From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [63]
There is a great difference in the way ads and commercials are produced at the creative agencies and at the oldline places. Before Bill Bernbach, old agencies used to produce advertising by the assembly-line method. This method, by the way, is still being used at most of the establishment agencies. First off, in the assembly-line way, a copywriter used to type up thirty, forty, even fifty headlines. All on the same subject. ‘Aspirin Does This,’ ‘Aspirin Does That,’ ‘Aspirin Is for You,’ ‘Aspirin Is Your Friend,’ ‘Aspirin Likes You,’ literally dozens of these things. Then the copywriter takes his headlines and goes to a copy chief, who sits there and looks at them and finally says, ‘All right, number thirty-seven looks like you might be able to work up into some kind of a concept. Number forty-three, if you change this word, might work, too.’
When Rosser Reeves was running Ted Bates every writer would have to put each of his headlines on a single sheet of yellow paper. Then the writers would pin their headlines to a long wall in one of the rooms. Then Reeves used to come by, almost like a general reviewing the troops. He’d have his big red pencil with him and he’d look at the yellow sheets and say, ‘All right, that one. Work that up. You might have something there.’ One guy might have ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways’ and Reeves would say, ‘That’s not bad, that’s not bad. Work up that one.’
You figure he had maybe twelve copywriters taking part in this thing, with something like fifty headlines a copywriter, which gives you six hundred ways to fight something. Out of the six hundred Reeves might pick four or five, and out of those he would sit down one day and come up with his concept of what the problem was, using maybe one of the headlines as a hook.
That was Reeves. At other places the copywriter would sit there and type like a son of a bitch and then go running into a copy chief who would look at it and say, ‘That’s got some merit. Why don’t you work on that?’ When it was all through bouncing back and forth between the copywriter and the copy supervisor, they would ship it into the art director. To the establishment agencies, an art director is a guy who draws. ‘He’s our drawing guy.’ So they go in to their drawing guy with a headline that says ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ Maybe the copywriter has got a little scribble of how the ad should look. Now the art director is, first of all, chained to his desk; they don’t want art directors roaming the halls at large agencies. So he can’t move around too much. He usually is between forty and fifty years old but even if he’s a young guy his mind is fifty. He’s sitting there minding his own business when the copywriter comes in and says, ‘Okay, here’s what we did. We want to say, “Fights Headaches Three Ways” and I think we should show a big pill.’ The art director says, ‘Terrific.’ The copywriter says, ‘We got to have a layout by this afternoon to show to the creative director.’ The art director says, ‘No problem,’ and he puts it together. It’s in the hands of the creative director by that afternoon and that’s it. There’s little relationship between the art director and the copywriter. They hardly know each other. They meet once a year at the Christmas party and the copywriter says to the drawer, ‘Hey, how are you? Boy, we really turned out some great work together this year.’ But they don’t really work together, they don’t get to see each other. It’s really not two minds working on the same problem.
What Bernbach did was put the art director and the copywriter together in a room and let the chemistry take over. He has a lot of respect for people and people’s minds. I think he got the feeling that it was a lot