The Art of Einstein

An Advertising Tale

One of advertising’s most distinguished early practitioners was Commodore J. Walter Thompson. 

With his dignified bearing he was among the first to put forth advertising as a profession.  He was utterly tireless and insisted on making every moment of every day as productive as possible.  In an era of hansom cabs and horse drawn trolleys the quickest way to get around New York was the elevated train system.  So when he had an appointment he often chose this speediest, if not grandest, form of transportation.   

One windy day in March the Commodore found himself seated aboard the “el” when a young man carrying a sandwich boarded the train and squeezed into the seat next to him.

The sandwich board was large and bulky; two-sided and about five feet tall by three feet wide.  One side promoted the virtues of a local restaurant while the other side proclaimed the benefits of painless dentistry. 

As the train rattled on the young man kept glancing at the Commodore, eager to engage this distinguished gentleman in conversation.  But the Commodore remained aloof.

Summoning up all his nerve the sandwich board man finally broke the ice.  “ Good morning, sir,” he said.  “I’m on my way to work, are you?”  The commodore ack nowledged that he too was headed for his job.

“And what is your profession sir?” asked the sandwich board man 

“ I am in the advertising business,” replied the commodore. 

A wide smile lit the younger man;s face.

“What a coincidence," he said. "I’m in advertising, too. Ain’t it hell when the wind blows!”

My good  friend Chuck Francis never tired of telling this story from the files of his Idea Bank.  It cracked him up every time.   

 

We Interrupt This Blog for a Word From Our Sponsor

There’s a very good chance I’ve been a car enthusiast since before you were born.

 So when I was backed into a corner about my thesis topic while a grad student at Michigan State and managed to persuade my advisor that the advertising of the Packard Motor Car Company would be a fit subject, I pretty much thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Now that it's been aged in fine pine bookshelves for many years this morsel of minor scholarship has been revised, updated and actually published, not by a vanity press but by a card-carrying book publisher, McFarland Press , in the mountains of North Carolina, the land of my birth.  

After two years of fussing, it can now actually be purchased from McFarland online or at Barnes & Noble, Amazon et al.  Put the title “Ask the Man Who Owns One” in the query box and it comes right up.  There’s even a website dedicated to it  where you can see 25 of the 145 illustrations that are in the book.  

It’s turns out to be a pretty good story if you’re interested in cars or advertising - in spite of the fact that it was written in the bloom of youth before I’d ever written an ad for pay.  I had the opportunity to talk with people who had worked for the company in its prime and some who made advertising for it as far back as 1925.  If you're able to transport yourself back to the 1930's, you'll find the  work from Young & Rubicam a creative revolution in its own right.

Should you know anyone who’s interested in how a brand was built before ‘branding’ was the vogue, pass the word along.  The reproduction of the ads is disappointing and the lay out artist was on drugs. But if cars or ads are your thing, you may find something of interest here.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. 

 

Is Apple the new Ma Bell?

Judge Green and your Justice Department dismantled Ma Bell 28 years ago.  A lot of people thought it was about time.  Cigars were passed out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange!             

But most Americans loved the telephone company.  She was dependable.  Customer service was off the charts.  The Operator answered in 2 rings and never uttered a discouraging word.  Employees were trained relentlessly to be courteous and helpful.  And Ma Bell was also a great place to work.  Remind you of anyone?

Dan Gilmor’s column in Salon the other day reminded me how my affection for my Apple devices parallels how most of us felt about the old phone company.  And how Apple has made being loved and admired as good a policy in the free-for-all 2010 marketplace as it was for a 20^th century regulated monopoly.

 From the very beginning Apple, like Ma Bell, has been a profoundly customer-centric organization.  They’ve understood that people, like an electric current, follow the past of least resistance.  In the wired world there wasn’t anything easier to use than a black telephone.  Today the unwired world nobody comes close to the iPhone and Appleware in general.

I’ve been researching android phones lately (strictly business) and am just stunned at the tower of Babel wireless has become.  Multiple handsets running multiple operating systems.  Multiple carriers with multiple service plans.  Fall in love with a phone and you often discover that the carrier who offers it doesn’t serve your area (happened to me).  Then please decide on how many minutes you want to buy, which talk, text, and data plans work for you.  Some phones are free - some cost hundreds of dollars.  And by the way, how many megapixels would you like on your phone’s camera!  The friction in this market is incredible.

