From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [70]
Sitting there at seven o’clock in the morning we were really desperate, I mean desperate, because the guy is coming in at nine o’clock to see advertising and he doesn’t want to know from anything else. (Creative people in all agencies work best under the gun. If you were to give an agency three years to do something, they would wait until the last minute to do the work. Ron and I always wait until the deadline.) As far as he’s concerned he’s to be shown a campaign and he doesn’t want to know that we’ve been backed up and busy as hell. It’s a funny feeling; what are we going to do? Ron and I always work up to the wire but this was the closest we ever were. Maybe, we thought, this will be the time when we won’t make it.
Well, we started out talking about sex. Seven o’clock! ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine, how are you?’ ‘Boy, did you see Norma walk by here last night? Wow, what a body!’ Comes 7:30 a.m. and nothing’s happening. Like at about quarter of eight I say, ‘What are we going to do with this problem?’ Ron says, ‘Aw, don’t worry. We’ll make it.’ All of a sudden he says, ‘I’ve been thinking about it all morning.’ We started feeling sorry for ourselves. ‘You know, it’s really a pain in the ass,’ I say. ‘You never can go home and like just think of nothing, right?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah. That’s interesting, isn’t it? That you always think of your job. I bet these guys in the institutional investing business feel the same way about themselves. I bet they think that they’re heroes the way we think we’re heroes for being here this early.’
I say, ‘Yeah, that’s interesting. I’ll bet they really think they’re hot stuff because they don’t get to go to lunch because they’re working so hard. Hey, did you ever notice when you don’t go to lunch you really feel better because you think you’re working so hard?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah, I know. I feel great when I’m working like a son of a bitch and I don’t go to lunch. I bet these guys feel the same way, sitting there with their millions of dollars to spend, they must really feel like they’re something when they miss lunch or they have to order a hamburger sent in.’
And I say, ‘Hey, a hamburger. Remember that day we were working with that guy Dave and he ordered a hamburger and it got cold? Remember how proud he was that he didn’t even have time to eat?’
Ron says, ‘Yeah, what a headline – “The Glory of the Cold Hamburger.” That could be it, the whole campaign. “The Glory of the Cold Hamburger.” That was the concept for the entire campaign, not just a single ad. The ideas started coming right out of the concept. The guy shaving in the morning saying that he thinks about stocks even in the bathroom and like he’s putting in a twenty-four-hour day. We know that we want to show the reader of The Institutional Investor a picture of a hamburger and we want to say to him, ‘You know, we understand exactly what it’s like. You’ve got too much money and sometimes you don’t know what to do with all of this money and there are too many people depending on you for you to run out and have a big expense-account lunch. So you order a hamburger in and it gets cold and you know what? You get a big charge out of it. You really think you’re hot stuff for eating this cold hamburger and you know, you’re right.’
The campaign started to grow from the guy feeling the way he does because he works so hard. The fact that he doesn’t get a chance to see his kids. The fact that he shaves and thinks about work. The fact that he hasn’t eaten a decent lunch in months. One by one the ads start to come: ‘The Glory of the Cold Hamburger’; ‘The 24-Hour Workday.’
Ron is drawing like a madman at this point. Now, how do we tie it all together? Well, why are these people working like this? Why are they breaking their necks? Because a lot of people are depending on them. Fine. That’s the whole thing. ‘Call Hirsch