The research guy does it with numbers. He says, ‘Look, the way I see it, nine out of ten people aren’t drinking this product because of the tests. It tastes like hell.’ He doesn’t give you a solution, he simply gives you another aspect of the problem. You’ve got the account guy talking to you, you’ve got the research guy talking to you, and you’ve got the account itself saying, ‘Well, I think our problem is that people don’t buy our product because they’re prejudiced against us because our plant is in Hackensack.’ Everybody’s got their own stake in what they think the problem is.
Now that you have listened to everyone, you have to get to know the account. This involves a trip to their plant to watch their widgets being made or a trip to listen to their sales manager or a trip to listen to their salesmen or going out on the road with their route salesmen or going into a store and asking a guy what he thinks of the product. It is the most concentrated educational process in the world. I can be a little bit of an expert on almost every business that I’ve ever touched. In other words, I can tell you how to make a polyester in your home if you’re crazy enough to want to know. I can tell you how the gases are pushed through all kinds of things and are turned into spaghetti coils, which then turn into fabric. I can tell you what it takes to sell time for a radio station. I can tell you how to be a route salesman for a product called Moxie. I know more about the feminine-hygiene business than I should legally know.
The average copywriter and art director never stop learning. You have to know your product so well you could go out and be a salesman for the company pushing the product. What you’re trying to do in all of this is to isolate the problem of the company – naturally they wouldn’t have switched their advertising to your agency if everything was going along fine. What you’re trying to do is to crystallize the problem. Once you arrive at the problem, then your job is really almost over, because the solving of the problem is nothing. The headache is finding out what the problem is.
Then you walk into your room. When Ron and I start working we ask ourselves, ‘What’s bugging everybody?’ What is it? Define the problem. Most copywriters and art directors close the door and don’t mention the product for hours – sometimes days, if we’ve got a lot of time. We sit there and shoot the breeze. Maybe we talk about sex, maybe we talk about the movies. Sometimes the relationship is one of hostility. I’ve been in agencies where the copywriter and the art director were screaming at each other for two or three days. One guy says, ‘Where the hell have you been? I can’t find you.’ The other guy says, ‘I’m not hiding, I’m here. You don’t like to work.’
I used to work with an art director, and his thing was to scream and curse for eight hours a day. Sometimes he busted up furniture, just to make things a little more exciting. I loved working with this guy because you never were quite sure what was going to happen.
One guy might say, ‘Did you go to the movies last night?’ ‘Yeah, let me tell you about the thing I saw last night.’ This guy used to talk for hours about the movies he saw. Another art director I worked with used to talk about his house – his mortgage, his termites, the crabgrass, everything about his lousy house in Jersey. In a way, it’s like two-man group therapy. It goes back and forth very fast and you’re never quite sure who said what. When Ron and I were at Delehanty we did an ad for Talon Zippers – the one with the kid from ‘Peanuts’ on the pitcher’s mound with his fly open – and to this day we still argue over who did it. I insist that I came up with the idea; he says he did. And we’re both not kidding; we both think we came up with the notion. The thing is you blank out during the back-and-forth talking and nobody can remember who came up with which notion.
This same process holds true when you’re working up a television commercial. One guy says, ‘How about we open up with this, and then come in for a close-up?’ The other guy says, ‘No, let’s not have a close-up, let’s pull back for a shot of the aspirin bottle.’ The profanity, the screaming, the yelling, the carrying on, the drinking, all at the same time – it’s one tight crazy little room that explodes, and it’s a very exciting process. To me, this is what advertising is all about because everything follows from that little room. After you’ve got the concept, then you take a photograph, then you have typography, then an engraving, then research to see if the idea will be effective, then you have to find the right media. But all of this is dependent on what goes on in the little room. You don’t need research if nothing went on in that little room. The greatest media buyer in the world can’t help you out if a dumb idea came out of that room. You could have Michelangelo setting type for your ad but it doesn’t mean a thing if there’s no chemistry.
The big problem in advertising is how to put the right team of copywriter and art director together. You’re talking about chemistry or even a wedding, and it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s usually the job of the creative director to match the talent up. Helmut Krone, who just started his own agency with Gene Case, was a star art director for years at Doyle, Dane. But he was feared. Some of the hottest copywriters of our time went into that room with Krone and folded. The problem with Krone is, as I’ve heard it, that he doesn’t talk – but nothing – he just sits and stares. So the copywriters at Doyle, Dane used to go in with Krone and talk and talk and talk, and finally they’re running out of things to say. During all this talk Krone might have shaken his head once for a few seconds. Two days go by and the copywriter comes out of there wringing wet, twitching like a son of a bitch, wondering whether he should have taken up something else, like selling Bibles.
In the meantime, Krone is just methodically sitting there listening. He doesn’t go in much for the chemistry. He’s like a father, or a doctor. He’s really got you lined up. He’s just sitting there staring at you. Finally, after three or four days, he might come up with something and when he does it might be brilliant. He is a great art director; his only problem is that he’s tough on the nerves of the copywriters.
