by Peter Mayle
He starts safely enough: “The agency’s approach is very interesting, and they have clearly devoted a lot of time and effort in coming to their conclusions.”
So far, so good. Now for the tricky part, with everyone hanging on his words—the agency, to see whether he will be a useful ally or a difficult little creep; his colleagues, to see if this first straw in the wind seems to be blowing in an acceptable direction; his boss, sitting inscrutably at the top of the table—they are all waiting, watching, pencils poised over notepads. Oh, God.
He takes a flying leap toward the middle of the road. “On the one hand, the agency’s ideas are undoubtedly… well, interesting.” (Fresh and different can also be used here without too much risk.) “And there are some aspects of the campaign that would probably work very well, although obviously they’re still rough and would need to be discussed in detail and researched and fine-tuned.” (An invaluably vague word, fine-tuned.) “On the other hand, there is a possibility—only a possibility—that certain requirements set out in the brief have been, if not exactly neglected, not given sufficient emphasis.”
Before he can be pinned to the wall by the agency and asked precisely what he means, he sprints toward a summing-up. “The one hand” and “the other hand” having been used, “in general” is now the only phrase that has the necessary air of finality without having sufficient weight to cause the speaker to lose his balance and fall off the fence. “In general, therefore, the agency has come up with some very interesting proposals, and it would be very… well… interesting to see how they plan to develop them.”
More of this goes on, sometimes hours of it, until the senior client is ready to unburden himself. By this time, the agency people are leaning forward like young cuckoos waiting for a worm. Surely now there will be a decisive and favorable response, followed by champagne in the chairman’s office, banner headlines in the trade press, and another few million to add to the agency’s billings. The anticipation is excruciating.
The senior client chooses his words as if he were selecting a cigar; he hasn’t gotten where he is by blurting out his opinion without first making a few suitably statesmanlike remarks. And so he thanks the agency for its efforts, perhaps with a wry reference to midnight oil, before picking his way through the comments that have been made in the course of the presentation. The agency fidgets. Is he going to buy it? Did we get the worm? For heaven’s sake, man, get on with it.
And he does, bur very rarely in the definitive way that the agency is hoping for.
“All I am prepared to say at the moment is that you have given us a great deal—a great deal—to think about.” He looks at the agency chairman and smiles a tycoon-to-tycoon smile. “I’m sure you weren’t expecting an instant decision when there are so many considerations to take into account.”
An instant decision is exactly what the agency chairman, an optimist to his toenails, was expecting, but he does his best to be a tycoon about it, nodding sagely as he tries to avoid thinking about the enormous amount of money that has just been spent to achieve an anticlimax.
Souvenirs are distributed—inch-thick marketing documents stuffed with statistics and conclusions, decorated with miniature reproductions of advertisements and storyboards and “personalized” with potted biographies of the agency personnel who would work on the account. Once the client party has been escorted out of the agency, the presentation team returns to the conference room for the postmortem. The clients and their reactions are discussed and analyzed, and the odd recrimination is voiced about somebody’s lackluster presentation performance, but it’s all inconclusive and often rather depressing. There’s nothing to be done now except wait for the client’s verdict, and the bastard didn’t even give a hint about when that might be.
Normal service in the agency is resumed, and those tasks, great and small, that were neglected or postponed during the panic are picked up again in a rash of meetings.
The writer and art director who worked on the presentation are feeling an even greater sense of deflation than the rest of the agency. They sweated blood. They produced a masterpiece of persuasive communication, and what happened? It wasn’t sold properly. Another black mark on the record of their executive colleagues, more ammunition in the cold war between the princes of creativity and the rest of the world. Fortunately, they can now divert themselves with a job that has been dragging on for many months and that is at last ready for execution: their epic commercial.
The average cost of a thirty-second commercial, without anything too complicated in the way of special optical effects, is at least $250,000. If a celebrity is used, there is a considerable fee on top of that, plus handsome repeat fees every time the commercial is shown. Prime-time television costs approximately $100,000 a minute. With an investment of this size, it is not hard to see why the progress of most commercials, from original concept to finished film, is slow and often extremely frustrating.
It was months ago that the writer and art director labored and brought forth their idea, drawn up on a storyboard. The creative director approved it, the account people accepted it, and it was gradually sold up through the levels of client management. It was generally agreed that the commercial was on strategy, but the client had some misgivings about the details of execution, and so it was put into research.
The original storyboard was drawn up again, in more finished form. A soundtrack of commentary and music was recorded and the elements were put together to make a film—still rough but sufficiently clear for a representative selection of the target audience (possibly those long-suffering housewives from Queens) to understand and comment on it. A screening was arranged, and the housewives were invited to see the preview of a new television show. During the screening, they were also treated to a sight of the new commercial, and among the questions they were asked afterward were questions about the commercial.
