From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Part 5

CHAPTER.

EIGHT.

FIGHTS.

HEADACHES.

THREE WAYS.

'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 ...'

I know that a lot of people are talking about this so-called creative revolution in advertising. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on the subject last summer. But it's interesting that when we talk about the creative revolution we don't talk about the great creativity which has been part of advertising for decades. There's a book out with one hundred of the greatest ads ever written and I would love to have written every one of them. Some of those ads go back to 1901. One of the ads is a tiny cla.s.sified that says simply, 'We're looking for men who are willing to give up their lives.' The whole story was that an expedition was being planned to go to the Arctic, and the guys behind the expedition said, 'We're looking for men who are willing to go out on an adventure of a lifetime, but they may die on this great adventure.' Or get frostbit. A h.e.l.l of a good ad.

Creative revolution may be an awkward way of saying there is good advertising and then there is garbage. It's always been that way. Today, of course, you've got some pretty strange kids turning out advertising, so for lack of a better name for these kids you could call them creative. Clients today really aren't aware of the extent of the weird behavior in agencies. They don't know about the real loose nuts in the agency. Agencies keep these guys in closets during presentations; otherwise a guy is going to show up high or he's going to do something pretty silly. The average client doesn't get to see the real weirdos; he'll get to see a guy he might consider weird, and by his standards is weird, but this guy is not agency-weird.

You take this guy Herb I had working for me, the fellow who wanted to own a live alarm clock. He wrote ads and commercials when the city was trying to pa.s.s a bond issue to improve the commuter railroads. One of the commercials showed what looked like a thousand people being pushed into a commuter train. That commercial was done from the point of view of the poor commuter. You could feel from that commercial how a guy like Herb could relate to the whole commuter problem. He works best on problems that are problems to most people. n.o.body could know the little man better than Herb, because Herb is a little man who is concerned with the problems of life. He's close to it. He knows what it's all about. He can really feel and really relate to the consumer.

You can see a lot of Herb's personality coming out in his advertising and he's not unusual in this respect. A lot of people's personalities show up in their ads. I was once turned down for a job when I was starting out by a guy who said, 'You write like a street-corner wise guy.' At that time, it could be that there was hostility in my copy and it showed through and maybe I still do write that way, though I like to think my hostility quotient is way down.

Evan Stark once wrote an ad for an air conditioner that took place in h.e.l.l. You know, this is h.e.l.l, and the devil gets all the bad guys and shoves them in a room and turns off the RCA Whirlpool air conditioner. That's what Evan felt h.e.l.l was. The devil turns off the air conditioner. But this is Evan's personality. He feels and believes this sort of stuff. And that's what makes him such a great writer.

Guys like Charlie Moss and George Lois and even Ron Rosenfeld see things a lot differently from the average guy. I caught a real wild commercial the other day, a crazy thing with a car talking. Now how could a guy come up with a talking car in a commercial? Well, the chances are it was written by a copywriter who talks to cars you know, he believes that cars do talk and if you talk to a car the car will talk right back.

All these strange guys eventually produce. At four o'clock in the morning, Herb was a fantastic writer. His personal problems never showed up in his advertising, but his personality did. I can sit and look at commercials and ads and tell you who wrote them. Guys who are wigged out write wigged-out stuff.

The giant accounts they don't care about the craziness. All a General Foods worries about is the bottom of the line. The bottom of the line as far as they're concerned is that a guy showed up with an ad. The fact that it was done by a psychotic doesn't mean anything to them. They couldn't care less who did it. You could throw some copy and artwork into a machine, and if an ad came out they would be happy with it. The loose nuts are the problem only of the agency president who has to put up with them. Naturally it's a strain. I had a guy come into my office one day and tell me he didn't like the way the sun was shining in his window. I swear this is the truth. I said, 'Did you ever hear of a shade?' He said, 'There's something wrong, it's bothering me and I want another office.' Well, people usually come in and say, 'I'd like to have a bigger office.' No, he had to come in and say he didn't like the way the sun was shining into his window. Loose upstairs. We had another guy working for us who would take maybe three or four weeks on one ad. He would sit there and order $1,000 worth of stats for an ad that eventually cost $400 when it was printed and finished. So I'm seeing a $1,000 stat bill, with hours and hours of time, that must have cost my agency $6,000 to produce and when it runs it costs maybe $800 to place so the agency nets $120. I had to get rid of him and one day he met someone on the street who said, 'You were fired by Della Femina, weren't you?' He talked the way he worked. 'They ... said ... I ... didn't ... work ... fast ... enough ...'

