From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [60]
CHAPTER
EIGHT
FIGHTS
HEADACHES
THREE
WAYS
‘The average copywriter and art director never stop learning. You have to know your product so well you could go out and be a salesman for the company pushing the product. What you’re trying to do in all of this is to isolate the problem of the company – naturally they wouldn’t have switched their advertising to your agency if everything was going along fine. What you’re trying to do is to crystallize the problem. Once you arrive at the problem, then your job is really almost over, because the solving of the problem is nothing. The headache is finding out what the problem is …’
I know that a lot of people are talking about this so-called creative revolution in advertising. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on the subject last summer. But it’s interesting that when we talk about the creative revolution we don’t talk about the great creativity which has been part of advertising for decades. There’s a book out with one hundred of the greatest ads ever written and I would love to have written every one of them. Some of those ads go back to 1901. One of the ads is a tiny classified that says simply, ‘We’re looking for men who are willing to give up their lives.’ The whole story was that an expedition was being planned to go to the Arctic, and the guys behind the expedition said, ‘We’re looking for men who are willing to go out on an adventure of a lifetime, but they may die on this great adventure.’ Or get frostbit. A hell of a good ad.
Creative revolution may be an awkward way of saying there is good advertising and then there is garbage. It’s always been that way. Today, of course, you’ve got some pretty strange kids turning out advertising, so for lack of a better name for these kids you could call them creative. Clients today really aren’t aware of the extent of the weird behavior in agencies. They don’t know about the real loose nuts in the agency. Agencies keep these guys in closets during presentations; otherwise a guy is going to show up high or he’s going to do something pretty silly. The average client doesn’t get to see the real weirdos; he’ll get to see a guy he might consider weird, and by his standards is weird, but this guy is not agency-weird.
You take this guy Herb I had working for me, the fellow who wanted to own a live alarm clock. He wrote ads and commercials when the city was trying to pass a bond issue to improve the commuter railroads. One of the commercials showed what looked like a thousand people being pushed into a commuter train. That commercial was done from the point of view of the poor commuter. You could feel from that commercial how a guy like Herb could relate to the whole commuter problem. He works best on problems that are problems to most people. Nobody could know the little man better than Herb, because Herb is a little man who is concerned with the problems of life. He’s close to it. He knows what it’s all about. He can really feel and really relate to the consumer.
You can see a lot of Herb’s personality coming out in his advertising and he’s not unusual in this respect. A lot of people’s personalities show up in their ads. I was once turned down for a job when I was starting out by a guy who said, ‘You write like a street-corner wise guy.’ At that time, it could be that there was hostility in my copy and it showed through – and maybe I still do write that way, though I like to think my hostility quotient is way down.
Evan Stark once wrote an ad for an air conditioner that took place in hell. You know, this is hell, and the devil gets all the bad guys and shoves them in a room and turns off the RCA Whirlpool air conditioner. That’s what Evan felt hell was. The devil turns off the air conditioner. But this is Evan’s personality. He feels and believes this sort of stuff. And that’s what makes