From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [65]
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.
Then you walk into your room. When Ron and I start working we ask ourselves, ‘What’s bugging everybody?’ What is it? Define the problem. Most copywriters and art directors close the door and don’t mention the product for hours – sometimes days, if we’ve got a lot of time. We sit there and shoot the breeze. Maybe we talk about sex, maybe we talk about the movies. Sometimes the relationship is one of hostility. I’ve been in agencies where the copywriter and the art director were screaming at each other for two or three days. One guy says, ‘Where the hell have you been? I can’t find you.’ The other guy says, ‘I’m not hiding, I’m here. You don’t like to work.’
I used to work with an art director, and his thing was to scream and curse for eight hours a day. Sometimes he busted up furniture, just to make things a little more exciting. I loved working with this guy because you never were quite sure what was going to happen.
One guy might say, ‘Did you go to the movies last night?’ ‘Yeah, let me tell you about the thing I saw last night.’ This guy used to talk for hours about the movies he saw. Another art director I worked with used to talk about his house – his mortgage, his termites, the crabgrass, everything about his lousy house in Jersey. In a way, it’s like two-man group therapy. It goes back and forth very fast and you’re never quite sure who said what. When Ron and I were at Delehanty we did an ad for Talon Zippers – the one with the kid from ‘Peanuts’ on the pitcher’s mound with his fly open – and to this day we still argue over who did it. I insist that I came up with the idea; he says he did. And we’re both not kidding; we both think we came up with the notion. The thing is you blank out during the back-and-forth talking and nobody can remember who came up with which notion.
This same process holds true when you’re working up a television commercial. One guy says, ‘How about we open up with this, and then come in for a close-up?’ The other guy says, ‘No, let’s not have a close-up, let’s pull back for a shot of the aspirin bottle.’ The profanity, the screaming, the yelling, the carrying on, the drinking, all at the same time – it’s one tight crazy little room that explodes, and it’s a very exciting process. To me, this is what advertising is all about because everything follows from that little room. After you’ve got the concept, then you take a photograph, then you have typography, then an engraving, then research to see if the idea will be effective, then you have to find the right media. But all of this is dependent on what goes on in the little room. You don’t need research if nothing went on in that little room. The greatest media buyer in the world can’t help you out if a dumb idea came out of that room. You could have Michelangelo setting type for your ad but it doesn’t mean a thing if there’s no chemistry.
The big problem in advertising is how to put the right team of copywriter and art director together. You’re talking about chemistry or even a wedding, and it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s usually the job of the creative director to match the talent up. Helmut Krone, who just started his own agency with Gene Case, was a star art director for years at Doyle, Dane. But he was feared. Some of the hottest copywriters of our time went into that room with Krone and folded. The problem with Krone