Most of the loose nuts in town work for the boutique agencies, which is the derogatory term used when the large agencies want to put down the small agencies. As far as I'm concerned, boutique advertising is the new advertising. Someone once made an a.n.a.logy comparing the problems that we're now having in our schools with the problems now going on in advertising. In advertising, just like the schools, there is a group of people who are threatening an establishment and the establishment is fighting the threat. Perhaps the only difference is that a lot of us don't want to burn down the place, but we are a threat to the established group, which is made up of agencies like Ted Bates, J. Walter Thompson, Lennen & Newell, Foote, Cone & Belding, Compton, D'Arcy and others. They've been here many years and they haven't been bucked for many years, and all of a sudden guys are starting agencies and they have the audacity to take business away from the establishment.

In 1969 I went down south and pitched a giant tobacco company and picked up some business. Ten years ago I couldn't have gotten into any place in the whole state of North Carolina. They'd have taken one look at me at the state line and turned me away as some kind of menace. This is what is driving the establishment crazy.

By definition, a boutique is small. The establishment says that boutiques are cutesie-poo, very superficial, very flowery. Their idea of what a boutique is comes from what their wives tell them about the cute little boutique they found on Madison Avenue. The guy running this boutique might be standing behind the counter without a shirt on, maybe just some beads, and in the mind of the establishment this is no good. So they sat around and tried to come up with the worst name they could call this new type of agency, and boutique was it.

Doyle, Dane, Bernbach grew too fast to get into the boutique thing. Just as the establishment was starting to call Doyle, Dane a boutique it turned into a department store right before their eyes and just kept clobbering the h.e.l.l out of them. They don't call Mary Wells a boutique because she opened and all of a sudden she's a department store. The boutique is the call given to maybe twenty to twenty-five agencies.

But think about the boutique for a moment. It means you're going to be dealing with the man who owns the store and you're going to get a lot more service and a lot more attention from him. Second of all, the item you buy from a boutique has to be perfect, otherwise you would go to another store. It's as simple as that. If you're running a Macy's, you sell everything in sight you sell high-priced, low-priced, anything you can get your hands on. The object of Macy's is to sell, and the h.e.l.l with service; the object of a boutique is also to sell, but with a maximum of personalized service into the bargain. So the boutique stays open until 10:00 p.m. Macy's closes at 6.00 p.m. A big difference.

You might go to Macy's because R. H. Macy was a great merchant and a great salesman and a brilliant man who got everyone to think Macy's when he wanted to buy anything beyond five-and-ten stuff but whom do you find? You find a $90-a-week sales clerk with aching feet. She is R. H. Macy. The same thing happens in an agency. People might go to Ted Bates because Mr. Ted Bates is brilliant, but they might wind up with the equivalent of a $75-a-week trainee writing the stuff for their account. Chances are if an account goes to a boutique agency, they wind up working with the guy who did it all the guy who started the agency. The word boutique used in a derogatory sense is a misnomer, it's a joke, and it's wrong.

But the small agencies are going to win, no matter what they call us. We win unless the kids who are striking in the schools take over, in which case n.o.body wins. The establishment is talking to a dying generation. They're not on the same wavelength as the younger kids today. That's why they're in trouble. The establishment can't change, it can't give the people anything different, it can't make the turn. The establishment doesn't know what makes people think; they don't know what makes people go any more. That's where they lose it, that's where they blow it. They've lost their ability to tell how people go, how people move, how to sell them their bra, how to sell them their hair lotion.

You think an establishment agency could have produced a campaign for Love cosmetics the way Mary Wells did? Never. It is a brilliant campaign and the packaging of the cosmetics themselves is phenomenal. The kids like the bottles so much they keep them after they've run out of lotion. The campaign is talking to kids the way they like being talked to. The kids they've used in the ads and the commercials are hippie-looking. They're also very good-looking, and all they talk about is love. In one of the commercials the guy had longer hair than the girl. In fact, his hair was so long and so nice I almost identified with him more than with the girl. They're very love-conscious, love-oriented. The Love cosmetics are selling like h.e.l.l and they've got a problem in that they can't make the stuff fast enough. Now maybe it's a one-year phenomenon. The cosmetics business is a terrific jungle. But the fact that Love is selling means that they've got good advertising. The fact that they might stop selling means that maybe the product isn't there. But right now they're selling, they're doing a good job.

