From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  As far as I’m concerned, the best beer advertising today is Schaefer’s. It really gets to the beer drinkers; it has a very simple, very meaningful message for the real drinkers. ‘The one beer to have when you’re having more than one.’ Boy, does that message come across to those guys. They really understand it. Wow! And the guy grabs another can of beer. What a red flag that line is! Here I am, having more than one. As a matter of fact, I’m having seventeen at one sitting, and my eyes are getting glassy. And Schaefer is the only beer that will make me feel great when this binge is all over.

  Schaefer is done by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne. They’re an agency that hasn’t distinguished itself for much other than Schaefer, Pepsi-Cola, Dodge, and Chiquita Banana. (But they were brilliant with Chiquita Banana. They sold bananas without laughing. They gave the banana an identity and, you know, they literally made banana history. I mean, you never see any other banana commercials, do you?) It’s an interesting thing when a good campaign comes out – there usually are a hundred guys who take credit for it. I know of at least nine guys who modestly say they came up with the line about the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. A number of friends of mine at B.B.D. O. tell me that a guy named Jim Jordan, who is a creative director, is the guy who did the campaign.

  Compare the Schaefer campaign with the Ballantine Beer campaign created by Stan Freberg – the campaign using the takeoff on Portnoy’s Complaint, except they call it ‘Ballantine’s Complaint.’ Very cute stuff but it falls into that trap of having the wrong initial premise: How many beer drinkers have read Portnoy’s Complaint? Forget the book. How many beer drinkers can read? One of the commercials shows a guy named Ballantine lying on a shrink’s couch complaining about how he left the brewery in the hands of his family while he went on a trip and the family loused up the beer. How many beer drinkers give a goddamn if Ballantine had a problem with his family? How many beer drinkers have ever been to a shrink? How many of them ever heard of Philip Roth? As far as they’re concerned, that beer is off the books. They might have had a can of Ballantine at a ball game once, and that’s it. They won’t drink Ballantine for anybody any more. These guys know where they’re understood and loved – and I mean loved: Schaefer.

  Rheingold nowadays is doing things with ten-minute heads. Nonsense. There isn’t a beer drinker alive who will sit and watch the head on his beer disappear in ten minutes, timed, by the way, with a stopwatch. Your beer drinker figures he can put two and a half beers away in ten minutes, forget about your head.

  Pabst Blue Ribbon does nice commercials with a nostalgic twist – usually a bunch of people in straw hats at a picnic. But I’m convinced that the only kind of nostalgia that will sell beer is a guy standing in a bar saying, ‘Hey, let’s have a beer for good old Joe DiMaggio. And hey, what about Dixie Walker? And now let’s have one for Carl Furillo.’ Nostalgia is not a bunch of guys clowning around at an old-timey picnic. Nostalgia is Joe D. picking one off in center field. That’s what nostalgia is all about for the beer drinker.

  The last figures I looked at for beer sales showed Schaefer climbing out of sight. Budweiser is still the biggest-selling beer in the country. But their sales aren’t climbing the way Schaefer’s are. They’ve tried a number of campaigns and a bunch of commercials. So they’ve got their horses schlepping, and that’s O. K. if you like horses, which I don’t happen to. The best commercial of theirs I’ve seen lately has Ed McMahon, who is a great guy to sell beer, standing there and saying, ‘Folks, it’s that time you’ve all been waiting for. It’s time to pick up two packs of Bud.’ There is no particular reason why a guy should pick up two instead of one, but it gives a lot of beer drinkers inspiration. And these drinkers are usually pretty short of inspiration. So they say to themselves, ‘Gee, you’re right, Ed, I should have picked up two instead of one.’ So people are buying double. You don’t save any money. They just tell you this is the time of year you’ve got to buy two of them rather than one.

