From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [58]
The idea has to work. It’s just too good not to. It’s got all the elements of a good campaign: it’s amusing, it’s got a good commercial situation around it and it gives people a reason why they can expect good service on TWA. You can’t help but think something good is going to happen on TWA the next time you fly with them. And you’ve got the best of all possible worlds when you get your employees to back up your campaign. Forget all that crap about wearing little buttons. Here your employee is actually taking part in the campaign, and when the employees of a service organization feel they’re important, it’s everything. If you can get somebody at TWA to smile and act pleasant just because it’s part of this whole thing and she feels like she’s part of something, you’ve got a great campaign going for you.
Great campaigns that reach down to the employees of an organization are very rare. ‘We Want You to Live’ from Mobil reaches all the way down. Avis and Hertz do, too. When Avis said, ‘We’re number 2, we try harder,’ the people who worked for Avis responded very well. Research was done at the time, and it showed that the Hertz people were actually affected by the Avis campaign. They found that the Hertz employees were feeling low and deflated. Here Avis is jabbing away at them, and the company they work for is running commercials showing a crazy guy who flies into the front seat of a convertible. Norman, Craig & Kummel were the inventors of that flying fruitcake, and when Avis started hammering away, Hertz pulled the account out of Norman, Craig and gave it to Carl Ally. It wasn’t that easy for Ally, either. He had to come up with what essentially is a very unpopular notion: taking on a guy head to head who admits he is second. And of course he also had the employee problem as well. The Hertz people felt rotten, and here was this aggressive young competitor coming up on the outside.
What Doyle, Dane had done for Avis was take a concept that had been around for years: You know, we’re not as big as the next guy but we do a lot more. Nobody had ever quite crystallized this concept into ‘We’re number 2, We Try Harder.’ I’ve done ads for Univac that said basically the same thing, trying to use the notion of Univac versus IBM, but not as well. Everybody’s always got a situation where they’re second but nobody had ever come right out and said it point-blank. And that’s the difference between a so-so campaign and a great campaign.
In my opinion, one of the agencies that consistently produces superior campaigns is Leo Burnett. The interesting thing about Leo Burnett is, first of all, he must be seventy-five years old. So immediately he’s not some long-haired kid. Second, his agency is in Chicago, and Chicago is really not major league. What makes him so brilliant is that he’s got his roots in the Middle West. He’s an ex-newspaperman and he really knows the people, he knows how people think, and he knows what makes people go. He produces very simple advertising, so simple that it’s deceptive. You almost think it isn’t good. It isn’t sophisticated, and it doesn’t make you laugh. But boy, it sells goods.
Burnett is the agency that figured out a way to sell vegetables: they invented this green eunuch called the Jolly Green Giant. The giant stands for great quality and he comes from the Valley of the Green Giant and the people look at this big green guy and figure, ‘Gee, it’s got to be good stuff.’ And they buy. Who knows what the Green Giant stands for? Maybe because he’s so big he means quality. If I had a product to market in the Middle West, I would go right to Burnett. Burnett even tells people what a corny agency he has, but he’s not corny. He is a very brilliant man. That big green son of a bitch, that Jolly Green Giant, is fantastic. He sells beans, corn, peas, everything. When you watch the Jolly Green Giant, you know it’s fantasy and yet you buy the product. Do