What's happening in business throughout the country is that these younger kids are beginning to work their way up in management. They're in marketing, in sales, in promotion, in finance, and in a lot of cases, they're running things. The president of a sleepy corporation who is in his late sixties and is trying to get to retirement without blowing an artery is not going to take his account and give it to an agency like mine. He's going to keep it at his establishment agency where it's been for, like, fifty years. The seventy-five-year-old chairman of the board who has been friends with D'Arcy forever, he's not going to switch agencies. But the next generation they're ours, we're going to own them. The next generation belongs to us; they're all ours.

There is a great difference in the way ads and commercials are produced at the creative agencies and at the oldline places. Before Bill Bernbach, old agencies used to produce advertising by the a.s.sembly-line method. This method, by the way, is still being used at most of the establishment agencies. First off, in the a.s.sembly-line way, a copywriter used to type up thirty, forty, even fifty headlines. All on the same subject. 'Aspirin Does This,' 'Aspirin Does That,' 'Aspirin Is for You,' 'Aspirin Is Your Friend,' 'Aspirin Likes You,' literally dozens of these things. Then the copywriter takes his headlines and goes to a copy chief, who sits there and looks at them and finally says, 'All right, number thirty-seven looks like you might be able to work up into some kind of a concept. Number forty-three, if you change this word, might work, too.'

When Rosser Reeves was running Ted Bates every writer would have to put each of his headlines on a single sheet of yellow paper. Then the writers would pin their headlines to a long wall in one of the rooms. Then Reeves used to come by, almost like a general reviewing the troops. He'd have his big red pencil with him and he'd look at the yellow sheets and say, 'All right, that one. Work that up. You might have something there.' One guy might have 'Fights Headaches Three Ways' and Reeves would say, 'That's not bad, that's not bad. Work up that one.'

You figure he had maybe twelve copywriters taking part in this thing, with something like fifty headlines a copywriter, which gives you six hundred ways to fight something. Out of the six hundred Reeves might pick four or five, and out of those he would sit down one day and come up with his concept of what the problem was, using maybe one of the headlines as a hook.

That was Reeves. At other places the copywriter would sit there and type like a son of a b.i.t.c.h and then go running into a copy chief who would look at it and say, 'That's got some merit. Why don't you work on that?' When it was all through bouncing back and forth between the copywriter and the copy supervisor, they would ship it into the art director. To the establishment agencies, an art director is a guy who draws. 'He's our drawing guy.' So they go in to their drawing guy with a headline that says 'Fights Headaches Three Ways.' Maybe the copywriter has got a little scribble of how the ad should look. Now the art director is, first of all, chained to his desk; they don't want art directors roaming the halls at large agencies. So he can't move around too much. He usually is between forty and fifty years old but even if he's a young guy his mind is fifty. He's sitting there minding his own business when the copywriter comes in and says, 'Okay, here's what we did. We want to say, "Fights Headaches Three Ways" and I think we should show a big pill.' The art director says, 'Terrific.' The copywriter says, 'We got to have a layout by this afternoon to show to the creative director.' The art director says, 'No problem,' and he puts it together. It's in the hands of the creative director by that afternoon and that's it. There's little relationship between the art director and the copywriter. They hardly know each other. They meet once a year at the Christmas party and the copywriter says to the drawer, 'Hey, how are you? Boy, we really turned out some great work together this year.' But they don't really work together, they don't get to see each other. It's really not two minds working on the same problem.

What Bernbach did was put the art director and the copywriter together in a room and let the chemistry take over. He has a lot of respect for people and people's minds. I think he got the feeling that it was a lot easier to have two bright people sit there thinking about the same problem than to have one bright person using himself as a judge. When Ron and I are working, when we're really on and really good, that door is locked. Like n.o.body exists. That room is a different place. A crazy chemistry takes over and suddenly the two of you think alike. With every art director I ever worked with I reached a point where I would start to say something and the art director would finish the sentence. I would say, 'What if we said, "What's the ugliest ..."' and the guy would say, 'I got it, I got it!' Without going any further.

