From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [15]
Ron also was involved with a problem dealing with a first-aid cream, a Johnson & Johnson product. This stuff was a painless antiseptic for cuts, scratches, things like that. Now here’s Johnson & Johnson, a hell of a good company, and they go and invent an antiseptic that doesn’t drive you up the wall when you put it on. They send it out on a test and nobody buys the stuff the second time around. The company can’t figure out what’s wrong. They ran tests again and they discovered that people have to feel pain before they’ll accept the fact that they’re getting healed. They have to feel a burning sensation. And what’s wrong with this stuff? It’s obviously no good because when you put it on it doesn’t burn. Forget that the cut is healing, there wasn’t any burn.
So the guys at Johnson & Johnson who broke their backs to figure out this marvelous stuff put a little alcohol back into the cream for no other reason than to give the stuff a little wallop. I figure the research scientists really wondered what the country was coming to, but as soon as the alcohol got put in the sales started to go up again. People wanted to feel that burning sensation because when you’re burning that means you’re suffering, and everyone knows you’ve got to suffer in order to get better.
The poor copywriter? He’s sitting there turning out the greatest campaign of all times that says this stuff doesn’t burn – when burning happens to be the one thing you need to sell the product. It really isn’t such an easy business at times.
The Hertz-Avis campaign is a classic in so many ways. According to people I’ve talked to, the Avis ‘We Try Harder’ campaign by Doyle, Dane was never meant to beat Hertz. But that’s the way it looked in the ads and the commercials. When the Avis campaign began, Hertz was number one and Avis and National were running neck and neck for number two. But look how clever it was: Avis attacks the guy who is number one and makes it a one-two situation and nobody even remembers that National is still around. I really don’t think Avis took all that many customers away from Hertz; they grabbed them off from National, from Olins, from Budget-Rent-A-Car, from all the smaller car-rentals companies who are running four, five, even number six to Hertz.
Everybody’s looking at the ads and saying, Wow, what strategy, they’re attacking Hertz! But they really weren’t. What happened is that the guy who used to rent from the number-four outfit decides to trade up: he’ll now try the number-two company. It also was a great campaign for the businessman who does a lot of renting of cars. He sits there and says to himself that his boiler-plate factory is maybe number six to American Standard and he feels sympathy for these Avis guys, so instead of going to National, he’ll try Avis.
Now the Carl Ally people, who took over the Hertz account, were faced with the Avis problem. They helped Avis, really, because suddenly they acknowledged the existence of someone else in the field. For the first time the guy who was on top admitted that there was a guy under him. But they had to do this. Their surveys showed that the Hertz employees actually felt lousy about the Avis campaign, so it was necessary to come up with a campaign that answered Avis. In doing this, they helped cement the one-two situation that Avis had begun. They’ll be teaching the Avis campaign in advertising classes for years. It was brilliant, and it will be a classic.
Next to destination advertising, the easiest kind of campaign to produce is public-service advertising. Anybody – but anybody – can write great public-service stuff. Every year agencies win all kinds of awards for their public-service campaigns and there’s a reason why: the subject matter lends itself to dramatic advertising. I don’t want to sound cynical, but think about it for a minute: you’re talking about starving people, diseased people, Korean kids without