From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [61]
Guys like Charlie Moss and George Lois and even Ron Rosenfeld see things a lot differently from the average guy. I caught a real wild commercial the other day, a crazy thing with a car talking. Now how could a guy come up with a talking car in a commercial? Well, the chances are it was written by a copywriter who talks to cars – you know, he believes that cars do talk and if you talk to a car the car will talk right back.
All these strange guys eventually produce. At four o’clock in the morning, Herb was a fantastic writer. His personal problems never showed up in his advertising, but his personality did. I can sit and look at commercials and ads and tell you who wrote them. Guys who are wigged out write wigged-out stuff.
The giant accounts – they don’t care about the craziness. All a General Foods worries about is the bottom of the line. The bottom of the line as far as they’re concerned is that a guy showed up with an ad. The fact that it was done by a psychotic doesn’t mean anything to them. They couldn’t care less who did it. You could throw some copy and artwork into a machine, and if an ad came out they would be happy with it. The loose nuts are the problem only of the agency president who has to put up with them. Naturally it’s a strain. I had a guy come into my office one day and tell me he didn’t like the way the sun was shining in his window. I swear this is the truth. I said, ‘Did you ever hear of a shade?’ He said, ‘There’s something wrong, it’s bothering me and I want another office.’ Well, people usually come in and say, ‘I’d like to have a bigger office.’ No, he had to come in and say he didn’t like the way the sun was shining into his window. Loose upstairs. We had another guy working for us who would take maybe three or four weeks on one ad. He would sit there and order $1,000 worth of stats for an ad that eventually cost $400 when it was printed and finished. So I’m seeing a $1,000 stat bill, with hours and hours of time, that must have cost my agency $6,000 to produce and when it runs it costs maybe $800 to place so the agency nets $120. I had to get rid of him and one day he met someone on the street who said, ‘You were fired by Della Femina, weren’t you?’ He talked the way he worked. ‘They … said … I … didn’t … work … fast … enough …’
Most of the loose nuts in town work for the boutique agencies, which is the derogatory term used when the large agencies want to put down the small agencies. As far as I’m concerned, boutique advertising is the new advertising. Someone once made an analogy comparing the problems that we’re now having in our schools with the problems now going on in advertising. In advertising, just like the schools, there is a group of people who are threatening an establishment and the establishment is fighting the threat. Perhaps the only difference is that a lot of us don’t want to burn down the place, but we are a threat to the established group, which is made up of agencies like Ted Bates, J. Walter Thompson, Lennen & Newell, Foote, Cone & Belding, Compton, D’Arcy and others. They’ve been here many years and they haven’t been bucked for many years, and all of a sudden guys are starting agencies and they have the audacity to take business away from the establishment.
In 1969 I went down south and pitched a giant tobacco company and picked up some business. Ten years ago I couldn’t have gotten into any place in the whole state of North Carolina. They’d have taken one look at me at the state line and turned me away as some kind of menace. This is what is driving the establishment crazy.
By definition, a boutique is small. The establishment says that boutiques are cutesie-poo, very superficial, very flowery. Their idea of what a boutique is comes from what their wives tell them about the cute little boutique they found on Madison Avenue. The guy running this boutique might be standing behind the counter without a shirt on, maybe just some beads, and in the mind of the establishment this is no good. So they sat around and tried to come up with the worst name