From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [53]
And there was no management. They hired a guy to be president but he was nothing but a caretaker. Manny was out saving the world through advertising, and Moe was out at the track every day losing his shirt. Clients were being left out in the halls waiting to see somebody. They used to wait hours. Creative people used to take them into their offices and give them coffee while they were waiting. Clients are human and finally they got to the point where they started telling Manny and Moe, ‘Screw you. I mean your advertising isn’t even good any more, and who needs all the abuse?’ The agency folded a couple of years ago.
All of the newer agencies blow something now and then. Even the guys at Doyle, Dane. A couple of years ago they did a campaign for a new beer out by the Rheingold Brewery people – the new stuff was called Gablinger’s Beer. The thing about Gablinger’s was that it was very low in calories, and the thought was, ‘We’ll sell this to all those guys who drink beer and want to lose weight.’
Somewhere, somehow, they blew it. Somebody in research made the first mistake, which was thinking that beer drinkers wanted to lose weight while drinking beer. Not true. Twenty percent of the people in this country who buy beer drink about 80 percent of all the beer consumed. I have an image in my mind of your typical beer drinker: the man never has a shirt on. He’s always in his undershirt, one of those old-fashioned undershirts, not a tee shirt. I may be wrong there, but I could swear that your typical beer drinker is proud of his beer belly. There he is, swilling beer all day long, and the only thing he has to show for it is his belly. It’s his sign of masculinity.
Now, you have a great example of one error compounding another error compounding still another error. So the first error – thinking that these guys want to lose weight – leads to the second error, which is that you can build a campaign on this attitude and spend $5 million and tie up the whole beer market because all of these beer people want to lose weight. Campaigns will work only if the initial premise is true. But it’s like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: the first brick was crooked and after that everything started going sideways, and you wind up with a fucking silly-looking building or you wind up with a pretty terrible campaign. Since the first premise in Gablinger’s case was wrong, the thing went bad all up and down the line. Beer drinkers want to be fat. They love to watch their bellies. Figure it out: they like looking at their bellies because they never see their feet. Go into the bars right now. These guys start drinking at nine o’clock in the morning – and they have their more than one by 9:05 a.m. And they drink and they drink and drink and drink, and this is the beer market.
The only thing you have to worry about in selling beer is to give these guys enough time to waste. I mean, don’t give these guys anything to do in which they have to use their hands, other than bowling. Bowling is O. K. because all they have to do is get up every seven minutes or so and roll a ball and then sit down as fast as they can and start drinking beer again.
Beer companies shouldn’t sponsor golf matches because golf is death on a beer drinker. If you’re out on the fourteenth hole, you can’t have a beer unless you throw away the clubs and lug beer around instead. Just find enough leisure time for the beer drinkers, that’s your only worry. Leisure time, in a beer drinker’s mind, means all they have to do is reach for a glass or for a bottle. Maybe they’ll have to get up from the television set and go to the refrigerator, but that’s it. Your real beer drinker can sit home watching television and polish off two six-packs a night. If he’s thirsty, or it’s hot out, make that even more. His wife will drink only four or five cans because she’s suddenly decided that she really shouldn