by Studs Terkel
POSTSCRIPT: Shortly afterward she was battling an ulcer.
THE COMMERCIAL
JOHN FORTUNE
He is thirty-six. He has been with an advertising agency for eight years. “I started out in philosophy at Princeton . . .”
I am what is called a creative supervisor. Creative is a pretentious word. I have a group of about six people who work for me. They create radio commercials, print ads, billboards that go up on highways, television commercials too. Your purpose is to move goods off the shelf (laughs): your detergents, your soaps, your foods, your beers, cigarettes . . .
It’s like the fashion business. There’s a look to advertising. Many techniques are chosen because they’re in vogue at the time. Then a new look will emerge. Right now. a kind of angry stand-up is popular. A guy who’s all pissed off up there and he says, “Look, other products are rotten and ours is good—buy it or I’ll kill you.” The hortatory kind is in fashion now.
It’s an odd business. It’s serious but it isn’t. (Laughs.) Life in an advertising agency is like being at a dull party, interrupted by more serious moments. There’s generally a kind of convivial attitude. Nobody’s particularly uptight. Creativity of this kind flourishes better.
They’re aware that they’re talking about little bears capering around a cereal box and they’re arguing which way the bears should go. It’s a silly thing for adults to be doing. At the same time, they’re aware the client’s going to spend a million dollars on television time to run this commercial. Millions of dollars went into these little bears, so that gave them an importance of their own. That commercial, if successful, can double salaries. It’s serious, yet it isn’t. This kind of split is in everybody’s mind. Especially the older generation in advertising, people like me.
I was a writer manqué, who came into advertising because I was looking for a way to make money. My generation is more casual about it. Many will be writers who have a novel in the desk drawer, artists who are going to quit someday and paint. Whereas the kids coming up consider advertising itself to be the art form. They’ve gone to school and studied advertising. There’s an intensity about what they do. They don’t laugh at those little bears capering around the cereal. Those little bears are it for them. They consider themselves fine artists and the advertising business owes them the right to create, to express themselves.
And there’s a countertendency among young people. The other day I was challenged by someone: “I find this commercial offensive. It’s as if you’re trying to manipulate people.” This kind of honesty is part of it. But he’s in the business himself. His bread is in the same gravy. Though the older ones start out casual, they become quite serious as they go along. You become what you behold. You turn into an advertising man.
My day is so amorphous. Part of it is guiding other people. I throw ideas out and let them throw ideas back, shoot down ideas immediately. In some ways it’s like teaching. You’re trying to guide them and they’re also guiding you. I may sit with a writer and an art director who are going to create a commercial—to sell garbage bags, okay? A number of ideas are thrown out. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? Last year we tried this. Don’t make it that wild. We stick, say, to a family situation.
Let’s have a big family reunion, right? We’ll use fast motion and slow motion as our visual technique. A reunion right after dinner. They’re outside, they’re at a picnic, right? Grampa’s in the hammock and so forth. Everything’s in slow motion. But when it comes time to clean up, things go pretty fast if you use these garbage bags. Everything begins to move in fast motion, which is a funny technique. Fast motion tends to distance people from what they’re watching. I didn’t like it. I thought it lacked focus. You have to set things up. You have to characterize everybody, grampa, uncle . . . You don’t have the effective relationships clearly marked in the beginning. You have to do this in a commercial that may be only thirty seconds. Sometimes you’re writing a play, creating a vehicle. You begin with a human problem and then you see how it’s satisfied by the product.
The way you sell things is to make some kind of connection between the attributes of the product and what people want, human needs. Some years ago, there was a product called Right Guard, an underarm deodorant. It was positioned at that time for men. It was not going anywhere. A copywriter noticed that it was a spray, so the whole family could use it. He said, “Let’s call it the all-family spray.” There was no change in the product, merely in the way it was sold. What any product is selling is a package of consumer satisfactions. A dream in the flesh or something.
A Mustang is a machine that was designed with human fantasies in mind. It’s not just a piece of machinery. Somebody did a lot of research into what people wanted. That research went into the design, very subtly into the shape. Then the advertising came along and added another layer. So when a person drives a Mustang, he’s living in a whole cocoon of satisfaction. He’s not just getting transportation. With detergents people are buying advertising. With cigarettes they’re buying an image, not just little things in a box.
They’re all very similar. That raises the question: How important is advertising? Is there a justification for it? It’s a question people are asking all over the country. I myself am puzzled by it. There’s a big change going on right now. The rules are becoming more stringent. In another five years you’ll just have a lawyer up there. He’ll say, “This is our product. It’s not much different from any other product. It comes in a nice box, no nicer than anybody else’s. It’ll get your clothes pretty clean, but so will the others. Try it because we’re nice people, not that the other company isn’t nice.”
I enjoy it actually. I think any kind of work, after a while, gets a kind of functional autonomy. It has an intensity of its own. You start out doing something for a reason and if you do it long enough, even though the reason may have altered, you continue to do it, because it gives you its own satisfaction.
