From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [56]
The last figures I looked at for beer sales showed Schaefer climbing out of sight. Budweiser is still the biggest-selling beer in the country. But their sales aren’t climbing the way Schaefer’s are. They’ve tried a number of campaigns and a bunch of commercials. So they’ve got their horses schlepping, and that’s O. K. if you like horses, which I don’t happen to. The best commercial of theirs I’ve seen lately has Ed McMahon, who is a great guy to sell beer, standing there and saying, ‘Folks, it’s that time you’ve all been waiting for. It’s time to pick up two packs of Bud.’ There is no particular reason why a guy should pick up two instead of one, but it gives a lot of beer drinkers inspiration. And these drinkers are usually pretty short of inspiration. So they say to themselves, ‘Gee, you’re right, Ed, I should have picked up two instead of one.’ So people are buying double. You don’t save any money. They just tell you this is the time of year you’ve got to buy two of them rather than one.
Bud does very well – and Schaefer – but that’s about it. Not long ago Jack Tinker did a campaign for Carling’s Black Label, which said that we have our breweries close to every city so our beer is always fresh. They were trying to sell quality to these guys. Fresh as opposed to stale. Beer drinkers know the difference in quality. They know what stale beer is: it’s what they taste in their mouth the next morning when they wake up. They know that taste well, but they wouldn’t buy Carling’s because it’s fresh. So the campaign bombed out.
Although Doyle, Dane is so-so with beer, they’re absolutely great on hard booze. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because most of the guys working at Doyle, Dane drink only hard booze and couldn’t care less about beer. They took a perfectly ordinary scotch, Chivas Regal, and upgraded it, gave it snob appeal. They convinced people to trade up in booze so that when somebody spent $7.50 for a fifth of Chivas Regal he was convinced that the booze was worth it. The ads they did for Chivas were beautifully designed – elegant. Another great booze campaign of theirs, which was done by Ron Rosenfeld, was the Calvert’s ‘soft whiskey’ line. To this day I don’t know what the hell ‘soft whiskey’ means, but it evidently meant something to the guys who were pouring rotgut down their throats, because ‘soft whiskey’ sold like hell.
The worst idea for a booze campaign that I can remember was the one put out several years ago by Schenley’s. A marketing executive at Schenley insisted that their agency have a mascot, and the mascot was named Sunny the Rooster. Sunny the Rooster was supposed to equal that sunny morning flavor. The marketing executive was convinced that if he could tell people that they wouldn’t be hung over and feel like dogs the next day he could sell a lot of booze. What they were trying to say – and couldn’t – was, ‘Listen, buddy, if you drink our booze you’ll never wake up having to look in your wallet to find out who you are and all that kind of nonsense. You drink our stuff and you’ll be perfectly all right.’
What they did was to hang about seven agencies with Sunny the Rooster. So there you have seven agencies trying to come up with a campaign built around that sunny morning flavor and feeling. They turned out Sunny the Roosters galore. Thank God, the campaign never ran. Nobody came up with anything that was halfway decent. Nobody knew whether the agencies they tried were bad or whether Sunny the Rooster was just another crazy notion who should have had his head chopped off early in the game. A lot of guys spent a lot of money on Sunny.
Sometimes great campaigns work, bring in the customers, but then there are other things happening that kill you. Ed McCabe, who now has his own agency of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, used to work