The Art of Einstein

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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. 

 

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.

 

 

 

Warning! Brand terrorists at work!

I could not believe my eyes the first time I saw this.

Some genius over at GM gave one of his co-conspirators the go-ahead to punch a hole in the middle of the Chevy bowtie logo, stick a trunk lock in it, and slap it on the rear deck of a Chevy Cavalier.  What can these people be thinking?

The hole in the Chevy bowtie is a sign of what’s been wrong at GM and a lot of other companies for a long time.