From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [10]
Despite all the talk about romance, boozing, and carrying on, the advertising business is not what you think it is. Crazy? Yes. Romantic and glamorous? Not one bit. The wild stuff, I’m afraid, is very much overrated.
CHAPTER
TWO
WHO
KILLED
SPEEDY
ALKA-
SELTZER?
‘Good advertising gets exposure. People talk about it, notice it, think about it. The client is standing up there waiting at the train station for the New Haven to take him into New York and he’s dying to be stopped by his buddies. He is dying for them to compliment him on his new campaign. Everyone wants to be praised. “Boy, you’ve got a hell of an ad there.” That’s what the client wants to hear. Plus the cash register …’
In the beginning, there was Volkswagen. That’s the first campaign which everyone can trace back and say, ‘This is where the changeover began.’ That was the day when the new advertising agency was really born, and it all started with Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. They began as an agency around 1949 and they were known in the business as a good agency, but no one really got to see what they were doing until Volkswagen came around.
Volkswagen was being handled in the United States by Fuller & Smith & Ross. Doyle, Dane took the account over around 1959. One of the first ads to come out for Volkswagen was the first ad that anyone can remember when the new agency style really came through with an entirely different look. That ad simply said, ‘Lemon.’ The copy for ‘Lemon’ said once in a while we turn out a car that’s a lemon, in which case we get rid of it. We don’t sell them. And we are careful as hell with our cars, we test them before we sell them, so the chances are you’ll never get one of our lemons.
For the first time in history an advertiser said that he was capable, on rare occasions, of turning out an inferior product. An advertiser was saying that all wasn’t sweetness in life, that everything wasn’t fantastic in the world of business, and people took to it immediately. Volkswagen became a successful campaign, and an overwhelmingly successful product.
No one had ever called his product a lemon before. By today’s standards, of course, this is pretty ordinary stuff. It was the first time anyone really took a realistic approach to advertising. It was the first time the advertiser ever talked to the consumer as though he was a grownup instead of a baby.
Before ‘Lemon,’ they ran an ad that said, ‘Think Small.’ Now the average American car buyer, who has been raised on chrome and plastic and tailfins all his life, looks at that ad and starts to think small. The Detroit reaction to all this was: It will never do. What is this, calling your product a lemon? It was the equivalent of a politician saying, ‘I’m not going to keep all my promises. I’m going to lie on occasion.’ It was the first time anyone ever told the truth in print. And the reaction was immediate – people started talking about Volkswagen advertising.
The Volkswagen ads didn’t make a big fetish of the company’s name. They kept their name down in a very small logotype at the bottom of the ad. It was handled in such a way that somebody was talking directly to the consumer in a language which the consumer was dying to hear. It was a tremendous success. ‘Lemon,’ ‘Think Small,’ all of them not only built up Volkswagen but led directly to the advertising we have today.
Detroit, of course, not only ignored the advertising – they ignored the message of the small car, too. After Volkswagen came Renault and Volvo and Peugeot and dozens of others. Detroit figured what this country still needs is a large boat that you can’t park and falls apart in three years. First Detroit