There have been copywriters who don’t talk and there have been cases where both the art director and the copywriter don’t say a word to each other for hours. They just sit there for three hours and not one word is said. At the end of three hours one of the guys sighs and says, ‘What if we said, “Fights Headaches Three Ways”?’ The other guy might say, ‘Nah, doesn’t sound right.’ And they’ll sit there for another three hours.
There have been cases where the male art director takes a look at the pretty young girl copywriter and he turns the whole session into a pitch. The guy is sitting there thinking of headlines. A lot of affairs in the advertising business have started over ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ First of all, this whole thing is very close, very much like sex. Here’s the girl’s chance to see the guy as a hero. You know, he’s going to solve the problem. They’re now two people struggling against this big problem. He says, ‘Wait, I’ll save you – I’ll save your job, your little one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Eighties, I’m going to come up with a headline.’ ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ And bingo. He’s a hero. And sometimes, like heroes, he’s rewarded.
Doyle, Dane has had some very strange copywriters. One of the strangest was a girl who developed working with an art director to a fine art. Her theory was, ‘What does it matter where we do the work as long as we produce?’ So she quit going to the office, especially in the summer. You’d see her and the art director lounging around Central Park. If it was really hot, the two of them would take off for Amagansett. They’d work on the beach and come back with a campaign.
When a team fails to come up with something, they might go to the creative director and ask for help. A good creative director can be a great source of inspiration: ‘Hey, look, why don’t you just concentrate on this one area? Maybe you can come up with something and you’ll be in better shape than you are right now. Go back and try again.’ Like a hung jury, they’re never dismissed immediately – they’re told to go back and give it another try.
Some of the larger agencies that ha
ve switched to the team method occasionally have four or five teams working on the same problem – an ugly business. This means that only one team is going to win. The other four are going to be rejected, which also means that they’re going to go out and look for jobs that day. The winning team, of course, is going to feel happy until the next time. That’s the team theory of Rosser Reeves – throw everybody into the dike when there’s a crisis. If a copywriter happened to be walking by Reeves, he would grab him and say, ‘Find yourself an art director and get to work.’
I can’t talk too much about the importance of the copywriter and the art director clicking together. It’s the reason why creative agencies are doing so much better today. Sure, an agency making a pitch for business can say, ‘Come with us, we’re a great media agency.’ What do you place if you haven’t got advertising? How can an agency say, ‘We’re research-oriented’? What do you research if it doesn’t lead to advertising? All the account needs is advertising – that’s what he pays for – good advertising.
There comes a time when all agencies are created equal and that time is when Jerry Della Femina & Partners, which maybe is billing $20 million, has a four-color ad in Life magazine next to a four-color ad from J. Walter Thompson, which bills maybe $640 million a year and has thousands of employees. No consumer sitting in the barber shop is going to know the difference in the two agencies behind those ads. Media are the great equalizers.
We’re as good as anybody in Life or on NBC. We’ve got it made. We’re right up against them and nobody knows it. Nobody ever said, ‘I won’t buy a Corum watch because Della Femina isn’t billing what J. Walter Thompson is.’ They really can’t beat us – except in the quality of the ad or commercial. And that’s what the game is all about. They might have more research and more bodies and more media guys, but when we print an ad and they print an ad, we’re equal. They can’t use one dime more of their money to look any better than we do in Life. They can’t buy better supplies because we all buy the same supplies. They can’t buy better photography because we know and use these same guys with long arms that they do. They can’t buy better typography because we all buy the same typography. They can’t buy a better page because the media has to give you the page next to anyone else’s.
They can’t buy anything that we can’t buy and that’s what’s been the revolution in the business: People have suddenly discovered, ‘If I give it to Thompson or if I give it to Della Femina, the difference is what winds up on the page.’ It doesn’t matter how many people the account met, or how much agency basketball is involved, or how many guys show up at a meeting. Bodies. You can always call Central Casting for bodies. We can deliver a hundred bodies if that’s what’s wanted by the account. But bodies aren’t and never will be advertising.
CHAPTER
NINE
FIGHTS
HEADACHES
FOUR
WAYS
‘It really doesn’t matter what you did before you got into advertising. David Ogilvy worked in a restaurant kitchen and he’s done quite nicely since. The key thing is, how much do you learn after you get into the business and then how well do you tell the consumer what you’ve learned? This is what it’s all about …’
You can get into advertising in many different ways. I got into advertising because once, many years ago when I was a kid, I was a messenger for the advertising department of The New York Times and I used to deliver proofs of ads to department stores on Fifth Avenue. Wherever I went – Bonwit, Saks Fifth Avenue – in any of the stores I used to see guys sitting around with their feet propped up on desks. I liked that and I used to ask people who these cats were with their feet up. They were the department-store copywriters. That’s when I made up my mind that copywriting was for me. My father, Mike, was and still is a paper cutter for The Times, working in the press room. My brother Joe works at The Times in classified ads. I have an Uncle Tony working as a compositor there and four cousins there too. The Della Femina family has been supported by The Times for many years. In my family the natural thing to do was to go to work for The Times. I had a choice. In our neighbourhood you could work for The Times or become a longshoreman. When I decided to become a copywriter, the neighborhood wrote me off as some kind of freak. The Gravesend section of Brooklyn is not what you might call strong on producing copywriters.
