again, and then the cars. They’ll get down to the soap guys eventually. Just watch. When somebody tries to stop them their rationale is, ‘Look, it’s only one slice of this great business and we’re doing it for your own good.’
The salami technique also has been used in truth in advertising and packaging. The U.S.Government has decided that you cannot call your cherry pie cherry pie unless it has thirty-two cherries per pie, or something like that. Now who’s going to yell about the cherry pie? Not the bread manufacturers – they don’t care. The bread guy is sitting there saying, ‘Good for them, you show ‘em, those bastards should do something about the cherries in their cherry pie.’ The guy down the block who’s making cigarettes, he doesn’t care: ‘Serves those guys right, it’s about time they got after those bums who’re selling cherry pie.’
The cherry-pie manufacturer, he gets it full force. Because one man in Washington has arbitrarily set a figure of cherries per cherry pie, the pie company comes up with an instrument that measures exactly the number of cherries per pie. It’s almost like a sieve used in panning for gold. They dip this thing into a vat of guck, they sift it, and when the other guck falls through they’ve got to be able to count thirty-two cherries. Before they turn the sifter into the pie, they’ve got to have a minimum of thirty-two cherries in it. The Government feels that the average guy who digs into his cherry pie doesn’t have any protection if he doesn’t have enough cherries in the pie. The only person who gets outraged at this is the pie maker and he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to have to say that he has ‘cherrylike’ pie instead of ‘cherry’ pie. So he’s going to comply with the ruling. Down the block another guy is thinking, ‘Good. Get that cherry-pie bastard.’ Nobody’s together on this thing.
The Government goes on the theory that my wife or your wife or everybody’s wife is too dumb to know the difference between the supercan and the monster can. That’s their theory: We better take care of the people because the people are too stupid to watch out for themselves. What happens is that we get people like Bess Myerson or Betty Furness to watch out for us. It’s amazing the people they recruit to be watchdogs for the people. I’m waiting for Frances Langford, or maybe Dorothy Lamour. Gloria De Haven would be good, too. Or Ann Miller. I can see Ann Miller doing twenty minutes on truth in packaging. I can’t understand how the thing is so screwed up. Why do they go to the entertai
nment world? How about Mickey Rooney? Or Shirley Temple? No, she’s out, because she’s representing us at the UN.
What gets me really mad is that the Government gets so hypocritical about the whole business. The Government says cigarettes are a hazard to your health. O. K. Why don’t they make the sale of cigarettes illegal? It would be very simple, no trouble – just classify cigarettes along with grass, heroin, hash, and whatever. Make them illegal. Well, I think the Government can’t see its way clear to making them illegal because there is one hell of a lot of tax money coming in to the Government on the sale of cigarettes. The Government is making a lot of money on cigarettes right now – and who knows what the state and local governments are making on their taxes? The Government is a beneficiary of cigarette advertising. And this is the double standard.
The networks’ giving up cigarette advertising is a joke. The networks are saying, ‘Right, no more commercials.’ But the reason is simple economics. The pressure had been great on the stations to run the American Cancer Society freebies. They’ve had to give up so much time from their programs that it no longer becomes economically feasible for them to continue to carry cigarette advertising. The networks can’t keep carrying cigarette advertising and then give equal time to the anti-cigarette advertising and still stay in business. To get out of this bind, they’re giving up the cigarette business.
If advertising agencies are such seducers, if they sway so many people to buy cigarettes, how come they can’t sway people to stop smoking with anti-smoking campaigns? You either have a right to smoke or you don’t. Either make it illegal or leave it alone. But enough of the double standard. Grass is illegal. Doctors are saying that maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t. The Government is sure – they say it’s illegal, and depending upon where you are you can be put away for a long time for using it or selling it. In 1969 they held a rock festival at Bethel, New York, and like 400,000 kids sat out in a field and got stoned. Strictly illegal, and one sheriff said there weren’t enough jails in three counties to hold all those who were smoking grass so they said the hell with it. Double standard, just like prohibition.
What the cigarette people did was to hire their own censor. They felt it would be easier to hire a guy to censor them now even more than the Government ever could. So they went out and hired Robert Meyner, formerly Governor of New Jersey. And the industry tells Meyner, ‘Censor us. Keep us from doing things that the Government will get mad at.’ He went so far that he’s censoring them now even more than the Government ever could.
A friend of mine said to me not long ago, ‘I’m going to beat them. I’ve got to get a cigarette commercial on the air.’ Finally he came up with an idea. He would get the rights to the ‘59th Street Bridge Song’ which has a line in the lyrics that goes ‘feeling groovy,’ and he would show a guy and a girl walking through Manhattan, smoking, and in the background, ‘Feeling Groovy.’ The Code said no good: ‘Feeling Groovy’ is a young song. It’s young music. Get some older music. My friend was dead, finished.
Do you remember the famous ads made by Colonel Elliot Springs for Springmaid sheets? Lewd, tasteless stuff. He would have an Indian maiden with her dress up to her belly button and next to her would be an Indian guy. It was obvious that they had just finished screwing around. If you couldn’t figure that out for yourself, the headline helped you out: ‘A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet.’ You don’t see that any more. In the end, the public killed it. They decided not to buy the sheets. Eventually tasteless advertising doesn’t work, and there’s no percentage in trying it.
