• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 366 0

time somebody tried to bomb the line, the creative director would say, ‘I insist that this is the way we’ve got to go.’ People thought he came up with the line, he was defending it so much. Well, they got the Air France account and then things were even bigger and better for the creative director. I’ve seen it in different advertising trade papers crediting the creative director not only with the line but with pulling in the account. That creative director was making maybe $100,000 a year and riding high. The guy who came up with the line is dead and gone. The creative director was a hero at Fuller & Smith for a long, long time, just on the strength of that campaign. The only thing is that the creative director knows who came up with that line. He knows that he didn’t; that he had to grab it off some poor guy. He has to know this and very late at night that guy must shake just a little bit.

CHAPTER

TEN

CENSORSHIP

‘One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reasonto it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It’s one guy’s idea of what is right for him. It’s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws …’

You don’t spend $50,000 or $60,000 to make a commercial and just put it on the air. It’s not that easy. There are rules and regulations and censorship. There is so much of this that it’s goddamn funny and stupid. Sooner or later every commercial is passed on by someone. The National Association of Broadcasters is the national bunch of censors and they pass on commercials on certain sensitive subjects, like cigarette advertising, personal products, feminine hygiene products, and parts of the body like the belly button. The National Association is very strong on belly buttons. If you get by the N.A.B., then you’ve got to deal with the networks, which have their own censors. And the individual stations, they’ve got their censors too.

One of the biggest problems that all agencies have is the headache of censorship. There is simply no reason to it. Censorship, any kind of censorship, is pure whim and fancy. It’s one guy’s idea of what is right for him. It’s based on everything arbitrary. There are no rules, no standards, no laws. The problem is, the Code of the National Association of Broadcasters changes every week; each week a new directive comes out of the N.A.B. I don’t follow any rules or standards or laws when I do commercials because how can I? What is O.K. this week may not be good next week. There are no rules. There’s only Miss Cheng.

Now Miss Cheng is a very nice chick – her first name is An-Shih – who is about thirty-one or thirty-two years old, and she is the lady whom you see at the National Association of Broadcasters when you want to clear a commercial. Miss Cheng sits in her little room up on Madison Avenue, which is a strange place for a censor to be, she sits there saving the Great American Public from being offended. She has no stake in any of the commercials, no money stake, all she wants to do is keep America clean.

Although Miss Cheng is cute as hell, I have had my biggest problems with her in doing commercials for Feminique. All right, Feminique is a feminine hygiene product, to coin a phrase. Women use the spray so they will smell nice around their vaginas. This is what the stuff does. But you can’t come within miles of saying this in an ad or a commercial. So what we tried to do was get a movie star to endorse the product in a commercial. We tried everybody. Vanessa Redgrave sent us a letter saying that we Americans were crazy over our clean armpits and so forth. She said that she thought Feminique was just one more example of the American craziness about cleanliness. As far as the vagina was concerned, Vanessa Redgrave said women ought to use bidets, soap, water, and baby powder. I’m standing there looking at the letter, and it dawned on me that we’re not going to be able to get anybody.

I mean everybody turned us down, everybody but Linda Darnell, and she’s been dead for