It’s very hard to know if you know something in this business. There are very few genuine experts. It’s a very fragile thing. To tell somebody they should spend ten million dollars on this tiger that’s gonna represent their gasoline, that’s quite a thing to sell somebody on doing. Gee, why should it be a tiger? Why shouldn’t it be a llama?
The way, you see, is by being very confident. Advertising is full of very confident people. (Laughs.) Whether it’s also full of competent people is another question Coming into a meeting is a little like swimming in a river full of piranha fish. If you start to bleed, they’re gonna catch you. You have to build yourself up before you’re gonna sell something. You have to have an attitude that it’s terrific.
I say to myself, Isn’t it terrific? It could be worse—that’s another thing I say. And I whistle and skip around and generally try to get my juices moving. Have a cup of coffee. I have great faith in coffee. (Laughs.) There’s an element of theater in advertising. When I’m presenting the stuff, I will give the impression of really loving it a lot.
It’s amazing how much your attitude toward something is conditioned by what other people say about it, what other people’s opinions are. If somebody who is very important starts to frown, your heart can sink. If you’ve done this a couple of times, you know this may not be the end of the world. He may have noticed that the girl has on a purple dress and he hates purple. Meanwhile you have to continue. You get yourself up. Some commercials require singing and dancing to present. It’s like being in front of any audience. When you begin to lose your audience, there’s cold feet, sweat.
He’s not happy with the way the bear’s moving. You don’t know why he’s unhappy. Clients have different styles. They can’t articulate it. They begin to thrash around. You have to remain calm and figure out what’s bothering him. Then you light on it and say, “We can change that.” And he says, “Oh yeah? Then it’s okay.” Occasionally we present to people who are crazy.
Originally I was a copywriter. I sat in a room and it was very simple. I woul
d go to the boss and he’d tell me what he wanted. I’d go back to my room and try to write it, and get mad and break pencils and pound on the wall. Then finish it and take it in to him, and change it and change it, and then I’d go back and write it over again and take it in to him and he’d change it again, and I’d take it back. This would happen thirty or forty times and then we’d move to another man. He’d put his feet on the desk and change it again.
Now that the burden of work is greater, I take home less. I’ve gotten more and more good at erasing things from my mind. That’s why I leave myself little notes on the typewriter. I just got back from a three-day weekend and I can hardly find the office. (Laughs.) I erased it completely from my mind. I think it’s a sign of health. When you’re doing creative work, you should think about it all the time. When you’re doing administrative work, you should think about it as little as possible.
There’s the contemplative mind and the business mind. The good businessman is always willing to make decisions on incomplete evidence. I came out of a whole contemplative mode. It was hard for me to learn that you have to make a decision. Advertising is terrific for spot decisions. I think I make more decisions in a week than my clients make in a year. I’ve changed a lot, I think.
Often the products are pretty much the same—which is why there’s advertising. If the products were very different, you wouldn’t need the skill you do. In some way, I think, advertising is very good for any writer, because of this whole image-making thing. Before, I had a tendency to get very word-involved. It’s very like when you program computers. It’s breaking everything down in this strange new way. Then you learn it and it becomes natural to you—seeing pictures instead of arguments.
I’m glad I didn’t go into philosophy. I don’t think I have the right personality for it. I think it involves talent. Also, it involves a language that fewer and fewer people can speak. Finally, you’re speaking to yourself. Advertising is a more social business, which is also frustrating. I’m not sure I’m happy in advertising, but I don’t think philosophy would have been heaven for me. I think I’d rather write—movies or books. For some reason I don’t do that.
Advertising’s a fashion business. There are five stages. “Who is this guy, John Fortune?” The second stage: “Gee, it would be great if we could get that guy, what’s his name? John Fortune.” The third stage: “If we could only get John Fortune.” The fourth stage: “I’d like to get a young John Fortune.” The fifth stage: “Who’s John Fortune?” There are no old writers.
There’s a tremendous threat from young writers. So much so that old writers just aren’t around. When an older writer gets fired, he just doesn’t get another job. I think there’s a farm out in the Middle West or something where they’re tethered. I don’t know what happens to them.
You should start moving when you’re about thirty-five. If you’re not in a supervisory position around then, you’re in trouble. By the time you’re forty, you should be a creative director. That’s the guy with a lot of people under him and nobody over him on the creative staff. But there’s only room for a certain number of people who tell other people what to do.
They’re all vice presidents. They’re given that title for business reasons. Clients like to deal with vice presidents. Also, it’s a cheap thing to give somebody. Vice presidents get fired with great energy and alacrity. (Laughs.) And they get jobs doing public relations for Trujillo or somebody. Or they go out and form their own company which you never hear of again.
