From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [69]
The outsider thinks that all you have to do is win the account and from then on everything goes smoothly. Not true. You’re constantly selling to the account. True, when you get the account, everything is a little easier, but with each campaign you’ve got to sell it to the client. Each time.
The way we work there is little difference between the art director and the copywriter. We’re almost one person. I can do the layouts, Ron can come up with the selling line. And you discard ideas, you get rid of them.
Last year I came up with what I thought was a pretty good concept for Cinzano Vermouth. Ron didn’t think so. We fought over it for days. It came about after one of our talks with their sales manager who mentioned that all vermouth turned yellow after a while. ‘Every manufacturer has lots of bottles of yellow vermouth that nobody wants,’ he said.
‘Hey, that’s interesting,’ I said. ‘What happens when you have yellow vermouth? You can’t sell it now. Does everybody have this problem?’
‘Yeah.’
Later, back in our office, I said to Ron, ‘You know, yellow vermouth is an interesting notion. I wonder how you could make hay from something like this. What if you date the bottles? What if you put a date on the bottle telling the consumer when it was bottled. You could tell the people that when the stuff starts to go yellow you can’t make a good martini with it. You can throw it in food, you can wash with it, but you can’t use it to make a martini.’
But Ron doesn’t buy it. ‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘It’s too hard to do.’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s pull it down to its simplest form. What do you do? You put a little tag on the bottle with a date on it. No other problem.’
Back and forth the idea went, for days. Every time we’d pass in the hall I’d say, ‘What about the dating of the bottles?’ Every time he’d say, ‘Ah, that’s bullshit. It’s a gimmick.’ I’d say, ‘All right, it’s a gimmick. Let’s present it to them as a gimmick. Let’s tell them what we want to do is that we have a gimmick that we want to show them.’
One of the key things in presenting a campaign is that you should never pitch a half-developed idea because you’re assuming that they can visualize what’s in your mind, which they can’t, and you’re taking a chance on having a good idea killed right in front of your eyes. If I had gone up to the client and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to date the bottles,’ the client probably would have said, ‘Ah, it’ll never work. How are you going to do it? It’s not practical.’ But if you go to the client with a bottle and say, ‘Here’s the label with the date. Here’s the advertising for it, here’s the thinking behind it. Here’s how it becomes advertising. Here’s a radio commercial, here’s a storyboard for a television commercial, here’s what we’re going to do’ – if you do it this way, you’ve got a better chance of selling it. I’ve seen guys blow good campaigns because they got so excited about them that they presented them not fully developed. In the end, my idea for Cinzano got shot down by Ron. He finally convinced me that basically the idea was too much of a gimmick and we dropped it.
Naturally the pace of the meeting between the art director and the copywriter varies, depending on when the ad or the commercial has to get out. Just the same, the chemistry is fantastic to watch. If you’ve got three days to come up with something, then you can really take your time. Or maybe it has to be out in a half hour, in which case the whole thing is speeded up.
One morning last summer Ron and I had to have some advertising ready to show at nine o’clock in the morning. We both got to the office at seven o’clock and neither of us had any idea what we wanted to say. The subject was institutional investing, and we had to have a campaign ready to run in a magazine called The Institutional Investor. That magazine is read by guys who have lots of dollars to spend in the market. Our client was Hirsch & Company, the stockbrokers, and through The Institutional Investor they were trying to reach the guy who is working for the ILGWU who’s got maybe