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By Root 425 0

at Carl Ally. Ed McCabe is maybe one of the five top writers in town. He did the Horn & Hardart campaign when he was at Ally, and it was great. It was so great that it reached all kinds of people – including a girl I’ll call Betty-Sue. Now Betty-Sue comes to New York from Kneejerk, North Carolina, and she goes to work for Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller when I was working there. Betty-Sue is a terrific kid except she had a little problem with the English language – she couldn’t speak it. That is, she spoke but you couldn’t understand her. One Monday morning she comes up to me and she says, ‘Jer, I bin reading those Horn and Hardart ads, the ones which say “It May Not Be Fancy but It’s Good.” I said, ‘What’d you say, Betty-Sue?’ She said, ‘Bin reading the Horn and Hardart ads, “It May Not Be.” ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you’ve been reading the Horn and Hardart ads?’

She said, ‘And I decided to go to Horn and Hardart, and I had some of their beans and the beans were gooooood, and I had some lemonmrang pah and it was gooooood, and then I had some coffee and it was gooooood. And then the man sitting across the way exposed himself.’

Unfortunately, this was one of the problems that Ed McCabe faced. He could come up with the selling line that reached a Betty-Sue, but he couldn’t go around and take care of the occasional guy who was walking into Horn & Hardart wearing a raincoat and making quick flashes. But the guy wrote a classic line that sold and got a lot of people to come to Horn & Hardart.

There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been some cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.

Let’s take the airlines again. They have great advertising and the problem is, planes get stacked up, the air-traffic controllers are either walking out on strike or threatening to walk out, you can sit on the ground at La Guardia Airport for two hours trying to get out of town, and what sometimes happens to baggage shouldn’t happen to a dog. The airlines that don’t have service which lives up to the advertising have trouble. The greatest living commercial of all time for Mohawk Airlines will not get me on a Mohawk plane. Let me change to an airline that’s a lot larger: the greatest United Airlines commercial of all time will have trouble convincing me to fly United. I’ll get on a United plane only if it’s like the only airline going at the moment; I don’t like to fly United because they once did a job on my baggage that you wouldn’t believe. Fortunately this kind of foul-up is on the ground.

All the great advertising in the world can never straighten out the stewardess who wakes up cranky one morning. There is nothing in the world an agency can do about the gas station attendant in One Horse Stand, Nebraska, who has a hangover. An agency can try to help with better dealer programs. Maybe. Or take TWA. They obviously felt that this customerrelation problem was enough of a headache to go out and run a campaign offering a million dollars in bonuses to its employees for being nice and polite.

The TWA campaign was excellent. First of all, the million dollars in prizes going to the nice TWA people comes out of the advertising budget. This is absolutely nothing when you’re spending something in the neighborhood of $20 million. Second, the campaign probably cheers up these people working for TWA; it makes me feel that the people are going to be working harder.

Wells, Rich, Greene is doing the TWA campaign and it’s interesting because the same campaign was to be presented to Avis, but they never saw it. An art director at Doyle, Dane came up with the campaign, the idea being that he was going to spend less money on advertising and more money in getting the Avis people to work. They’d give out bonuses and so forth. But the campaign never got out of the agency to be shown to Avis. The art director who had the idea was not