Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [47]
I looked out at the franchisees and made a joke about feeling as if I were testifying before both houses of Congress. Of course, no one laughed. Moving right along, I began to deliver a short talk about the work they were about to see, how excited we were about it. I shared what I erroneously thought was a humorous anecdote from the set. I had been certain that I could charm them and win them over before they even saw their commercials, but I was interrupted by a voice to my right. It was the known enemy of the agency, He Who Had the Power to Bring It All Down. “Just show us the danged work,” he yelled, even though I was less than six feet away. I smiled and attempted to continue, but someone else spoke. “Yeah. Let’s see the commercials.” I’m fairly sure that someone said, “Hear! Hear!” and I’m absolutely certain that several of them began rapping on the table.
I pushed play. But what I was really doing was pulling the trigger on a pistol pressed against the temple of the account.
To avoid rewinding, I’d had the commercials looped so we could watch each one three consecutive times. There was grumbling midway through the first spot. By the middle of the second commercial, the grumbling had risen to a low roar that made it difficult to hear the words to the songs, the silly chicken songs that were the campaign’s main creative idea. But they didn’t care about music, or words or stories, they wanted to see chicken and price points, and what was on the screen before them was not at all acceptable. Even though we had already zoomed in on and extended every bit of chicken footage and bumped up the type size of their offers several times, it was not enough for the franchisees. No one even bothered to listen to the commercials as they played a second time. Bedlam had broken out. Factions formed. Franchisees shouted one another down like senators in the chamber on the eve of the Civil War. Senior account guy glared at me. Senior client guy glared at me. “I told you so.” I snuck out of the square and out into the hallway. The doors to the franchisee meeting closed, never to open for me again.
A week later we ran the straightforward, heavily edited commercials. Rather than showing charming stories set to quirky music, they were almost wall-to-wall chicken, backed by songs that made little sense taken out of context. It may take several weeks to declare a winner of a presidential election, but in the fall of 2000, franchisees could report on in-store sales at the end of every day that the commercials ran. And sales were not good. In fact, they were flat or down across the country. It could have been the economy, or a change in America’s eating habits, or a changing perception of the chain that had been developing for years. But in their eyes, it was all about the ads. Every morning we gathered around the speakerphone for the bad news and then set out for the editor’s studio in search of a Kentucky Fried miracle.
Thankfully, by this point, my nephew had returned to school.*3 So at least I could take solace in the fact that a good portion, if not all, of his tuition was being paid for with chicken money. A few weeks later, just before we were about to leave for Vancouver to shoot their next commercial, we got the news. After twenty-three years at our agency—from “Finger Lickin’ Good” through our latest theme line, “How good is that?”—they were firing us.
Out of curiosity, while writing this, I went to KFC’s Web site to see if they had evolved and were having what Webb called real dialogue with