From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  I was down in Charlotte, North Carolina, one time to make a speech and I sat next to a guy who said, ‘Remember when you did that ad for Esquire Sox?’ I didn’t even remember ever working on Esquire Sox, much less the ad the guy was talking about, but this guy wouldn’t let up: ‘Don’t you remember the ad? There’s a man in the ad who is talking and the girl is standing in the background …’ And then the ad came back to me. But this guy had like literally collected these things and was following me, and it’s crazy but I’m a scrapbook someplace in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  A friend of mine once went out to Cleveland to make a speech and when he came back he called me and said, ‘There’s a guy in Cleveland who knows more about you than your wife.’ He mentioned the guy’s name and of course I’d never heard of him, and my friend says the guy from Cleveland has a scrapbook on me with every ad I ever wrote, every speech I ever made, and every advertising column I ever wrote for Marketing/Communications. This is the out-of-town story.

  The standard word around Madison Avenue is that the out-of-towners love to be put down. If you want to make a speech out of town you’ve got to tell them that they’re no good. If you ever tell them that they’re good, they’ll hate you for it. They really sit there waiting for you to come in and say, ‘Boy, are you guys bad. I mean, are you bad. You know, in New York none of you would ever get a job.’ And they sit there and say, ‘Yeah, that’s New York advertising talking.’ It’s crazy.

  In Los Angeles, the guy they’ve promoted to sainthood is Gene Case. Case is a beautiful, beautiful writer who recently formed his own agency with another beauty, Helmut Crone, an art director. Case had worked at Jack Tinker & Partners and Crone was from Doyle, Dane.

  Case is invited out to the Coast to make a speech, and they pick him up at the airport. They’re driving away from the airport on their way to get a drink or something and Case is looking out of the window as they drive in. If you’ve ever driven in on Sepulveda Boulevard, you know it is not much to look at. Anyhow, Case makes the speech and immediately he says, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to fly out of this town, I hate it.’ The L. A. guys are looking at Case as if he’s crazy. They want to take him out to dinner. But he’s insisting that they take him back to the airport, he’s had his look at L. A., and he’s had enough. He says to them, ‘I know this place. I used to present to the Carnation Milk account out here when I worked for Jack Tinker, and they were always nasty to me. I can’t stand this town. You’ve got to take me to the airport.’ So they shake their heads, bundle Case back on a plane to New York and today. he’s a legend out there. ‘Gene Case, wasn’t he fantastic?’ they say. Case, of course, produced the ultimate putdown.

  It’s nice – out of town. A different kind of advertising. It’s a slower and much easier life because, let’s face it, where could you be banished to if you’re working in Cleveland? I mean, where could they send you? Akron? In New York, you could always wind up in Cleveland, but like in Cleveland there’s nothing worse. So the people don’t have the same fears. They don’t have the same salaries, either. They don’t have the same relationships with clients. It’s not advertising the way I know it. In New York you have real stars – copy guys, art directors, creative people, television directors – who are good and they know it. Some of these creative people command higher salaries than the president of an agency in Cleveland might get. There is an emphasis on the creative guy in New York. Agencies put up with the craziness to get the creative. There’s no creativity in Cleveland, very little originality.

  It’s a whole different game. It’s maybe advertising the way it used to be in 1942. The president of the agency still gets out on the golf course and plays with his client, the president of Acme Steel. The president of the agency lives very well and the rest of the people in the agency are just working people. They don’t make big salaries. There are no glamour people in, say, Cleveland. There’s nobody sitting in Cleveland saying, ‘I want to be like somebody else in Cleveland.’ They live vicariously and get their glamour from New York.