At this point, complications set in, because research people are not satisfied with simple answers. It is not enough to know that Mrs. Jones liked the commercial. How much did she like it, on a scale of one to ten? What did she remember? Was there anything in the commercial she disliked? Would she be: (a) very interested in trying the product? (b) quite interested in trying the product? (c) not interested in trying the product? Reams of completed questionnaires are then studied and analyzed. The results, which are always open to considerable interpretation, are worried over and inspected from different angles by the agency and the client. Weeks pass, but eventually qualified approval is given and the show can go on.
Meanwhile, the writer, the art director, and the agency producer have been hard at lunch, deciding various artistic matters, and at the top of their list is the choice of director.
At the end of 1989, there were 464 directors of TV commercials in London chasing barely three thousand commercials and revised versions. Competition as keen as this breeds specialists, and so there are directors who specialize in dialogue, in fashion, in action, in special effects, in hair, in drinks, in any one of a dozen subdivisions of technique. But for our agency trio, putting together their epic, these worthy craftsmen are not quite what they had in mind, not heavyweight enough. They are united in their desire to get a features director who is resting between engagements.
It comes as a surprise to many people to discover that internationally known film directors are often more than happy to descend from their artistic eminence to shoot a commercial. What is it that lures them away from Gene Hackman in Hollywood to an unknown character actor in New York? How can a commercial for a soft drink compare with the creative scope offered by a tale of love and violence on the big screen?
The reason, in one form or another, is money—not just the director’s fee (although that has been known to reach $30,000 a day) but the luxury of time and the size of the production budgets, which, in relative terms, are infinitely more generous than those allocated to feature films.
Instead of breaking his neck to get five or ten minutes of usable film in the can
every day, all the director has to worry about is thirty or forty seconds. And the money available for production values—the props and all those barely glimpsed but wonderful touches that make set designers twitch in ecstasy—is there by the bucketful: four thousand dollars a second. This gives a director the chance to make a small but perfect thing, a marvelously polished tiny film that will not only keep his hand in but will also go some way toward helping with the alimony payments.
The agency producer makes his calls to Los Angeles to see who might be free to consider the commercial. Scripts are sent out and timetables are juggled. The first of many budget battles takes place when the true cost of the director’s involvement is calculated—his airfares, his board and lodging, his five-figure daily rate, and his well-known habit of shooting into the night on overtime—but these are small concerns when compared with the awards that will mark this as one of the legendary, never-to-be-forgotten commercials.
Once the director has been recruited, daily contact with the agency producer is maintained by the director’s producer, who will be in charge of organizing the set, the crew, the equipment, the money, the catering, and a hundred other details that have to be seen to. In addition, and most important of all, the director must be kept happy. He is the star, and he must not be bothered by trifles. In other words, the producer is responsible for everything except the success of the commercial, credit for which is shared between the director and the agency people.
As one might expect, the road to the shoot is paved with meetings. There are preproduction meetings, casting sessions, auditions, lunches, drinks, budget adjustments—sometimes with the client, as often as possible without him. The director’s presence is used sparingly, because we don’t want him to be upset by a twit of a brand manager who keeps insisting on a ten-second product shot in the middle of the commercial. That little problem is swept under the carpet, to be argued about when the rough cut is ready.
On the day of the shoot, a small army converges on the studio’s soundstage. The agency people, after an unsuccessful struggle, have been obliged to bring the client. There might easily be a crew of twenty or more, for sound, lighting, camera operating, focus pulling, makeup, hairdressing, catering, each with jealously guarded areas of expertise. Woe betide the helpful continuity person who happens to be standing by a light that the camera operator wants moved three inches to the left. If she attempts to move it, the electricians will be up in arms.
There will be the artistes, studying the script next to the sound crew, who are studying page three of the Daily News. There will be the producer and a personal assistant. And there will be that lordly figure dressed in crumpled but expensive clothing, the director.
Now that everyone has arrived, the first coffee break of the day can be taken. Doughnuts and croissants are distributed, and the crew stands around chatting about last week’s job, when, due to the director’s upset stomach, they ran into considerable and lucrative overtime, which they refer to affectionately as the diarrhea bonus.
For the client, who has never attended the shooting of a commercial before, it is disappointingly matter-of-fact. This is, after all, a film. Where is the drama, the electric atmosphere before a great performance, the glamour?
Little does he know, at 8:30 in the morning, that his most enduring memory of the day will be one of boredom, often accompanied by heartburn caused by bad coffee and too many sugary treats. His hours on the set will be hours of immense tedium and discomfort. He will not be allowed to speak or move while the camera is turning. He will hold himself unnaturally still, fighting off cramps, and peer toward the center of activity in the hope of seeing something exciting, because here he is on the fringes of show business. Those are real actors. That is a real director. Something exciting must happen.
And what does he see? The same short sequence repeated ten, fifteen, twenty times. Dialogue that was amusing at ten o’clock is irritating by eleven and actively offensive by noon. And it all sounds identical, anyway. Why go through it again?