  Bud does very well – and Schaefer – but that’s about it. Not long ago Jack Tinker did a campaign for Carling’s Black Label, which said that we have our breweries close to every city so our beer is always fresh. They were trying to sell quality to these guys. Fresh as opposed to stale. Beer drinkers know the difference in quality. They know what stale beer is: it’s what they taste in their mouth the next morning when they wake up. They know that taste well, but they wouldn’t buy Carling’s because it’s fresh. So the campaign bombed out.

  Although Doyle, Dane is so-so with beer, they’re absolutely great on hard booze. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because most of the guys working at Doyle, Dane drink only hard booze and couldn’t care less about beer. They took a perfectly ordinary scotch, Chivas Regal, and upgraded it, gave it snob appeal. They convinced people to trade up in booze so that when somebody spent $7.50 for a fifth of Chivas Regal he was convinced that the booze was worth it. The ads they did for Chivas were beautifully designed – elegant. Another great booze campaign of theirs, which was done by Ron Rosenfeld, was the Calvert’s ‘soft whiskey’ line. To this day I don’t know what the hell ‘soft whiskey’ means, but it evidently meant something to the guys who were pouring rotgut down their throats, because ‘soft whiskey’ sold like hell.

  The worst idea for a booze campaign that I can remember was the one put out several years ago by Schenley’s. A marketing executive at Schenley insisted that their agency have a mascot, and the mascot was named Sunny the Rooster. Sunny the Rooster was supposed to equal that sunny morning flavor. The marketing executive was convinced that if he could tell people that they wouldn’t be hung over and feel like dogs the next day he could sell a lot of booze. What they were trying to say – and couldn’t – was, ‘Listen, buddy, if you drink our booze you’ll never wake up having to look in your wallet to find out who you are and all that kind of nonsense. You drink our stuff and you’ll be perfectly all right.’

  What they did was to hang about seven agencies with Sunny the Rooster. So there you have seven agencies trying to come up with a campaign built around that sunny morning flavor and feeling. They turned out Sunny the Roosters galore. Thank God, the campaign never ran. Nobody came up with anything that was halfway decent. Nobody knew whether the agencies they tried were bad or whether Sunny the Rooster was just another crazy notion who should have had his head chopped off early in the game. A lot of guys spent a lot of money on Sunny.

  Sometimes great campaigns work, bring in the customers, but then there are other things happening that kill you. Ed McCabe, who now has his own agency of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, used to work at Carl Ally. Ed McCabe is maybe one of the five top writers in town. He did the Horn & Hardart campaign when he was at Ally, and it was great. It was so great that it reached all kinds of people – including a girl I’ll call Betty-Sue. Now Betty-Sue comes to New York from Kneejerk, North Carolina, and she goes to work for Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller when I was working there. Betty-Sue is a terrific kid except she had a little problem with the English language – she couldn’t speak it. That is, she spoke but you couldn’t understand her. One Monday morning she comes up to me and she says, ‘Jer, I bin reading those Horn and Hardart ads, the ones which say “It May Not Be Fancy but It’s Good.” I said, ‘What’d you say, Betty-Sue?’ She said, ‘Bin reading the Horn and Hardart ads, “It May Not Be.” ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you’ve been reading the Horn and Hardart ads?’

  She said, ‘And I decided to go to Horn and Hardart, and I had some of their beans and the beans were gooooood, and I had some lemonmrang pah and it was gooooood, and then I had some coffee and it was gooooood. And then the man sitting across the way exposed himself.’

  Unfortunately, this was one of the problems that Ed McCabe faced. He could come up with the selling line that reached a Betty-Sue, but he couldn’t go around and take care of the occasional guy who was walking into Horn & Hardart wearing a raincoat and making quick flashes. But the guy wrote a classic line that sold and got a lot of people to come to Ho
rn & Hardart.

  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. There have been some cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.

