From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [12]
There’s a magazine out right now called Screw and if you can pick up a copy at your local newsstand without getting arrested, it’s worth a look. Quite honestly, they may be overboard on one side, and yet they’re talking closer to the way people talk and think and feel than the Saturday Evening Post did when it folded. Screw has more of an appeal; it’s closer to what the people are.
Doyle, Dane is as close as you can get to what people really are and what people really think. When you run an ad in New York City for El Al Airlines with a headline that says, ‘My Son, the Pilot,’ you are talking the language of the people. It’s a beautifully written ad, supposedly done by a woman who is talking about her son, a pilot for El Al, and her son is going to really take care of you on the flight. In fact, he’s even going to take care of your heartburn from all the horseradish.
I love the El Al ads. Once, when I was at Fuller & Smith & Ross, those ads got me into a bit of trouble. We had just picked up one of the Arab airlines as an account. All I know is that there were a lot of guys wearing funny white things on their heads. I was instructed by the people at Fuller & Smith to take down all the ads tacked up on the walls of my office and keep the place absolutely spotless for the big meeting. I took this as a personal insult. I called up a friend of mine who worked at Doyle, Dane; this guy had every El Al ad and poster they had ever done. I loaded my wall with those El Al posters.
When the guy walking the Arab through the office opened my office door he started to say, ‘And this is Mr. Della Femina, one of our creative …’ He took one look at the walls and turned the Arab completely around and ran out of there. Later on, he called me down to his office and said, ‘Jerry, that was a terrible thing you did. If Abdul had seen those ads it would have been very embarrassing to him as well as to the agency and it could have cost us the account.’ But they all smoothed it over and I kept my job.
To get back to Fuller & Smith when they had Volkswagen, it’s interesting how an agency thinks of an account after it leaves and becomes a smash success. The attitude is, Gee, isn’t it amazing that Volkswagen, which was run by lunkheads when they were at Fuller & Smith, went over to Doyle, Dane and became a very hip group of guys. Same management, same people. They’re at Fuller & Smith and they’re turning out crap. The next day they go to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach and they turn out great advertising. So how can you blame the management of Volkswagen?
Eastern Airlines was considered a terrible account in the industry when it was at Benton & Bowles in 1964. One day they went over to Young & Rubicam, which turned out great advertising for them. The management of Eastern didn’t change overnight, the advertising did. Benson & Hedges was regarded as a dumb, rotten client at Benton & Bowles. They go over to Mary Wells in 1967 and she produces a great series of commercials showing people getting their extra-long Benson & Hedges stuck in elevator doors, and suddenly they turn out to be a bright, intelligent, great client.
There is no such thing as a bad client. But there is such a thing as bad advertising. This list is endless. Talon Zippers, when it was at McCann-Erickson in 1961, was considered to be one of the worst clients of our time. McCann would present campaigns, which were turned down by Talon. Talon hated the stuff McCann turned out and became very frustrated. They couldn’t get what they wanted, and naturally McCann, seeing all these rejected campaigns, thought that they were a lousy client. They weren’t. So with the same advertising manager, the same management guys,