Buying an iPhone, however, is as simple as “Good Night Moon”.  One carrier.  One OS.  Two phones.  And they’ll even teach you how to use it. 

Bingo!

 

 

 

  

DISCLOSURE: I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE BODY-WASH GENERATION!

I was brought up using soap.

    So while I may have seen the Old Spice guy once or twice on TV, the  spot sailed quietly over my head without intruding on my purchase behavior.                                

    Actually I didn’t pay any mind to the Old Spice guy until his star blazed across the YouTube firmament, after which he showed up in a group conversation on an email list I frequent

    It took television + YouTube + email from friends to get my attention - which seems to be the way things work in the heated up mediasphere we occupy.  It’s not enough to simply spend lots of money airing your message either.  If the advertising doesn’t ignite a firestorm of chatter the product is likely to languish.  It might keep its spot in the plan-o-gram, but there’s no guarantee.                  Once, buying a bunch of TV time and sending the foot soldiers on their way with a promotion was all you needed to get famous and move product.  As Marvin Hoenig, a great DDB writer, once said - “I have a BIG idea.  Spend 20 million bucks on it.”  You have to be lots craftier these days. 

        What’s interesting about the OSG spot is how P&G has changed.  And how it hasn’t.  Weiden & Kennedy was obviously given lots of rope.  And after some false starts   they finally got just about everything right  The right actor, with the right smirk, the right sense of humor and self mockery, and the right set of words - a surprising progression of set ups in which production values don’t overwhelm the story or the presenter.  Nice.                

        But while P&G has lightened up over they years, they haven’t lost their soap opera mojo.  Once upon a time, P&G required that every frame in a storyboard have a written justification.  Whether they still ask for that I don’t know.  But every frame in this OSG spot is devoted to the story, and the proposition.  Wacky as it seems, it’s a very disciplined commercial.  Not a frame wasted.  To top it off,  Ad Age reports that  Old Spice body wash has actually gained market share since the spot  and its online components appeared.  

     How often does that happen? 

Naming Your Baby

Things have come to a nasty pass in the agency biz.

Being hired by a procurement officer is surely a sign of vendorship, not partnership. And apple carts   continue to be upset at every turn.

Marketing once was a piece of the advertising pie. Now advertising has become a sub-set of marketing, and the Rodney Dangerfield in the marketing mix.  Ad types who were once counted on for wise counsel are now vendors who don’t get no respect.  

And new generations of digital agencies has contributed to this reversal of fortune. Here’s what I mean.  A list of advertising agencies popped up on my screen the other day.  The list included : Juniper Park, Rockfish, Big Spaceship, Unknownlab, Victors & Spoils, Ground Zero, and Toy.  No Weiden.  No Kennedy  No Fallon. No Bogusky.  So who’s in charge?  Who’s responsible?   Who’s minding the store?  In a service business, where relationships matter,  does it really make sense to hide behind a name that make you sound like a rock group? 

Naming your new company after the partners may sound quaint in this digital era, but there’s much to recommend it.

• It establishes a unique identity for your firm - making your URL safe.
• It clearly differentiates you and your crew from everyone else.
• It lets everyone know who’s in charge, where the buck stops, etc.
• It tells the client, who may very well not be working directly with the names on the letterhead, who to call when the relationship hits a rough patch. 
•  It identifies responsibility and by doing so builds trust and authenticity.

Every rule has exceptions and so does this one.  But in the end I believe that personality wins.  And most business people with an ad budget burning a hole in their pocket will feel more comfortable and confident entrusting it to stand up people who aren't afraid their name on the door.  

 

The New Fiesta has arrived. So? Where’s the Beef?

 Used to be the new Fords didn’t show up in showrooms till September.   But now, a full 6 months before the Super Bowl, the 2011 Ford Fiesta has arrived - with an announcement  commercial that fairly shouts “Suddenly it’s 1960”. 

It’s a surprising spot. (You can watch it below).   Not offensive - but a commercial that obviously cost millions, and utterly fails to tell any kind of story.  If it offers a reason to head for a Ford store and have a look, I missed it entirely.  It’s merely sixty seconds of fanfare.