  Let’s take the airlines again. They have great advertising and the problem is, planes get stacked up, the air-traffic controllers are either walking out on strike or threatening to walk out, you can sit on the ground at La Guardia Airport for two hours trying to get out of town, and what sometimes happens to baggage shouldn’t happen to a dog. The airlines that don’t have service which lives up to the advertising have trouble. The greatest living commercial of all time for Mohawk Airlines will not get me on a Mohawk plane. Let me change to an airline that’s a lot larger: the greatest United Airlines commercial of all time will have trouble convincing me to fly United. I’ll get on a United plane only if it’s like the only airline going at the moment; I don’t like to fly United because they once did a job on my baggage that you wouldn’t believe. Fortunately this kind of foul-up is on the ground.

  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. An agency can try to help with better dealer programs. Maybe. Or take TWA. They obviously felt that this customerrelation problem was enough of a headache to go out and run a campaign offering a million dollars in bonuses to its employees for being nice and polite.

  The TWA campaign was excellent. First of all, the million dollars in prizes going to the nice TWA people comes out of the advertising budget. This is absolutely nothing when you’re spending something in the neighborhood of $20 million. Second, the campaign probably cheers up these people working for TWA; it makes me feel that the people are going to be working harder.

  Wells, Rich, Greene is doing the TWA campaign and it’s interesting because the same campaign was to be presented to Avis, but they never saw it. An art director at Doyle, Dane came up with the campaign, the idea being that he was going to spend less money on advertising and more money in getting the Avis people to work. They’d give out bonuses and so forth. But the campaign never got out of the agency to be shown to Avis. The art director who had the idea was not the top art director on the account so the notion was kind of pushed off to the side. Mary Wells had the same idea and turned it into a multimillion-dollar campaign.

  The idea has to work. It’s just too good not to. It’s got all the elements of a good campaign: it’s amusing, it’s got a good commercial situation around it and it gives people a reason why they can expect good service on TWA. You can’t help but think something good is going to happen on TWA the next time you fly with them. And you’ve got the best of all possible worlds when you get your employees to back up your campaign. Forget all that crap about wearing little buttons. Here your employee is actually taking part in the campaign, and when the employees of a service organization feel they’re important, it’s everything. If you can get somebody at TWA to smile and act pleasant just because it’s part of this whole thing and she feels like she’s part of something, you’ve got a great campaign going for you.

  Great campaigns that reach down to the employees of an organization are very rare. ‘We Want You to Live’ from Mobil reaches all the way down. Avis and Hertz do, too. When Avis said, ‘We’re number 2, we try harder,’ the people who worked for Avis responded very well. Research was done at the time, and it showed that the Hertz people were actually affected by the Avis campaign. They found that the Hertz employees were feeling low and deflated. Here Avis is jabbing away at them, and the company they work for is running commercials showing a crazy guy who flies into the front seat of a convertible. Norman, Craig & Kummel were the inventors of that flying fruitcake, and when Avis started hammering away, Hertz pulled the account out of Norman, Craig and gave it to Carl Ally. It wasn’t that easy for Ally, either. He had to come up with what essentially is a very unpopular notion: taking on a guy head to head who admits he is second. And of course he also had the employee problem as well. The Hertz people felt rotten, and here was this aggressive young competitor coming up on the outside.

  What Doyle, Dane had done for Avis was take a concept that had been around for years: You know, we’re not as big as the next guy but we do a lot more. Nobody had ever quite crystallized this concept into ‘We’re number 2, We Try Harder.’ I’ve done ads for Univac that said basically the same thing, trying to use the notion of Univac versus IBM, but not as well. Everybody’s always got a situation where they’re second but nobody had ever come right out and said it point-blank. And that’s the difference between a so-so campaign and a great campaign.

  In my opinion, one of the agencies that consistently produces superior campaigns is Leo Burnett. The interesting thing about Leo Burnett is, first of all, he must be seventy-five years old. So immediately he’s not some long-haired kid. Second, his agency is in Chicago, and Chicago is really not major league. What makes him so brilliant is that he’s got his roots in the Middle West. He’s an ex-newspaperman and he really knows the people, he knows how people think, and he knows what makes people go. He produces very simple advertising, so simple that it’s deceptive. You almost think it isn’t good. It isn’t sophisticated, and it doesn’t make you laugh. But boy, it sells goods.

