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.   

 

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? 

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.

Random Acts of Blindness

Why do I get the feeling that the marketers I deal with wear blindfolds, like kids playing pin the tail on the donkey?  

The letter I got from my Volvo dealer last week says it all.  His database wanted to be sure everything was going swimmingly with the wagon I bought a few years ago.  But his database (who I’ve never met) had no way of knowing that I haven’t owned that Volvo in years. 

The same week someone from BMW sent a letter wishing me happy birthday.  The BMW is long gone, too.

I wonder why these geniuses don’t ask some of the sales people, who sit around waiting to ignore the next person who walks through the showroom door, to man the phones.  Call customers.  Have a conversation.  Build a relationship.    

Last week’s mail also brought a ‘personalized’ letter from an audiologist.  Someone had sold him a list of generation H (hearing aid) types.  The letter promised benefits that would “greatly effect (sic) my life”.   (When I typed the previous sentence even my grammar checker caught the mistake),

These letters don’t build relationships.  What’s more they really piss me off.

They make the senders look stupid, too.  And the underlying premise, that they can save money giving a human being’s job to a computer, is highly questionable. 

Computers have zero street smarts.  They’re great at crunching numbers but not much good at building relationships.   After 50 years of intensive work, the artificial intelligence community will tell you there’s still no computer that can recognize you when you walk into the room – much less judge your mood by your expression, tone of voice, etc. – signs that human beings decode very well.

People are expensive, I suppose.  But so are :30 TV spots, NASCAR sponsorships, Catalog mailings, Customer Relationship Management applications and other methods designed to win friends and influence people.

I am not a Luddite.  I’ve been using PC’s  for 30 years and I am lost without my Mac.  But I find people delegating tasks to computers that defy common sense.

Isn’t it curious that the best internet marketers are also the ones who best understand how to involve people in the process of dealing with customers.   More about them in my upcoming series “Heroes of the Internet”

 

 

Remember Howard Zieff?

Howard died the other day after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.  I got to know him through my pal of 40 years, Dick Clark who worked for him as an assistant, collaborator, court jester, and sometime actor  (Dick was the voice-over in the unforgettable Alka-Seltzer commercial, “Spicy Meatball’ and ultimately became his rep).

In every one of the half dozen obits I’ve read (they’re all over the Internet) I’ve been struck by the raves for work he did 40 years ago (before inline skates, PC’s, iPods, the internet, or Miller Lite)  The half-life of outstanding advertising never ceases to amaze me.   

The Alka-Seltzer spot dates to 1970.  The Levy’s rye bread posters came earlier.  But none of the articles mentioned the posters he did for The New York Daily News (below) that established his reputation. The Daily News pictures didn’t need a headline - or copy for that matter.  The whole story, including dialog, was wrapped up in a photograph - like a Norman Rockwell illustration on film.  They campaign was done in the ‘50s, years before the ‘creative revolution’ of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

Today it’s hard to realize how unique Howard’s vision was.  But if you can find an copy of LIFE from that era you'll get some idea.  The models in the advertising are right out of  “The Stepford Wives”.  Their pefect faces are wreathed in perfect smiles.  Their perfect bodies are perfectly groomed and dressed.  Howard broke that mold.  The pictures he took were populated with real people who made the advertising authentic in the same way headlines like “Lemon”  did for VW.  

His pictures had a sense of humor that’s missing in most advertising today.  The light touch, the result of exquisite casting and meticulously set ups - well - the ad just made you smile and feel good.  

There’s a new series about advertising on TNT called “Trust Me” and in last week’s episode the creative heros   

spent the hour scheming to get a high-powered director to film their spot.  In Howard’s prime, when an ordinary director’s job was to ‘shoot the board' as written, he was the first of the directors people schemed to get.  He picked the boards he wanted to shoot, and the fact that he’d take your job (at twice what you’d pay elsewhere) was an affirmation of your concept and a promise that the client was going to get a whole lot more commercial than he’d bargained for.  

