From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [68]
It really doesn’t matter what you did before you got into advertising. David Ogilvy worked in a restaurant kitchen and he’s done quite nicely since. The key thing is, how much do you learn after you get into the business and then how well do you tell the consumer what you’ve learned? This is what it’s all about. When John Kennedy was alive, a friend of his was quoted as saying that he had gone to school with Kennedy and he was just as smart as Kennedy in those days. But when they graduated, he got a job and Kennedy kept on learning. He never stopped learning. After a while there was a world of difference between the two.
You learn, you have to to survive. The first thing you do after picking up an account is learn. When we got the American Broadcasting Company’s owned-and-operated stations, we traveled to their five stations. We heard all their news programs. We talked to their station managers. We learned, learned, learned, until we were almost ready to drop. It was a cram course in broadcasting and the thing was coming out of our ears.
If you bought what the ratings said, ABC News was running third behind CBS and NBC. But even though they were running third, ABC did have some characteristics that were very exciting. They knew that they liked going out and scoring newsbeats.
After we listened to everybody, Ron and I sat down and tried to figure it out. A couple of hours passed, and then in the middle of some story Ron was telling me he said, ‘What is it that we’re trying to say? Are we trying to say that ABC’s news guys are not as staid as Cronkite?’
I came back at that and said, ‘Look, you know what it is? It’s like The Front Page.’ He said, ‘I never saw The Front Page.’ I said that the type of news they have on ABC is not unlike the type of news coverage they used to have back in the days of The Front Page and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur creating Hildy Johnson. It’s not the white-glove school of news that we’ve come to know and accept.
I said, ‘It was an era of …’
And he said, ‘Oh, like an exciting kind of news, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, were there some people who represent that kind of news?’ I said, ‘Sure. Guys like Murrow, like Walter Winchell, guys like Ernie Pyle.’ Ron said, ‘Look, why don’t we start using these guys? And say our news has been patterned after the way they lived and the way they went out and got news?’
I said, ‘All right, fine. We’ll use Murrow. Murrow’s great because he used to work for CBS. Now we’ve got a little more interest. We can imply in the ad,“Although he worked for a competitor, we always admired him and admired that he had the courage to go out and cover the Battle of Britain the way he did.” We admired him and now we’ll take many of the qualities of his reporting and apply it to our news programming.’ Now we’ve got the beginning of an ad.
Nobody’s put pencil to paper yet. We’re just talking concept. The concept slowly comes out that we’re going to tell the world that we have the same kind of news they were doing in the 1930s and the 1940s. Ron says, ‘Gee, that’s it. That’s our last line. That’s the whole concept of what the news is, that we’re an exciting news station. We go out and get the news the way they did in the 1930s.’ And from there on, out comes a campaign. Out comes the whole business. It just snowballs.
Now then, if Ron and I do all of this work, how can we stand to pick up the ad, hand it to a guy who’s an account executive and say, ‘All right. Go out and sell this to a client.’ Yet this is what happens every day. And this is the big mistake of advertising as far as I’m concerned. We’re there, we’re sweating it out, we had twelve ideas, we kept three, we know exactly what we’re doing. And in the meantime we finish it off and we say, ‘Here, go out and tell them that this is good and they should buy it.’ Well, that won’t work. At my agency, we go out and