Pay close attention and you can pick up a few  copy points.  The Sync audio  system ( so good it’s reason enough to buy a Ford) gets a quick mentioned but no explanation.  Like too much advertising the carnival barker lies just below the surface.  The excitement is in the presentation, with the hope that the hoopla will cast a rosy glow on the product .   

Back  ‘the big three’ ruled the industry all an announcement spot had to do was announce that the circus was coming to town (i.e. the new Chevy’s had arrived.)   Showroom traffic materialized shortly afterward.

The Fiesta announcement seems to say that nothing’s changed in the past 50 year.  It assumes brand loyalty is immutable.  It ignores the open warfare for share that exists among a raft of players in the Fiesta segment.  In fact, if the Fiesta is just coming up on your radar screen this does little to position it.

What’s so baffling is that ad critics and creative columnists  have crowned pleasant but irrelevant spot with all kinds of creative plaudits.  It may even win some awards down the road. 

How out of touch these folks are just blows my mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mad Men Stories IV: "Clusterf**ks I have Known"

My friend Dick Clark, erstwhile art director and TV director who's seen it all, writes:  " We   didn’t know we were working in "The Golden Age of Advertising".  We just wanted to do "good", and most of us knew  it when we saw it.

But we were also aware of the “ritual dance”.

One I remember was painfully illustrative of what became known as the “creative clusterf**k”. It was one of those urgent, work-through-lunch exercises making print “roughs” for the truck division of a major automotive account.   I was “partnered” with a very bright copywriter named Charlie, a soft-spoken southerner with the self-mocking sense of humor that comes with confidence. I recollect being pleasantly surprised at how quickly we established a rhythm. We were cranking out “roughs” like a giant letter-sorter at the post office. A constant flow of full page magazine layouts began to paper the floor-to-ceiling cork board of my office.

 We were really humpin’ when  the phone rang. Charlie answered it. The caller was a junior account executive, a prototypical young New York ad man right out of a casting call for Mad Men. (They’ve gotten that part consistently right.) This kid had one of those voices which require the recipient of the call to hold the phone 6 to 8 inches from the ear.   I heard the whole conversation.

Charlie: “Clark’s office . . . Charlie here.”

Junior: “ Charlie! This is Brad! How you guys doin’?”

Charlie: “Well . . . we’re gainin’ on it. Got some stuff.”

Junior: “Terrific! More fuel for the fire, huh?   Got some world-beaters in there? Some break-throughs? Award winners?”

Charlie: “No. Mostly they’re pretty dull. Actually, a few are flat-out awful but one or two might be headed the right direction. We figure to hit ‘mediocre’ just  about dead center.”

Junior: “ . . . (very long pause) . . . Okay-y-y. See you at three.”  Click.

In fact, some of what we did that day became the theme of became a fairly durable campaign.

I don’t think the constant fight to raise creative standards we were continually waging has ever been the plot line for an episode of Mad Men.

Charlie and I said “Hi” a lot and had lunch a couple of times, but he moved on shortlyafter our “clusterf**k”. To Doyle, Dane, Bernbach as I recall.

 

 

 

Mad Men Stories III - Rank Hath Priviliges - More True Tales From Madison Avenue In The Days of The 3-Martini Lunch

 My first job out of grad school was  at J Walter Thompson Co in the Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Ave.  They gave me a battered Smith Corona, a ream of yellow paper, and I was a copywriter.  It wasn't long before I learned about pecking orders.

A very big suit had been imported from some lesser agency to work in the Ford group and pour oil on troubled waters in Dearborn.  JWT was quite a bankerly place then, and though there was in-fighting nobody’d seen anything like him.

We read a lot about “branding” one’s self these days.  What this big swinging d**k  did was have his assistant (they were called secretaries then) make a lunch reservation and then be sure she paged him at the restaurant - an accepted practice before cell phones and good for name recognition.  One day he called a meeting and nobody showed up.  He did not last long.

