Adland

  Mother believes that the key to effective advertising is simply to tell the truth. The most obvious example was a campaign for a brand of instant noodles, Super Noodles. The TV spots portrayed consumers as lazy, inept slobs – although with a modicum of oafish charm. In its Mother Bible – an insight into its philosophy – the agency explained that, let’s be honest, a pot of Super Noodles was unlikely to become ‘the reason Mum’s kids love her’. ‘So a pack of Super Noodles becomes a packet of nosh for when you are too lazy, rushed or, more likely, drunk to prepare proper food. In this instance, the customer recognizes themselves and gives the advertiser the benefit of the doubt.’

  As this book went to press, Mother had stubbornly resisted selling even a tiny sliver to one of the international giants, insisting that it wanted to stay ‘pure’. Small, flexible, honest and determinedly independent – how much more radical can you get?

  Far from the Madison crowd

  Lest I be accused of giving the Brits too much coverage, I had better turn my attention to the United States. The world’s largest advertising market is by no means bereft of fleet-footed agencies offering an alternative approach (although many of them have forged alliances with the giants).

  It’s difficult to pick a favourite. How about Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco? Headed by Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, the agency was founded in 1983 and has successfully retooled itself for the digital age. It has been described by Creativity magazine as ‘a creative hothouse’ that helped to ‘define modern advertising’ (‘The Creativity 50’, 1 March 2006). In the same article, creative director Gerry Graf – who worked there before moving on to TBWA in New York – summarized the role of an alternative agency when he said: ‘They were simply smarter and funnier than everyone else; they made the big New York agencies look old and stupid.’

  Don’t know their work? Got to be kidding… this is the agency behind ‘Got milk?’ It all began in 1993 when Jeff Manning, then executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, hired Goodby, Silverstein to turn a drink with a dull image into something resembling Coke or Sprite. The agency’s research revealed that milk was so closely associated with certain granular snacks – like cookies or brownies – that consumers could barely imagine swallowing them without the appropriate liquid accompaniment.

  This was the trigger for the first TV spot, ‘Aaron Burr’. It featured a history buff called at random by a radio quiz show host. Suddenly finding himself live on air, he was unable to answer the $10,000 trivia question – to which he clearly knew the answer – because he’d just taken an enormous bite of peanut butter sandwich. His eyes goggled as he realized that the carton of milk at his elbow was empty, preventing him from washing down the cloying ball of food. Unable to understand his mouth-stuffed mumbling, the DJ hung up on him. The ad’s offbeat humour made milk seem fun; and the slogan was stickier than peanut butter.

  Since that award-winning spot, the ‘Got milk?’ campaigns have taken on myriad forms, including that of a milk-starved planet in a distant galaxy. For the latter, the agency literally created an entire world – faintly inspired by old episodes of Star Trek – with interactive web experiences that blended seamlessly with the print and TV work.

  Our tour of creative outposts would not be complete without a visit to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, which single-handedly turned Miami into a creative advertising capital. The agency was founded in 1965 by Sam Crispin, but it remained stubbornly out of the limelight until 1987, when Chuck Porter was brought in to transform its creative fortunes. Two years later, he recruited Alex Bogusky as creative director. Around the same time that, in faraway Amsterdam, 180 and StrawberryFrog were insisting that they didn’t need a worldwide network to do international business, the Miami-based duo realized that they could stay put and still make a global impact. To an extent, they created the agency of the future before others were even aware that the future was happening.

  Porter told Adweek: ‘We always had virtually the exact vision of what the agency would be – we wanted to build a world-class agency in Miami. And we made all of our decisions based on that… If you did terrific, interesting work, everything else would work itself out. We always thought that way, and we still do’ (‘How the little creative shop in Miami grew up, but refuses to grow old’, 9 January 2006).

  The agency first got itself noticed with the ‘Truth’ campaign – an antismoking drive. Using non-preachy tactics to reach a youth audience, it hilariously exposed the tactics used by big tobacco companies to hook youngsters on cigarettes. One of the ads depicted a mock awards show in hell, with awards handed out to tobacco executives for the Greatest Number of Deaths in a Single Year.