  Cleveland will eventually change. The creative revolution will eventually get there. In New York, advertising is changing drastically and rapidly. Creative people are getting more clout. It is a provable fact that the so-called creative agencies are the ones that are growing the fastest. But I also have the feeling that life for the creative side of an agency will always be tough. Now you’ve got creative review boards made up of red noses and blue veins. Who knows? In twenty years perhaps pot will be legalized. It depresses me to think that in twenty years there still will be creative review boards, except that the board will not be made up of red noses. Instead, you’ll have a bunch of old guys with very funny pupils looking at your work. A bunch of dilated pupils checking you out. That kind of nonsense will never change.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  THE

  JOLLY

  GREEN

  GIANT

  AND

  OTHER

  STORIES

  ‘There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster … All the great advertising in the world can never straighten out the stewardess who wakes up cranky one morning. There is nothing in the world an agency can do about the gas station attendant in One Horse Stand, Nebraska, who has a hangover …’

  I don’t want to give the impression that the new creative agencies can do no wrong. They can do plenty of wrong, and in fact they can do so much wrong they can blow the whole thing. Creative or not.

  Several years ago two guys got together to form a new agency. They planned the agency along the lines of William Esty. Now William Esty is a very successful agency. It must bill somewhere in the neighborhood of $140 million a year, which is good billing. And William Esty has a very shrewd concept: Don’t take on a lot of accounts, just a few high-ticket, very large accounts. I think Esty has Sun Oil, Colgate, National Biscuit, American Home Products, Hunt-Wesson and only a few others. They can’t have more than ten or fifteen accounts, but all of them bill very high. Esty supposedly has the fewest number of employees for the number of accounts of any agency in town. You’re supposed to have something like eight employees for every $1 million in billing. Esty handles their accounts with maybe six employees for every $1 million. It is a very efficiently run agency, beautifully handled, and they can’t lose. They make nothing but money at Esty. They don’t care for too much publicity at Esty; all they want to do is their job – and count the dollars.

  They hold onto their accounts because with that small a number you really pay a lot of attention to them. Figure it out: the president has maybe ten or eleven guys to worry about each day – the chairman of the boards of the various accounts. He can make ten or eleven calls a day to see how his accounts are, he can have lunch with each chairman of the board in the space of two weeks. Esty pays a lot of attention to their accounts and they make sure their accounts are happy. And, believe me, they are.

  Anyhow, let’s get back to the two guys who formed that other agency a few years ago, and let’s call them Manny and Moe. The first year Manny and Moe began they had zero billing and then they got hot. At the end of the first year they had $6 million in billing, and they added a little bit to that the second year. During the third year they really got hot – they got so hot their billing went up to like $20 million. The fourth year they must have hit $40 million. Well, they hit their high of $40 million, and then they died, absolutely died. They managed to lose more business than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. It got so you couldn’t pick up Phil Dougherty’s column in The Times without reading of another client leaving Manny and Moe.

  When Manny and Moe set up their agency along the lines of Esty, they said to themselves, ‘We’ll load ourselves up with some high-ticket accounts and we’ll coin money.’ They forgot one thing. These people come – and go, too. It is very hard to keep a long-lasting relationship with an accoun
t when you are bored with it. And they blew it all because they got bored. Manny decided he was going to save the world, which is O. K. if your business is good. Moe decided he was going to beat the horses, which is even tougher than saving the world.

  Manny got very interested in gun control and political campaigns. That was good. But you’ve got to be careful. There are guys running around Madison Avenue who also have guns and they are always trying to knock you off. You might be an account sitting out in the waiting room with a hell of a problem, and you’re looking for Manny. When you gave them the account, they promised you Manny would be working on it. Where’s Manny? Well, right now Manny is out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, working on a political campaign for a guy who’s running for sewer commissioner of Jackson Hole. Manny thinks this guy has a future in politics, and he’s trying to make him into something much bigger than the sewer commissioner. Terrific, except if you’re a client and you want to see Manny you’ve got to figure out how to get to Wyoming.