  Burnett is the agency that figured out a way to sell vegetables: they invented this green eunuch called the Jolly Green Giant. The giant stands for great quality and he comes from the Valley of the Green Giant and the people look at this big green guy and figure, ‘Gee, it’s got to be good stuff.’ And they buy. Who knows what the Green Giant stands for? Maybe because he’s so big he means quality. If I had a product to market in the Middle West, I would go right to Burnett. Burnett even tells people what a corny agency he has, but he’s not corny. He is a very brilliant man. That big green son of a bitch, that Jolly Green Giant, is fantastic. He sells beans, corn, peas, everything. When you watch the Jolly Green Giant, you know it’s fantasy and yet you buy the product. Do you know what Libby does? I don’t. Do you know what other food advertising is? I don’t. Most food advertising is like gone by the boards, you don’t even see it. But the Jolly Green Giant, it’s been automatic success when he’s on that screen.

  For years Marlboro cigarettes had a selling line something like ‘escape from the commonplace.’ The advertising was fourth-rate. Burnett got his hand on Marlboro and went out and signed up a bunch of very masculine, very rugged guys and did a great campaign about the Marlboro Man. Now most of these were genuine rugged guys, not masculine-looking fags. He sold the daylights out of Marlboro. Then he switches from the Marlboro Man to Marlboro Country. Everything Burnett touches works. It’s not the way I might do it, but boy, it sells the hell out of the product. Marlboro is now ranked around third of all the cigarettes in the country.

  Burnett has a knack for finding a category of people to sell a product to. Another example is Virginia Slims cigarettes. Burnett decided to direct his pitch to one group – the liberated woman. This doesn’t mean that other groups won’t be influenced, but the direct appeal of his message is to only one group. Virginia Slims are telling women, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ and do you know what? A woman has been dying to hear somebody tell her that. She really secretly feels that she has come a long way, and it’s a good, sexy campaign, a very good campaign, and great thinking. Burnett also sells cake mixes like nobody sells cake mixes. The Pillsbury advertising is great, great stuff. My wife sits there and looks at those ads of chocolate cakes and decides she wants to go out and learn to bake. He has an ability to really hit the consumer where he lives. Maytag appliances. You know, here’s a shot of Mrs. Clancy and her thirteen children – and Mrs. Clancy looks like she’s been through the dryer herself after those thirteen children – but ther
e she is in an ad and she’s saying that she couldn’t have survived Mr. Clancy or the thirteen kids without her Maytag dryer which is still working. I mean, I don’t care who you are, that’s bound to sell. It also helps immeasurably that Maytag is a first-rate product with good word-of-mouth about it.

  There is a tremendous creative revolution going on today in advertising. But the Bernbachs, the Rosser Reeveses, the Leo Burnetts, the Mary Wellses, despite their outward differences, are really not all that different. Different in execution but not different in basic premise.

  Take Rosser Reeves, an authentic genius. His method of execution is to discover one thing about the product that you can make hay out of. Then you zero in on it and you make a lot of noise about it, forgetting everything about the product except this one unique selling proposition.

  The key is to find out which button you can press on every person that makes him want to buy your product over another product. What’s the emotional thing that affects people?

  The advertising that I had to do for Pretty Feet is a good example. My thinking was that people feel all their lives that they hate their feet – they’re ugly, they’re crinkly, they’re embarrassing. I figure the average woman goes into a shoe store and she’s so embarrassed by her feet that she twists them underneath her. The salesman’s got to see them in order to fit her for the pair of shoes, and she doesn’t even want him to see her feet. That to me is the key to selling Pretty Feet.

  The execution might be different. My ad might say, ‘What’s the ugliest part of your body?’ – which is a bit of a street-corner wise guy talking. David Ogilvy might say, ‘Twelve ways your feet can look better.’ Leo Burnett would have his Sally Claussen of Omaha, Nebraska, saying, ‘I couldn’t stand my feet for the first thirty years of my life but now I’ve found this wonderful thing that made them beautiful.’