  Having unsold cigarettes, Crispin Porter went on to successfully re-launch the Mini Cooper – a dinky little car with a British heritage that had attracted little interest in the United States in its earlier incarnations. The agency captured the car’s plucky Brit appeal with the slogan ‘Let’s motor’ and some equally nifty stunts – like parking one atop a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

  For my money, however, the most extraordinary ‘off Madison Avenue’ agency is based in Minneapolis, and its name is Fallon.

  Driving branded content

  The agency had a long gestation period. It started out as an informal out-of-hours partnership between Pat Fallon, who worked at an agency called Martin/Williams, and Thomas McElligott, then creative director at Bozell & Jacobs. The pair had worked together on private projects for seven years before deciding to open their own agency in 1981. They were joined by Fred Senn, Irv Fish and Nancy Rice.

  Right from the start, Fallon McElligott Rice – to give it its original name – wanted to offer an alternative to Madison Avenue. In their book about the agency’s work, Juicing the Orange (2006), Pat Fallon and Fred Senn evoke the ghost of Bill Bernbach when they write: ‘Even though research showed that people develop a psychological resistance to repeated exposure to a single ad, Madison Avenue was bombarding consumers and calling it success.’ They imagined ‘a new kind of agency that would communicate with consumers in fresh, intelligent and engaging ways’. Above all, it would be about creativity: not ‘self-indulgent… art for art’s sake ads that win awards but don’t affect the client’s bottom line’, but the kind of hardworking creativity that people like Bernbach and David Ogilvy produced.

  It had been said before and it could easily have been dismissed with a yawn – but Fallon actually delivered. Its very first client was a tiny local barbershop with no budget. Fallon’s posters featured ‘famous people with bad haircuts’. An image of the wild-haired Albert Einstein was headlined: ‘A bad haircut can make anyone look dumb.’ Other eccentrically coiffed individuals, from Betty Boop to Moe Howard, followed. ‘The barbershop’s target market loved the campaign so much that people were stealing the posters from bus stops,’ Fallon and Senn report.

  Although it started out with small, local clients, Fallon eventually attracted national advertisers such as Rolling Stone magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Lee Jeans. After a series of mergers and takeovers it found itself in the midst of the WPP group. But the agency entered a creative depression and in 1992 Pat Fallon bought it back from WPP for US $14 million (WARC profile in association with AdBrands, December 2005) and began to turn it around. A return to form was confirmed with the win of the BMW account in 1995.

  It was for BMW that Fallon created what is undoubtedly its most influential campaign: ‘The Hire’, a series of short action movies, shot by top Hollywood directors, and run exclusively on the internet. In 2001, this was an extremely risky option for a mainstream brand. But BMW had been inspired by its product placement deal with the Bond movie GoldenEye, and research showed that luxury car customers were using the internet to research vehicles that interested them. In addition, it was known that young men aged 25 to 35 were already online in a big way.

  In their book, Fallon and Senn explain: ‘We believed that the best way to signal that these short movies w
ere legitimate was to get famous directors. With the help of Hollywood screenwriters, we created about 15 scripts and asked A-list directors to pick one.’

  Intrigued by the possibilities of the web and keen to experiment, a clutch of top directors came on board, including John Frankenheimer (Ronin), Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love) and Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Clive Owen, a newly hot actor after his performance in the film Croupier, was signed up to play the films’ protagonist, an unnamed driver who is hired by various individuals and inevitably steered into danger, with only his nerve and his BMW to get him out.

  The movies were promoted like genuine blockbusters, with giant posters in the streets and TV spots that looked like trailers. The agency even ran ads in industry trade magazines like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. The first film went online on 25 April 2001. Nine months later, bmwfilms.com had logged more than 10 million film views by 2.13 million people. It was hardly surprising: with their heavyweight directors, starry casts (Madonna, Mickey Rourke, Forest Whitaker) and Hollywood production values, the films signalled the future of advertising – provided you had the budget.