Years after the creative revolution was put to bed  a hand full of writers, art directors, and agencies get credit for the work.  Howard left Madison Avenue at the top of his game, and went off to Hollywood and film career.  As a result, I think he gets much less credit than deserved for his influence on the advertising revolution 

 

OK, so a priest, a rabbi, and a copywriter walk into a bar…

Eric Silver, whose resume says he once wrote for David Letterman and also includes reference to some ‘slapstick’ work for Miller Lite, has just gone over to DDB as the creative big cheese, replacing Lee Garfinkel, who himself had a fling at stand-up comedy and has his fingerprints all over some light, amusing advertising, including work for Subaru and Pepsi.      

Having recently read Ken Roman’s bio of David Ogilvy, (one of my 'must reads in the column at right)  this changing of guard started me thinking about the use of humor in advertising, which Ogilvy hated with passion.  Perhaps because his medium was print, while funny ads are almost exclusively the province of television and radio, which have been driven from their beginnings by entertainment.

While I love a good laugh  I approach the subject of funny ads with trepidation.

Humor is a dangerous weapon in the hands of creative people - not unlike an AK-7 in the hands of a 10-year-old.  It can polarize an audience (believe it or not, some people don’t think Groucho is funny!).  Often it gains attention at the expense of what’s being advertised.   Friend Julie, a bundle of laughs in her own right, said when I asked her,  “I love funny commercials but rarely remember what the product is.”   That’s the problem.

And in truth, a lot of stuff that’s supposed to send you giggling all the way to the check-out counter is just lame.  Being funny takes extraordinary talent and is desperately hard work.   There’s a reason Jack Benny had writers.

We once hired John Cleese (Basil Fawlty, above) to do a radio campaign for Callard & Bowser candy.   John is serious about his nutso comedy – a and thoughtful person.  On top of that, he is a delight to work with if you play by the rules, and he made the rules quite clear   He was ready and willing to receive all the marketing wisdom we could supply.  “But please don’t try to tell me what’s funny”, he said.   The spots turned out to be a huge hit.   Leaving ‘funny’ to the pros is a big idea.

Steve Martin, and SNL aside, America doesn’t have a well-developed funny bone, either.   The Brits do humor in advertising so much better than we do.  Ditto the Aussies, Kiwi’s, and Scandinavians, etc.  Years ago I played a reel of humorous spots from around the world for a seminar I was teaching at Michigan State.  The class loved the commercials.  The more outrageous they were, the more the kids laughed.  But when I asked them why we don’t produce work of that caliber in America they said “we’re actually a  pretty conservative country”.  The work made them laugh but culturally it made them uncomfortable.  I suspect the funny stuff works better on the coasts than in the interior.

 The Tramp commercials we did for IBM taught me another lesson about humor.  The spots were big productions that put Billy Scudder, who played the Tramp, into situations where the PC always saved his bacon.  Corny as these little play-lets were, people loved them.  They liked them so much that when we researched the spots viewers actually played back copy points that weren’t even in the mentioned in the commercials.    

Julie’s brother Brian, who makes funny radio spots for a living put it another way.  “A funny spot can make you laugh many times, so when you hear the advertising message, you get a laugh. That makes listeners feel good about the advertiser and makes them more open to the product or service being sold... I'm more open to (humorous spots) than someone who is beating their chest and talking about how great they are.”

The real power of humor in advertising is that it  lowers the audiences’ defenses and humanizes big faceless companies.   The unspoken message is “we don’t take ourselves too seriously around here – we’re regular fellas just like you”.    The stiff collar, authoritarian voice that’s told us to color inside the lines all our lives is silenced.  

Bottom line:  if you can laugh at yourself  and avoid getting lost looking for laughs, you could make some friends and grab some market share.   Ogilvy might disagree, but I think that Bernbach and friends would be in my corner.