The client knows nothing of this chemistry, this process. Why should he? He should care only what comes out of that room. Most clients, I'm sure, think that there's a magic something going on. That if a guy is called creative the guy has somehow been touched by a special ray of light from the hand of G.o.d. People think the creative guy can do things other people can't do. Nonsense.

The big agencies today are buying the mystique of the creative man the big phony mystique. They buy the mystique and they pay top dollar for it and they don't know what to do with it. Why is it that an agency can hire a guy who is so good at one agency and turn him into a stumbleb.u.m in their own agency? Because they think creative advertising is a mystique; they think it's some kind of magic.

No one knows what it's like. No one knows what it is, no one knows the feeling. No one except other art directors and copywriters have ever been in on the excitement. That's why when clients sometimes try to do ads by saying, 'Well, what if you had a headline that said ...?' they have no idea what the feeling is about turning out an ad and what it is to achieve that feeling. There are things that I might say to Ron and he'll say, 'Are you crazy? You can't say that.' He'll then say, 'But what if we did this?' And he'll come up with something that's completely outlandish, but out of that outlandish thing there might be like one tiny dot there that says, 'No, you're wrong by doing it this way but if you tried it this way ... '

The way the whole process starts is that the art director and the copywriter do a lot of listening. When you've landed the account you've got to go through a lot of bulls.h.i.t. There's research and marketing, the account executive, the agency president, the advertising manager of the account everybody gets into the act. Everybody has something to say about the problem. The account executive, if he's good, can help. He's there because you might forget something and he's liable to say, 'Look, did you ever notice ...?' He might come up with a concept for you. He's another body.

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 h.e.l.l.' 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 s.e.x, 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 h.e.l.l 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 crabgra.s.s, 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 n.o.body 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 b.i.t.c.h, 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 s.e.x. 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 have 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 n.o.body knows it. n.o.body 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 cla.s.sified 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 longsh.o.r.eman. 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 a.s.sociations used to get together they used to talk about this guy like one of their G.o.ds. 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Winch.e.l.l, 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 compet.i.tor, 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.

n.o.body'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 were 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 s...o...b..a.l.l.s.

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 n.o.body wants,' he said.

'Hey, that's interesting,' I said. 'What happens when you have yellow vermouth? You can't sell it now. Does everybody have this problem?'

'Yeah.'

Later, back in our office, I said to Ron, 'You know, yellow vermouth is an interesting notion. I wonder how you could make hay from something like this. What if you date the bottles? What if you put a date on the bottle telling the consumer when it was bottled. You could tell the people that when the stuff starts to go yellow you can't make a good martini with it. You can throw it in food, you can wash with it, but you can't use it to make a martini.'

But Ron doesn't buy it. 'Bulls.h.i.t,' he said. 'It's too hard to do.' 'All right,' I said, 'let's pull it down to its simplest form. What do you do? You put a little tag on the bottle with a date on it. No other problem.'

Back and forth the idea went, for days. Every time we'd pa.s.s in the hall I'd say, 'What about the dating of the bottles?' Every time he'd say, 'Ah, that's bulls.h.i.t. It's a gimmick.' I'd say, 'All right, it's a gimmick. Let's present it to them as a gimmick. Let's tell them what we want to do is that we have a gimmick that we want to show them.'

One of the key things in presenting a campaign is that you should never pitch a half-developed idea because you're a.s.suming that they can visualize what's in your mind, which they can't, and you're taking a chance on having a good idea killed right in front of your eyes. If I had gone up to the client and said, 'Hey, we'd like to date the bottles,' the client probably would have said, 'Ah, it'll never work. How are you going to do it? It's not practical.' But if you go to the client with a bottle and say, 'Here's the label with the date. Here's the advertising for it, here's the thinking behind it. Here's how it becomes advertising. Here's a radio commercial, here's a storyboard for a television commercial, here's what we're going to do' if you do it this way, you've got a better chance of selling it. I've seen guys blow good campaigns because they got so excited about them that they presented them not fully developed. In the end, my idea for Cinzano got shot down by Ron. He finally convinced me that basically the idea was too much of a gimmick and we dropped it.

Naturally the pace of the meeting between the art director and the copywriter varies, depending on when the ad or the commercial has to get out. Just the same, the chemistry is fantastic to watch. If you've got three days to come up with something, then you can really take your time. Or maybe it has to be out in a half hour, in which case the whole thing is speeded up.