  According to BMW’s corporate website (bmwusa.com), the eight films garnered almost 100 million views before the site was finally closed down in October 2005. (They can still be found on YouTube.) It was a triumph for Fallon and BMW – but it was much more significant than that. The internet had finally been established as a legitimate medium for mainstream brands – and ‘branded content’ had arrived.

  In the meantime, Fallon had been acquired again – this time by Publicis Groupe. Although it had been forced to close its New York office, which was effectively competing with the Minneapolis agency, Fallon had opened a London branch in 1998 and was keen to develop a small international network. Backing from the French group gave it the clout to do so. Soon, additional offices had opened in Singapore, São Paulo, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

  The London office was behind another groundbreaking campaign, this time for the Sony Bravia LCD TV. To get across its idea of ‘colour, like no other’, the agency released 250,000 brightly coloured rubber balls into the hilly streets of San Francisco and stood back to film the results. Bouncing and tumbling down the sharp inclines, the balls resembled multicoloured hail. An anecdote from creative director Juan Cabral illustrated the direction the media – and advertising – were heading in. ‘During the shoot I got an email from someone who said they’d already seen our idea online. It turned out to be a film that someone had shot from their window on their mobile phone while we were making the ad. It had gone all the way round the world and come back to me’ (Shots conference, London, 21 March 2006).

  This was not the last time the film was appropriated by enthusiastic amateurs. Reliant on a neat idea rather than special effects, the charming spot was appreciated by viewers for its ‘authenticity’. The ad took on a life of its own, generating a hit song and numerous spoofs. More interestingly, unofficial new versions began cropping up on the web, edited to different music. Juan Cabral pointed out: ‘Media is global now. It’s not just me any more – it’s me plus everyone.’

  Like the BMW campaign before it, the Sony commercial offered an insight into the way consumers interacted with brands on the web. Agencies were slowly beginning to tame the internet, even though many of them still bore the scars of their earlier over-hasty efforts.

  14

  Dotcom boom and bust

  ‘We just wasted two million dollars’

  In December 1999 I was holed up in a hotel in New York City, idly zapping through TV channels while I waited for the streets to thaw. Dotcom advertising was everywhere that winter: I remember stumbling across a spot for Amazon.com featuring a motley group of employees in Santa hats singing carols. Other dotcoms followed the same ‘wacky’ route, while similarly failing to explain exactly what they were trying to sell. When I returned to New York a year later, most of them had vanished from the screen forever.

  Were advertising agencies to blame for the dotcom bust? There are certainly grounds for arguing that they hastened the implosion. Hypnotized by the venture capital cash being waved in their faces, they agreed to shelve everything they’d learned about building brands in order to produce shallow, only occasionally witty advertising whose sole aim was to generate hyper-rapid awareness for their clients. Meanwhile, traditional advertisers rushed online with clunky banners and pop-ups.

  It was fun while it lasted. On 10 September 1999 Campaign magazine ran an article headlined ‘The dotcom wars’. Its first sentence read: ‘If somebody were to make a billboard for the dotcom age, it would be several hundred feet high and sprawl across Highway 101 in Silicon Valley, reading “Welcome to the new gold rush”.’

  In 1998, the top 50 internet advertisers in the United States had spent only US $420 million on offline advertising. In the first two months of the following year, the dotcoms increased their ad spend by more than 280 per cent. On the other side of the pond, the UK was experiencing a similar boom. By the end of 1999, total spend on advertising had passed the £15 billion barrier for the first time. A spokesman from the Advertising Association said that dotcom advertising activity was bolstering the success of traditional media. ‘It’s difficult to see any clouds on the horizon,’ he added (‘Dotcom boom helps propel UK ad spend beyond £15 billion mark’, 26 May 2000).

