From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [59]
For years Marlboro cigarettes had a selling line something like ‘escape from the commonplace.’ The advertising was fourth-rate. Burnett got his hand on Marlboro and went out and signed up a bunch of very masculine, very rugged guys and did a great campaign about the Marlboro Man. Now most of these were genuine rugged guys, not masculine-looking fags. He sold the daylights out of Marlboro. Then he switches from the Marlboro Man to Marlboro Country. Everything Burnett touches works. It’s not the way I might do it, but boy, it sells the hell out of the product. Marlboro is now ranked around third of all the cigarettes in the country.
Burnett has a knack for finding a category of people to sell a product to. Another example is Virginia Slims cigarettes. Burnett decided to direct his pitch to one group – the liberated woman. This doesn’t mean that other groups won’t be influenced, but the direct appeal of his message is to only one group. Virginia Slims are telling women, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby,’ and do you know what? A woman has been dying to hear somebody tell her that. She really secretly feels that she has come a long way, and it’s a good, sexy campaign, a very good campaign, and great thinking. Burnett also sells cake mixes like nobody sells cake mixes. The Pillsbury advertising is great, great stuff. My wife sits there and looks at those ads of chocolate cakes and decides she wants to go out and learn to bake. He has an ability to really hit the consumer where he lives. Maytag appliances. You know, here’s a shot of Mrs. Clancy and her thirteen children – and Mrs. Clancy looks like she’s been through the dryer herself after those thirteen children – but there she is in an ad and she’s saying that she couldn’t have survived Mr. Clancy or the thirteen kids without her Maytag dryer which is still working. I mean, I don’t care who you are, that’s bound to sell. It also helps immeasurably that Maytag is a first-rate product with good word-of-mouth about it.
There is a tremendous creative revolution going on today in advertising. But the Bernbachs, the Rosser Reeveses, the Leo Burnetts, the Mary Wellses, despite their outward differences, are really not all that different. Different in execution but not different in basic premise.
Take Rosser Reeves, an authentic genius. His method of execution is to discover one thing about the product that you can make hay out of. Then you zero in on it and you make a lot of noise about it, forgetting everything about the product except this one unique selling proposition.
The key is to find out which button you can press on every person that makes him want to buy your product over another product. What’s the emotional thing that affects people?
The advertising that I had to do for Pretty Feet is a good example. My thinking was that people feel all their lives that they hate their feet – they’re ugly, they’re crinkly, they’re embarrassing. I figure the average woman goes into a shoe store and she’s so embarrassed by her feet that she twists them underneath her. The salesman’s got to see them in order to fit her for the pair of shoes, and she doesn’t even want him to see her feet. That to me is the key to selling Pretty Feet.
The execution might be different. My ad might say, ‘What’s the ugliest part of your body?’ – which is a bit of a street-corner wise guy talking. David Ogilvy might say, ‘Twelve ways your feet can look better.’ Leo Burnett would have his Sally Claussen of Omaha, Nebraska, saying, ‘I couldn’t stand my feet for the first thirty years of my life but now I’ve found this wonderful thing that made them beautiful.’
When I was at Daniel & Charles, we always had a bit about how different agencies would answer their telephones. It shows you what I mean by the difference in execution. When you called Bates, they would answer by saying,