There’s a kind of cool paradox in advertising. There’s a pressure toward the safe, tried and true that has worked in the past. But there’s a tremendous need in the agency business for the fresh and the new, to differentiate this one agency from another. Writers are constantly torn between these two goals: selling the product and selling themselves. If you do what they tell you, you’re screwed. If you don’t do what they tell you, you’re fired. You’re constantly trying to make it, fighting. The struggle that goes on . . .
It becomes silly to some people, but poignant too. You see people fighting to save a little nuance in a formula commercial. There’s a type called “slice of life.” Somebody I know called it “slice of death.” It is the standard commercial that starts out in the kitchen. Two people are arguing about a product. “How come you’re getting your wash so white?” “I use this.” “How can that be as good as this?” “Because it contains . . .” And she gives the reasons why it’s better. It follows the formula. People are forced to write it because it’s effective. But you see people fighting for some little touch they’ve managed to work in. So they can put it on their reel and get another job. Somebody will say, “Aha, look at the way it worked there.” You want the thing to be better.
People at parties will come up and denounce me. There’s a lot of paranoia about the power of advertising. They say we’re being controlled, manipulated. Sometimes I enjoy playing the devil’s advocate, so I’ll exaggerate it: “We take human needs and control them.” (Laughs.) I have an active fantasy life—not during the workday, because it’s coming at me so fast. Many of my fantasies have to do with the control of society. Very elaborate technological-type fantasies: a benign totalitarianism controlled by me.
Actually, my career choice in advertising, which I’ve drifted into, is connected with the fantasy of power. I have a sense of slowly increasing power, but the limits are very frustrating. I feel I want to do more, but I feel restraints within the system and myself. I think I hold myself back more than the system does. The system is easy to work within if you’re willing to, if you’re smart enough . . .
What would our country be like without advertising? I don’t know. (Laughs.) It would be a different country, I think.
POSTSCRIPT: At a pub in mid-Manhattan frequented by advertising people, he said, “I have a recurring dream in which I’m a stand-up comedian. I’m standing on a stage with a blue spotlight on me, talking. I begin by telling jokes. Gradually, I begin to justify my life. I can’t quite see the audience. The light becomes more and more intense. I can’t remember what I say. I usually end up crying. This dream I’ve had maybe three, four times.”
ARNY FREEMAN
He is a dapper sixty-three. He appears a good twenty years younger. He has been a character actor—“I am a supporting player”—in New York for almost thirty years. He has worked in all fields: on Broadway, off-Broadway, radio, television, and “a few pictures here and there.
“And suddenly you become—a friend of mine auditioned for a TV commercial. They said they wanted an Arny Freencan-type. He said, ‘Why don’t you call Arny?’ They said, ‘No, no, no, we can’t use him. He’s been used too much!’ I was overexposed in TV commercials.
“I didn’t do commercials until about ’62, ’63. Actors didn’t do commercials. Beautiful blondes, Aryan models, six feet three, did commercials. A friend of mine told me, ‘They’re starting to look for people who look like people.’ This one time I went down, they were looking at people all day. I happened to hit them right. One of the guys said, ‘He has a French quality about him.’ It was for Byrrh, a French apéritif, which is similar to Cinzano.”
I did this commercial in ’64. A thing called Byrrh16 on the Rocks. I have a citation. They have festivals for commercials. Isn’t that laughable? (Laughs.) It won five international awards—in Cannes, in Dublin, in Hollywood, in New York, in London. The goddamn thing was a local commercial. I walk in the bar and ask for Byrrh on the rocks. Everybody turns and laughs and looks at me. The bartender . . . It was played in every station, day and night.
This commercial became so successful that I couldn’t walk down the street. I now know what it’s like to be famous, and I don’t want it. I couldn’t walk down the street. I’d be mobbed. People would grab me, “Hey, Byrrh on the rocks! You’re the guy!” They’d pin me against the wall and the guy would say to his wife, “Hey, look who I got here!” I once got out of the subway at Times Square and a guy grabbed me and slammed me against the wall.
(Laughs.) Crowds of people gathered around. My wife was terrified. They were all screaming, “Byrrh on the rocks!” Because of that little TV box.
They don’t know your name but once they see your face, you’re so familiar, you belong in their home. It really was terrifying, but I enjoyed it very much. It was great. It was like being a short Rock Hudson. (Laughs.) Sure, there’s a satisfaction. I like a certain amount of it. I enjoy having people say complimentary things. I’m a gregarious person. I stop and tell them anything they want to know about making commercials, about the business and so on. But at times it does interfere with your life.
I took a vacation. I went down to San Juan. There’s nobody in San Juan but New Yorkers. I wouldn’t go to the beach. The minute I stepped out, somebody would say, “Hey! Hey! Don’t I know you? Ain’t you the guy . . . ?” In the early days of live TV they couldn’t figure out where they knew you from. Some guy would say, “Hey, you from Buffalo?” I’d say, “No.” “Well, goddamn, there’s a guy in my home town looks just like you.” I’d say, “Did you ever watch ‘T Men in Action’ or ‘The Big Story’ on TV?” “Oh yeah! You’re the guy!”