I got into advertising in a pretty straightforward way. But I know a beautiful guy at Bates who, before he got into the agency business, used to sell holy water by mail. It must have been fantastic. You know, you send in a buck and you get your bottle of holy water from Lourdes. Authentic holy water, too. When the holy-water associations used to get together they used to talk about this guy – like one of their gods. In the holy-water field, anyhow. He sold a lot of it. He went from selling holy water and making miracles with holy water to selling Anacin. Not too far apart. He went into selling Anacin because it was more profitable than selling holy water. It’s too bad he didn’t think about selling Anacin plus holy water. That’s terrific packaging! You’d wash down the Anacin with the holy water.
It really doesn’t matter what you did before you got into advertising. David Ogilvy worked in a restaurant kitchen and he’s done quite nicely since. The key thing is, how much do you learn after you get into the business and then how well do you tell the consumer what you’ve learned? This is what it’s all about. When John Kennedy was alive, a friend of his was quoted as saying that he had gone to school with Kennedy and he was just as smart as Kennedy in those days. But when they graduated, he got a job and Kennedy kept on learning. He never stopped learning. After a while there was a world of difference between the two.
You learn, you have to to survive. The first thing you do after picking up an account is learn. When we got the American Broadcasting Company’s owned-and-operated stations, we traveled to their five stations. We heard all their news programs. We talked to their station managers. We learned, learned, learned, until we were almost ready to drop. It was a cram course in broadcasting and the thing was coming out of our ears.
If you bought what the ratings said, ABC News was running third behind CBS and NBC. But even though they were running third, ABC did have some characteristics that were very exciting. They knew that they liked going out and scoring newsbeats.
After we listened to everybody, Ron and I sat down and tried to figure it out. A couple of hours passed, and then in the middle of some story Ron was telling me he said, ‘What is it that we’re trying to say? Are we trying to say that ABC’s news guys are not as staid as Cronkite?’
I came back at that and said, ‘Look, you know what it is? It’s like The Front Page.’ He said, ‘I never saw The Front Page.’ I said that the type of news they have on ABC is not unlike the type of news coverage they used to have back in the days of The Front Page and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur creating Hildy Johnson. It’s not the white-glove school of news that we’ve come to know and accept.
I said, ‘It was an era of …’
And he said, ‘Oh, like an exciting kind of news, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, were there some people who represent that kind of news?’ I said, ‘Sure. Guys like Murrow, like Walter Winchell, guys like Ernie Pyle.’ Ron said, ‘Look, why don’t we start using these guys? And say our news has been patterned after the way they lived and the way they went out and got news?’
I said, ‘All right, fine. We’ll use Murrow. Murrow’s great because he used to work for CBS. Now we’ve got a little more interest. We can imply in the ad,“Although he worked for a competitor, we always admired him and admired that he had the courage to go out and cover the Battle of Britain the way he did.” We admired him and now we’ll take many of the qualities of his reporting and apply it to our news programming.’ Now we’ve got the beginning of an ad.
Nobody’s put pencil to paper yet. We’re just talking concept. The concept slowly comes out that we’re going to tell the world that we have the same kind of news they w
ere doing in the 1930s and the 1940s. Ron says, ‘Gee, that’s it. That’s our last line. That’s the whole concept of what the news is, that we’re an exciting news station. We go out and get the news the way they did in the 1930s.’ And from there on, out comes a campaign. Out comes the whole business. It just snowballs.
Now then, if Ron and I do all of this work, how can we stand to pick up the ad, hand it to a guy who’s an account executive and say, ‘All right. Go out and sell this to a client.’ Yet this is what happens every day. And this is the big mistake of advertising as far as I’m concerned. We’re there, we’re sweating it out, we had twelve ideas, we kept three, we know exactly what we’re doing. And in the meantime we finish it off and we say, ‘Here, go out and tell them that this is good and they should buy it.’ Well, that won’t work. At my agency, we go out and talk it up ourselves.
The outsider thinks that all you have to do is win the account and from then on everything goes smoothly. Not true. You’re constantly selling to the account. True, when you get the account, everything is a little easier, but with each campaign you’ve got to sell it to the client. Each time.
The way we work there is little difference between the art director and the copywriter. We’re almost one person. I can do the layouts, Ron can come up with the selling line. And you discard ideas, you get rid of them.
Last year I came up with what I thought was a pretty good concept for Cinzano Vermouth. Ron didn’t think so. We fought over it for days. It came about after one of our talks with their sales manager who mentioned that all vermouth turned yellow after a while. ‘Every manufacturer has lots of bottles of yellow vermouth that nobody wants,’ he said.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 15