  Where’s Moe? Well, Moe is studying the racing form, and when Moe starts handicapping the fifth at Belmont it can get a little confusing. Moe may have been the only agency president in America who would show up at meetings with binoculars around his neck. He became so track-oriented that he didn’t know what was going on at his own agency. A media guy would come in to Moe and ask him, ‘Where are we going to spend this million dollars from the client?’ Moe would say, ‘How many furlongs?’

  And there was no management. They hired a guy to be president but he was nothing but a caretaker. Manny was out saving the world through advertising, and Moe was out at the track every day losing his shirt. Clients were being left out in the halls waiting to see somebody. They used to wait hours. Creative people used to take them into their offices and give them coffee while they were waiting. Clients are human and finally they got to the point where they started telling Manny and Moe, ‘Screw you. I mean your advertising isn’t even good any more, and who needs all the abuse?’ The agency folded a couple of years ago.

  All of the newer agencies blow something now and then. Even the guys at Doyle, Dane. A couple of years ago they did a campaign for a new beer out by the Rheingold Brewery people – the new stuff was called Gablinger’s Beer. The thing about Gablinger’s was that it was very low in calories, and the thought was, ‘We’ll sell this to all those guys who drink beer and want to lose weight.’

  Somewhere, somehow, they blew it. Somebody in research made the first mistake, which was thinking that beer drinkers wanted to lose weight while drinking beer. Not true. Twenty percent of the people in this country who buy beer drink about 80 percent of all the beer consumed. I have an image in my mind of your typical beer drinker: the man never has a shirt on. He’s always in his undershirt, one of those old-fashioned undershirts, not a tee shirt. I may be wrong there, but I could swear that your typical beer drinker is proud of his beer belly. There he is, swilling beer all day long, and the only thing he has to show for it is his belly. It’s his sign of masculinity.

  Now, you have a great example of one error compounding another error compounding still another error. So the first error – thinking that these guys want to lose weight – leads to the second error, which is that you can build a campaign on this attitude and spend $5 million and tie up the whole beer market because all of these beer people want to lose weight. Campaigns will work only if the initial premise is true. But it’s like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: the first brick was crooked and after that everything started going sideways, and you wind up with a fucking silly-looking building or you wind up with a pretty terrible campaign. Since the first premise in Gablinger’s case was wrong, the thing went bad all up and down the line. Beer drinkers want to be fat. They love to watch their bellies. Figure it out: they like looking at their bellies because they never see their feet. Go into the bars right now. These guys start drinking at nine o’clock in the morning – and they have their more than one by 9:05 a.m. And they drink and they drink and drink and drink, and this is the beer market.

  The only thing you have to worry about in selling beer is to give these guys enough time to waste. I mean, don’t give these guys anything to do in which they have to use their hands, other than bowling. Bowling is O. K. because all they have to do is get up every seven minutes or so and roll a ball and then sit down as fast as they can and start drinking beer again.

  Beer companies shouldn’t sponsor golf matches because golf is death on a beer drinker. If you’re out on the fourteenth hole, you can’t have a beer unless you throw away the clubs and lug beer around instead. Just find enough leisure time for the beer drinkers, that’s your only worry. Leisure time, in a beer drinker’s mind, means all they have to do is reach for a glass or for a bottle. Maybe they’ll have to get up from the television set and go to the refrigerator, but that’s it. Your real beer drinker can sit home watching television and polish off two six-packs a night. If he’s thirsty, or it’s hot out, make that even more. His wife will drink only four or five cans because she’s suddenly decided that she really shouldn’t drink more than a six-pack a night – it won’t look good. So you’ve got like three six-packs a family a night. And you can count their kid in if he’s over ten years old.

  Look at these people at the supermarket. They’re pushing market baskets piled high with beer, a couple of packages of hot dogs, and that’s it. Eighteen cans of beer a night except on Friday, which is party night when they switch to a clean undershirt. And on Friday you’ve got to figure that the guy is going to double his weekday consumption.

