From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [13]
The blame isn’t with the client. He’ll take whatever is right for him. If he can’t get it out of an agency that may be giving him garbage, he’s stuck with that agency unless he makes a change. Braniff was at a little agency in Wisconsin when it moved over to Mary Wells, who then was working at Jack Tinker & Partners. The advertising improved right away. Take Alka-Seltzer. An agency called Wade had invented this little fairy, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, who could have passed for the son of Johnny from Philip Morris. They were trying to sell Alka-Seltzer with this little Speedy creep. Well, one day they moved the account over to Jack Tinker and the first thing Tinker did was to kill off Speedy. Or if they didn’t kill him they had him arrested in the men’s room of Grand Central Station on a charge of exposing himself. And they came up with a great campaign, ‘Alka-Seltzer on the Rocks.’ In 1969, Miles Laboratory pulled it out of Tinker and gave it to Doyle, Dane. I don’t know why, but I do know that everybody concerned with the move praised Tinker for the superb job they had done.
Too many agency guys spend their time complaining about their clients. ‘My client won’t let me do anything. My
Good advertising comes from a good subject. Amend that: Good advertising is easier to come by when you have a good subject. Most airline advertising is terrific. In fact, almost all destination advertising is very good. They are talking about romantic spots throughout the world. I mean, who could fail when he’s doing an ad for Tahiti? But have you seen a good ad lately for Korean Airways? You’ve got to admit their advertising isn’t as good as, say, the advertising for Eastern where they used to show a kid jumping off a cliff into the water in Acapulco. You would really have to be a total incompetent to mess up an ad for Jamaica or actually a commercial for any city in this country. You can usually make something out of a city no matter which one it is. The airlines have produced commercials that make Chicago almost look like a palatable place. I mean, that’s great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you’d want to spend more than three hours in. It gets a little tougher when you take a place like Detroit. Have you ever seen a good commercial for Detroit?
Destination advertising is the easiest stuff in the world to do. When I was at Delehanty we had the TAP (Portuguese) Airline account. You don’t have to show a plane. You show the place you get to if you get on that plane. We turned out beautiful ads because Portugal is a great place to do ads for. We were very careful not to mention Salazar or the fact that if you did something wrong in Portugal you could have the world’s first thirty-year vacation.
Advertising agencies can take an off-the-wall country like France and do a terrific job with it. But I’m always amused by the fact that some of the country’s great liberals are in advertising and the ads these guys do for some of our better-known dictatorships in the world are terrific. They do great stuff for Spain, almost as good as Portugal. It’s interesting how some people drop their political convictions when it comes to advertising. I know guys who would make you fly Nazi Airlines in a minute or get you to pack your voodoo kit for a little trip to Haiti.
The quality of most advertising really depends on what has to be said. You’re writing ads on insurance, it’s easy. It’s great to do ads on the stock market. It’s simple to do ads on a camera that gives you a picture sixty seconds after you shoot it. The big problem is the guy who has to do an ad for soap. Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn’t been said maybe twenty thousand times before. I mean, what do you say? Where do you go? No matter what you say, it’s still soap.
This doesn’t mean that