One morning last summer Ron and I had to have some advertising ready to show at nine o'clock in the morning. We both got to the office at seven o'clock and neither of us had any idea what we wanted to say. The subject was inst.i.tutional investing, and we had to have a campaign ready to run in a magazine called The Inst.i.tutional Investor. That magazine is read by guys who have lots of dollars to spend in the market. Our client was Hirsch & Company, the stockbrokers, and through The Inst.i.tutional Investor they were trying to reach the guy who is working for the ILGWU who's got maybe a million dollars of union funds to invest in the market. He has discretionary power over a lot of money and the idea is to get him to buy his blocks of stock through Hirsch & Company. How do you talk to this guy? That was the problem.

Sitting there at seven o'clock in the morning we were really desperate, I mean desperate, because the guy is coming in at nine o'clock to see advertising and he doesn't want to know from anything else. (Creative people in all agencies work best under the gun. If you were to give an agency three years to do something, they would wait until the last minute to do the work. Ron and I always wait until the deadline.) As far as he's concerned he's to be shown a campaign and he doesn't want to know that we've been backed up and busy as h.e.l.l. It's a funny feeling; what are we going to do? Ron and I always work up to the wire but this was the closest we ever were. Maybe, we thought, this will be the time when we won't make it.

Well, we started out talking about s.e.x. Seven o'clock! 'How are you?' 'Fine, how are you?' 'Boy, did you see Norma walk by here last night? Wow, what a body!' Comes 7:30 a.m. and nothing's happening. Like at about quarter of eight I say, 'What are we going to do with this problem?' Ron says, 'Aw, don't worry. We'll make it.' All of a sudden he says, 'I've been thinking about it all morning.' We started feeling sorry for ourselves. 'You know, it's really a pain in the a.s.s,' I say. 'You never can go home and like just think of nothing, right?'

Ron says, 'Yeah. That's interesting, isn't it? That you always think of your job. I bet these guys in the inst.i.tutional investing business feel the same way about themselves. I bet they think that they're heroes the way we think we're heroes for being here this early.'

I say, 'Yeah, that's interesting. I'll bet they really think they're hot stuff because they don't get to go to lunch because they're working so hard. Hey, did you ever notice when you don't go to lunch you really feel better because you think you're working so hard?'

Ron says, 'Yeah, I know. I feel great when I'm working like a son of a b.i.t.c.h and I don't go to lunch. I bet these guys feel the same way, sitting there with their millions of dollars to spend, they must really feel like they're something when they miss lunch or they have to order a hamburger sent in.'

And I say, 'Hey, a hamburger. Remember that day we were working with that guy Dave and he ordered a hamburger and it got cold? Remember how proud he was that he didn't even have time to eat?'

Ron says, 'Yeah, what a headline "The Glory of the Cold Hamburger." That could be it, the whole campaign. "The Glory of the Cold Hamburger." That was the concept for the entire campaign, not just a single ad. The ideas started coming right out of the concept. The guy shaving in the morning saying that he thinks about stocks even in the bathroom and like he's putting in a twenty-four-hour day. We know that we want to show the reader of The Inst.i.tutional Investor a picture of a hamburger and we want to say to him, 'You know, we understand exactly what it's like. You've got too much money and sometimes you don't know what to do with all of this money and there are too many people depending on you for you to run out and have a big expense-account lunch. So you order a hamburger in and it gets cold and you know what? You get a big charge out of it. You really think you're hot stuff for eating this cold hamburger and you know, you're right.'

The campaign started to grow from the guy feeling the way he does because he works so hard. The fact that he doesn't get a chance to see his kids. The fact that he shaves and thinks about work. The fact that he hasn't eaten a decent lunch in months. One by one the ads start to come: 'The Glory of the Cold Hamburger'; 'The 24-Hour Workday.'

Ron is drawing like a madman at this point. Now, how do we tie it all together? Well, why are these people working like this? Why are they breaking their necks? Because a lot of people are depending on them. Fine. That's the whole thing. 'Call Hirsch & Company because a lot of people are depending on you.'

By this time Ron is drawing with one hand and lettering in headlines with the other. There are four stages in making an ad: a thumbnail, which is just a tiny sketch; a rough, which is like a thumbnail, but big; a comp, which means the headline is lettered in and the drawing is much more detailed; and the finish.