  I went to a Yankee game one night last year and there was a real beer drinker in front of me, the genuine thing. I was watching him, and he made the night for the kid selling beer. He stopped once for peanuts, but that was a mistake because he didn’t finish them. He knocked the beer off just like pills – I swear he must have drunk ten or twelve cans during that nine-inning game. He didn’t get up for the seventh-inning stretch, which doesn’t indicate that he wasn’t a Yankee fan. It was simply a matter that his legs weren’t moving too good at the time. There he was, sitting and drinking, and when the game was over he showed that he was a true fan. I got up to leave and he was still sitting there. Sitting there and looking out at the field, but he was staring straight ahead. A real beer drinker, with a real beer belly. Now you know if I had come up to him after the game and said, ‘Hey, buddy, do you know you just knocked off three thousand calories in all that beer? Why don’t you switch to something that won’t make you fat?’ – do you know what he would have done? He would have punched me in the mouth – that is, if he could have gotten his hands free.

  Now it is theoretically possible to sell Gablinger’s Beer. It’s a good idea, but not for Bohack, or A & P, or Piggly Wiggly. You sell it to Gristede’s because it’s a carriage-trade product. The lady who shops in Gristede’s might pick up one six-pack because she likes the notion that it’s low on calories.

  The beer business is very strange. Go into Costello’s, which is an old-time bar on Third Avenue in New York – go into there any night and pick the guy who has just staggered out of the men’s room and is trying to climb back on his bar stool. Go up to this cat and ask him what he thinks of Rheingold Beer. He doesn’t know zip about Rheingold Beer but he’ll focus his eyes and swear to you that Maureen Harrington got cheated out of winning the Miss Rheingold contest back in 1961 because a lot of votes for the girl named Beverly came in from Brooklyn on the last day of the contest. You think I’m kidding? There are guys in New York who went into mourning the day they discontinued the contest in 1965.

  Interesting thing about the contest. One of the marketing geniuses behind the campaign was supposedly trying to make it with almost every Miss Rheingold who came down the pike. That is one hell of a lot of Miss Rheingolds. But practically every one of them. And this marketing genius one day woke up and couldn’t feel his legs. So he went to Europe to dry out. I mean, he’s probably thirty-three or thirty-four now, but he can’t walk. He’s sitting there in
his wheelchair with a little gray shawl over his legs and one hell of a lot of memories. He got tired of the contest. Bored. It can happen; he’s entitled. So Rheingold went to Doyle, Dane and they produced those ethnic commercials – Doyle, Dane, let’s face it, does not have a stunning beer record in New York City.

  The ethnic commercials were beautifully done. Not only did they not sell beer; they antagonized a lot of people. Let’s say our beer drinker is an Italian. They had an Italian commercial with a lot of people running around and dancing and saying ‘Mamma mia’ and things like that, and during the commercial the Italian beer drinker was very happy. He had a nice warm feeling for Rheingold. Then, one day he’s watching television and a group of Poles show up dancing a polka and carrying on a lot. This drives the Italian up the wall. He says, ‘I won’t touch the same beer those lousy Poles are drinking.’ They had a Jewish commercial, they had Germans, they had the Irish, they even had a Negro blues singer surrounded by a bunch of guys who today would be identified as Black Panthers. They had everybody but the WASPs, and everybody knows WASPs don’t know from beer. Instead of getting everybody together in the spirit of good fellowship and all that jazz, they blew the campaign because all of the groups really hated each other.

  Beer advertising can be very tricky. Young & Rubicam turned out some terrific ads on Bert and Harry Piel, the Piel Brothers. Everybody liked Bert and Harry, all the intellectuals loved them. Good old Bert and Harry: they laughed at the product, they had fun. The big mistake with that campaign was that it got people to taste Piel’s Beer. A guy would take one sip of it and say, ‘Screw Bert and Harry, like they were a lot of fun and I like to look at them on the late news but they’re not going to make me drink this stuff.’ It’s a case of ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,’ especially if he’s tried the stream once and it tastes terrible. And that was it. Bert and Harry never came back.