From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [16]
I tell the kids who come in to see me for a job to write me ten public-service ads. The kids want to know what the story is. Well, the story is that in this terrible world there is always somebody starving. The children in Europe may not be starving but they’re starving in Biafra. There are always kids starving someplace in the world. One kid produced an ad that said, ‘There’s more protein in a can of beer than a kid in Biafra gets in a week.’ Another kid came into my office with an ad that said, ‘You’ve got the cure to heart disease in your wallet.’ I used to teach advertising at the School of Visual Arts and one of my students there produced this headline on an anti-Vietnam ad: ‘Will Your Son Be a Light-to-Minor Casualty or a Heavy-to-Major Casualty?’ Y. & R. did the great ‘Give a Damn’ campaign for the Urban Coalition in New York City. Great stuff. And someone produced a classic commercial showing a Negro trying to rent an apartment. The renting agent showing the apartment tries to flush the toilet but it doesn’t work. ‘Ah, a ten-cent washer will fix that,’ he says. The place is falling apart, and the agent keeps pressing the Negro: ‘Come on, are you going to take it or not? I’ve got people waiting to rent this place if you don’t.’ Very powerful stuff and beautifully done.
Where advertising starts to get tough is when all of the products are almost alike. If you take a close look, the rates on a lot of cars you rent are pretty much the same. For Hertz and Avis, they’re almost identical. The plane fare to London is the same whether you fly Pan Am, TWA, BOAC. If you want to go to London by way of Iceland, then the fare is cheaper, but otherwise it’s the same. So the advertising has to come up with the difference. When you look for differences, sometimes you have to stretch a bit. George Lois’s agency – Lois, Holland, Callaway – did a series of commercials for Braniff using two celebrities sitting in a Braniff plane saying, ‘When you’ve got it, flaunt it.’
Shep Kurnit, the president of Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller, once made a remark about that campaign that is pretty accurate: ‘I wouldn’t want to fly on the same plane with Andy Warhol or Sonny Liston.’ Most people in advertising don’t like the current Braniff campaign but that could be their jealousy of George Lois. I’ve got a feeling that the jury is still out on the campaign. ‘Flaunt’ is a very tough word for people to grasp. Actually, if you’ve got it, you usually don’t flaunt it. I think that Mary Wells did a much better job with Braniff when she painted the airplanes because there was something real, something you could see.
What do you do with gasoline? There’s very little brand loyalty in gasoline, so the companies are breaking their necks with their contests. The gas companies are in trouble and they know it. They know the consumer couldn’t really care less what kind of gas he puts in his car. You’re running out of gas and you go into a gasoline station. So to point up the difference they come up with lucky bucks, lucky dollars, the Presidents game, the antique-car game, the professional football players game and every other game they can think of. Not only are the games a must, but the government is going to make the rules for them a lot tougher. People realize you can’t win, that the chances are one in a million of winning.
Mobil has a pretty good campaign going now, the one that says, ‘We want you to live.’ Shell is telling me I have to have Platformate. Esso, I don’t even know what they’re telling me – maybe they’re still trying to shove tigers in your tanks. Somebody else is saying, ‘Visit a gasoline station this week,’ like it’s a great experience. Other people are saying, ‘Our rest rooms are terrific, you’d be proud to have them in your own home.’ That’s crazy. Nine-tenths of the rest rooms in this country are pigsties, and nowadays gas stations are