Because, unknown to a novice like him who doesn’t know a whip pan from a lap dissolve, there is always some slight imperfection, perceptible only to the director’s merciless eye and hypercritical ear.
TAKE ONE: The actor delivers his lines superbly, but someone in the darkest corner of the set shuffled his feet and the sound engineer has picked up the shuffle on the tape.
TAKE TWO: The actor delivers his lines superbly, but the makeup artist notices a drop of perspiration on the side of his nose.
TAKE THREE: The nose stays dry, but the actor doesn’t quite repeat his previous superb delivery.
And so it goes on. And on. And on. There are frequent pauses for refreshment after the first coffee break—the early lunch break, the disturbed lunch break, the afternoon break, the preovertime break—and it is possible to eat rather badly five or six times in the course of the day. It is the proud boast of the film technicians’ union that it has never in its history lost a member though lack of nourishment.
The shooting day starts at about eight and ends when the director is satisfied, which may unusually be as early as five or as late as the budget can stand the overtime. At the end of it, there will be an hour or so of film from which to choose the magic thirty seconds. The rough cut will be the subject of further meetings and more editing. The brand manager will want his ten-second product shot. The agency and the production company will resist. And the director will be on the plane back to Los Angeles, having made sure that his preferred cut of the commercial, which may or may not bear any resemblance to the final film, is put on his personal show reel.
It has been a taxing experience for all concerned, but as everyone in advertising agrees, it’s a tough business. People outside it have no idea what we have to go through. Have another drink.
Pigs with Checkbooks
Even with a kindly and forgiving eye, it is difficult to select from the millions of advertising messages on display at any one time more than a handful with any original merit. These are the famous advertisements and campaigns, the work that is remembered and liked, the work that sells products and services with wit and charm and imagination. Triumphs such as these are held up, quite rightly, as examples of what advertising should be, but they are rare. A very generous estimate might put the incidence of good or brilliant advertising as high as 10 percent of the overall output. The rest is dross.
The rest is either boring, derivative, strident (when in doubt, shout), offensively stupid, patronizing, or so smug that the most mild-mannered consumer could be forgiven for being provoked to physical violence. There is a limit to the number of times anyone can endure the sight of plastic middle-class couples gloating over their new cars, sipping their sticky after-dinner drinks, or going into raptures over a thin, mean liquid that masquerades as coffee.
We are often told that advertising reflects the face of society, which would be extremely depressing if it was wholly true. Nearer the truth is that advertising reflects the face of the client. He is the first member of the public outside the agency to judge an advertising idea. He can approve it, tinker with it, or kill it and demand something worse because, as he will point out if faced with too much argument, he’s paying for it. “Just remember it’s our money you’re spending here” is a phrase that has hung ominously over many a conference table, and it is enough to make most agencies back off and do what they’re told.
As you would expect, agencies do not enjoy the situation. It is not comfortable to live with. But, ingenious to the last, they have developed a philosophy that enables them to take the money and duck the issue at the same time. Expressed in simple terms, it is the whiskery old excuse that clients get the advertising they deserve, which conveniently ignores the option that agencies can always take against nightmare accounts and their attendant goon squads. They can resign the business. They seldom do.
To provide themselves with some daily consolation, agency people take pleasure in devising new and ever more derogatory ways
of describing their tormentors—“pigs with checkbooks” being one of the more moderate phrases in a litany of invective and profanity that is muttered (out of the client’s hearing, naturally) in agency offices throughout the world.
It would be tempting to dismiss this as nothing more than the harmless grumbling of an oppressed minority group, but we would be wrong to do so. While all clients do not automatically qualify as the subhuman morons that agencies claim them to be, there are enough suspect characters in the client population to justify many of the accusations that are made against them. Since clients themselves are lovers of labels and pigeonholes, it is appropriate to label and pigeonhole them here.
The Agency’s Pal
This is usually a brand manager who finds the environment of an agency much more to his taste than his own modest surroundings in the suburbs. He likes the slightly racy nature of agency people and makes a point of cultivating the writer and art director so that he can feel he’s up there in the front line, on the cutting edge of the creative process. He likes the secretaries, who tend to be prettier and more respectful than the women in his office. He likes the lunches. He lives in hope that one day he might be permitted to go off on location (with lavish expenses) when the agency team shoots the next commercial in the Bahamas. And, quite often, he has ambitions to change sides and become a racy advertising person himself.
He is never in a hurry to go back to the suburbs when the meeting is over. Instead, he loiters in the agency, friendly and admiring, until eventually he is adopted as an ally, a good guy, a client who is human.
This testing time comes when a new campaign is presented to his god and master, the marketing director. Our pal has been closely involved in the campaign, and he has been unwise enough to tell the agency, over another three-hour lunch at Luigi’s, that he thinks it’s great. He’s committed. Terrific! The campaign’s as good as sold.