  The outdoor industry was one of the greatest beneficiaries of this largesse, as dotcom companies plastered their incomprehensible logos all over town. Billboards did indeed clutter Highway 101. In the UK, spend on outdoor advertising by dotcoms rocketed from £1 million in 1998 to an implausible £23 million by the end of the following year. Rather than building brands, many of these posters were aimed at attracting investors. There were reports of British dotcoms asking their media buyers to concentrate on sites in the City in order to raise their profile among the financial community.

  There were occasional voices of reason. Stevie Spring, chief executive of the poster contractor More, told Marketing magazine: ‘What we’ve seen is the dotcom companies needing fast fame, and spending lots of money to do it. Most have yet to get to the next stage, where they have to really build brands as well’ (‘Dotcoms gain real presence outdoors’, 30 March 2000).

  The dotcom frenzy reached its height during the last half of 1999 and the first weeks of the following year. Agencies in the United States reported fielding five calls a day from dotcoms who wanted to get campaigns off the ground by the fourth quarter. Some agencies warned that brand-building took time, while others admitted that it was difficult to turn down multi-million-dollar clients.

  An article in New Media Age summed it up rather well: ‘Bewildered middle-aged agency suits sat open-mouthed as teams of idiots in three-quarter length trousers and Japanese trainers hosed backers’ money at them… They took briefs from 26-year-old marketing directors whose sole previous experience had been the production of club fliers…’ (‘How dotcoms killed off the ad agencies’, 13 September 2001).

  Even when the teams behind them were reasonably experienced, the ads were nothing if not eccentric. In the UK the faces behind ready2shop.com – fashion experts Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine – also turned out to be the bodies behind the site, appearing naked in a print ad. Others resorted to the emerging ‘guerrilla’ style of advertising. The women’s site Hangbag.com projected its logo and URL onto the side of the Natural History Museum, which was hosting a London Fashion Week event. A spokesman said: ‘We wanted to bring the Handbag brand out of the ether and inject it with an urban, streetwise personality.’ It may have been the first and last appearance of the words ‘handbag’ and ‘streetwise’ in the same sentence.

  The apotheosis of the dotcom boom was the Super Bowl of 2000. Dozens of dotcoms blew millions of dollars on dizzyingly expensive and mostly dreadful 30-second spots. Top prize for hubris went to E-Trade.com, which ran a loony ad featuring a dancing monkey. The endline said: ‘We jus
t wasted US $2 million. What are you doing with your money?’

  And what exactly did the dotcoms get for their money? As Salon.com pointed out in its after-match report, ‘the bottom line looks like a bit of gawking press coverage and a temporary [surge] in site traffic, but nothing so lasting that it could be called “brand building”, and nothing so irrefutably valuable… that it could possibly justify the huge expense for a whole batch of unprofitable companies’ (‘Fumble.com’, 3 May 2000).

  One Super Bowl advertiser was to become the symbol of the dotcom bust: Pets.com, whose jaunty sock puppet mascot charmed a nation, but utterly failed to save a company. ‘What bell-bottoms were to the 70s, the sock puppet was to the dotcom era,’ commented Wired magazine (‘1999 – What were they thinking?’, August 2005).

  Pets.com burned through millions of dollars in two years. Like another famous dotcom casualty, the fashion site Boo.com, it found that the cost of administration, storage, shipping and marketing greatly outstripped income. As it prepared its Super Bowl ad, it had already lost US $61.8 million on sales of US $5.8 million to the end of December (‘Pets.com to put puppet on Bowl’, USA Today, 25 January 2000).

  The sock puppet was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day in San Francisco. It was basically a fuzzy white sports sock with mismatched felt eyes, brown markings, a red tongue and ears tagged on with safety pins. Its collar was a wristwatch and it carried a microphone. The ads were knowingly amateurish and the puppet’s wisecracking style appealed to consumers. (In one Christmastime ad, the puppet stared at the row of stockings hanging on the fireplace, turned to the camera and intoned, ‘The horror!’) Each spot ended with the line, ‘… because pets can’t drive’.