There was much movement of offices on the 10^th floor where we writers sat.  The furniture in one’s office was definitely a signal.  JWT had a large stash of antique chairs, desks, tables, etc., that had been collected  over the years by Mrs. Stanley Resor, the boss’s wife.  The most expensive stuff  was assigned to the big dogs.  The furniture wrangler at Thompson was a lady who always seemed to be rushing from one important assignment to the next.  Her name was Margaret Tempest and the furniture she kept constantly in motion was referred to as “tempest tossed.” 

After two years I moved up the street to Benton & Bowles, still a copywriter, but with more money and more responsibility.  The Margaret Tempest at B&B was named Anne Octaveck.  She moved at flank speed -  about twice as fast as Ms. Tempest. 

I landed there in an office facing 52^nd street, between Sam Miller and Ed McCabe, both journeyman copywriters like me.  I discovered that I’d played lacrosse in college against Sam.  Ed went on to greater things. 

Before long a move was decreed and I was sent to an office at the other end of the floor.  I felt I was moving up in the world, for though the window looked out on an air shaft I was many steps closer to the creative director's office.   One day, not long after I’d settled in,  Anne O. went streaking by my office,  glanced in and stopped dead in her tracks.  She stalked in and stared at the plain, ordinary, industrial strength table lamp on my desk.  “You can’t have that lamp,” she said.  “That’s a group head’s lamp.”  Whereupon she got to her knees, unplugged it and took it away, presumably to bestow it on someone who’d just been promoted.

You can’t make this stuff up.

 

 

Everyting I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Steve Jobs

 Ken  Segall and I had a long, chatty lunch a week or so ago.  Once upon a time Ken and I worked together at LGFE.  He’s been around tech advertising as a creative type for years - many of them spent working on Apple at Chiat Day.

            Jobs, he says, is passionate about keeping things simple - which dovetails in a way with a long ago lesson I learned from a New Yorker editor who, when I asked him what he did as an editor, replied “It’s very simple.”  “I am a surrogate for the reader.”  His job, in other words, was be sure that ideas, no matter how complicated, were easily understood.  He was a sort of customer advocate who made things simple, as Apple has been striving to make computing simple for as long as I can remember.

            Back in the era of green screens and DOS prompts, Apple borrowed the icons that had been developed at Xerox PARC and introduced them on Macintosh in 1984.  Suddenly using a personal computer became hugely simpler.  Microsoft saw the light and went to work developing Windows.

Mad Men Stories : #3 - Something Fishy at Doyle Graf Mabley

Neil Gluckin, former agency type, wrote recently:  In some agencies, the “fish tank” was an open space where people sat at desks with no privacy. At Doyle Graf Mabley, the small agency where I worked in the frenzied 1980s, the fish tank was literal: a good-sized tank for tropical fish equipped with a miniature diver and treasure chest, swaying plants, a  gurgling pump and four actual fish, two red and two black.   The tank was placed in the office of the book-keeper/office manager, a hard-as-nails type I'll call Jane, who referred to her home, Staten Island, as the Mother Country.   DGM's owner told Jane that feeding the fish every day was part of her job. Jane demurred, saying that she had no intention of feeding those f*****g fish. The owner, who had fresh red carnations delivered to his office every Monday morning, laughed at Jane's cheekiness and went off to check his tie in the mirror.

Jane kept her word, refraining  from sprinkling even one orange, brown or violet flake of fish food into the bubbling tank. Every two weeks or so, the fish went belly up. Whereupon the owner would laugh and send his chauffeur to a nearby tropical fish store to buy four more.

Mad Men Stories: #2 Another Brilliant Ad by Accident

Bruce Richter, a former LGFE colleague writes: 

Your "Ads By Accident" story reminded me of a Perdue Chicken ad Amy Schottenfels and I did way back at Scali [McCabe & Sloves]. We were working on a campaign for something entirely different one weekend and all we kept hearing from the guys in the bullpen across the hall was, "Where's the beef?", "Where's the beef?", "Where's the beef?" You remember the phenomenon.  [ The Wendy’s commercial that made Clara Peller a household name for at least one Clio season]. And finally one of us just yelled out, "Who gives a sh*t where the beef is!" We looked at each other, threw Frank's face on a page, stuck his name under the edited quote (didn’t even include the logo), and on Monday showed it to Ed McCabe who made it happen practically overnight.