The people kill bad advertising in a very good way. They don’t write too many letters to the manufacturer; they just don’t buy the product. All of a sudden you look around and you see sales dropping right before your eyes. The letters that the networks get are few and far between, as far as commercials are concerned. But when companies or networks do get letters, they get very uptight. I could control the entire advertising business with five little old ladies and five pens. All a company has to do is get more than twenty letters on a single commercial and it’s out, it’s dead. The company gets very nervous and the commercial is finished, washed up.
I once wrote an ad for men’s socks and the ad showed a man standing next to a dog. I don’t know why or can’t even remember why we had a dog in the ad but it doesn’t matter. The dog was there. Well, Kayser-Roth, the company that made the socks, got a letter from somebody in Ohio. The letter said that the dog is the filthiest of all animals and it went on to describe the habits of a dog – it was a pretty nauseating letter. But the letter got up to Chester Roth, the president of the company, and he thought enough of it to send it down to somebody, who thought enough of it to send it down to someone else, and it caused a little stir. Obviously, the guy who wrote it was a real nut. Four other dog haters could eliminate a lousy dog from an ad. We left our dog in but it was a close call.
The story that the censors put out is that they’re doing it for the public good. That’s all you ever hear about why they do it. They’re going to ruin commercials, they’re going to damage advertising, all because of the public good.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
RUMORS
AND
PITCHES
‘The outsider who reads about this kind of infighting might be horrified, but strangely enough I enjoy it. I think it’s a lot of fun. I like it when somebody zaps me. The guy who said we weren’t taking small accounts did a beautiful job – he really got me. He put me in a position where I couldn’t fight back and I can admire the job he did. The thing to remember about the entire rumor game is that you can’t touch a solid account and you can’t bother a solid advertising man …’
I once made a presentation to an account when I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. The guy who owned the company zapped us out. He was straight as an arrow, greatlooking guy, big, tall, basketball-playing type. I ran into him about six months later on the ferry to Fire Island. He was with another guy and they had their arms around each other. As I walked by I caught him from the side of my eye and I said to myself, ‘I really didn’t see that.’ So I kept walking, like I didn’t really want to meet him and talk to him on the ferry. My wife was sitting in the front of the ferry and since he saw me alone he figured, Well, golly, here we go. ‘Jerry,’ he said, ‘how are you?’ I couldn’t remember his name, I only remembered that we pitched the account. He’s there, grinning, with his four buddies, and he said, ‘Who are you here with?’ ‘I’m here with my wife,’ I mumbled. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Oh.’ That was that.
Now, if I had known about this guy when I made the presentation, why you can’t tell, I might have done something to get an edge on the account. Like wear a dress. No, of course that’s not true, but it is true that you work like hell to pick up the business.
Before you even get a chance to present, you have to know that the account you’re going to pitch to is loose – that is, you have to be aware that the account wants to listen to you. You hear about possible new business through rumors. Rumors are very important in this business. Whether you start them or whether you’re the victim of them, rumors are crucial to advertising. This is one of the few businesses where people are so rumor-conscious. You’ll almost never find two lawyers sitting around discussing whether Sullivan & Cromwell is going to lose a client.
Rumor, gossip, whatever you want to call it, it’s essential to advertising. People use the advertising trade papers to push their careers, make a pitch for an account, or to zap guys who have an inside track on an account. The most important trade papers for rumors are ANNY (Advertising News of New York), The Gallagher Report, Ad Age and Ad Daily. ANNY also has a counterpart in Chicago and on the West Coast. People sit down and read ANNY and The Gallagher Report to find out if they’re going to lose their accounts. The New York Times is the single most powerful force in the business as far as straight advertising news is concerned. The Times does not go in for rumors, just plain news, when an account finally mov
es from one agency to another and items like that.
The trade papers print rumors – on purpose – when the rumors come from a reliable source. One of the trades printed a rumor in 1969 that a soap company was thinking of developing an enzyme which would be competitive, really competitive, with another soap. The story said that if the company did bring out this soap they would give the account to a large agency, which then would have to drop their soap account because of a product conflict. I happen to know that the guy who planted that rumor did it because he wanted to be able to say to Soap Company No. 1, ‘What’s with the story? Is it true? And if so, we’d like to be in the running for the account that was to be dropped.’ This was a legitimate rumor that went to the press, and who knows if something will come of it? You can’t tell.
The press is of value to someone in looking for new business or in solidifying his position with an account. As far as I’m concerned the rumor business is not all dirty pool. It’s like a race toward an account and everybody does everything in their power to get it. Agencies hire stars to impress the account, guys do anything to get the account. Part of the race for the account is the rumor. It’s true that there are some bad people who immediately go out and try to kill the other agencies who also are pitching the account. They’ll spread rumors that an agency’s best people are leaving. There are cases when people will sit down and spread lies–not rumors that may have a basis in fact. A good example of this recently was the rumor spread that Doyle, Dane’s best people were leaving for other agencies. Now Doyle, Dane was about to get a big chunk of business, and somebody spread this rumor about them so the account might think that it might not pay to go to Doyle, Dane if the people working there were leaving.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 18