From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [79]
If you’re doing cigarette commercials, forget it. You can’t say anything on cigarette commercials. Nothing. You’re allowed to have a fag run up and down for a while in your commercial but he’s not allowed to have fun in a cigarette commercial. Characters can’t look like they’re having fun. They can’t be endorsed by an athlete, can’t be endorsed by anyone. Characters can’t be too young and they can’t look too bright. Right now, cigarettes are vulnerable. Who can’t be a hero by not knocking cigarettes? The cigarette fight is really the most hypocritical form of censorship going – worse than Miss Cheng or Mrs. McGillicutty.
It’s very hip to attack advertising right now and we’re vulnerable because we’re so segmented. Someone can get up in Congress and say, ‘Well, the money that’s being spent on selling soap could be spent on saving Harlem.’ Everyone will agree to that except those people who are concerned with the making of and selling soap. It becomes easy, or seemingly easy, for a politician to swoop down and attack, but very few of them are so dumb as to attack advertising as a whole. Listen, politicians are some of the greatest advertisers going. Rockefeller – spends a fortune on advertising every time he runs for office. Javits – shrewd as hell. Treats himself like a product. When he takes a look at the surveys during a campaign and sees he is winning by a big margin, he’s like any other advertiser – he simply cuts back on his advertising.
Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin held some hearings a couple of years ago and decided that U. S. tire makers of this country should spend less money on advertising and take that money and build a better tire with the money they saved by not advertising. He was saying they should cut the hell out of their advertising budgets. On the surface this sounds fantastic. As far as I’m concerned, if the tire manufacturers could make a better tire, they certainly would, because it would be a hell of a lot easier to market. But Nelson says they’re spending too much money on advertising. I wrote a column in Marketing/Communications about Nelson and I happened to find out how much money he spent on his last Senatorial campaign. This politician who is yelling at the tire people spent – and it’s a matter of public record at the State Capitol in Madison – spent like $486,338.34 on advertising himself in his last campaign. All right, why doesn’t he cut down on his advertising and maybe use the money to make a better Senator? Maybe he could spend the money on hiring experts to cram him full of knowledge. He could do a lot with that money. What this country needs are more great Senators and Nelson ought to divert some of that ad budget into building better Senators. I could even write a pretty good campaign for him on that concept.
What the politicians use is the salami technique: they attack one group at a time. Now it’s the cigarette companies’ turn, next time maybe it’ll be the drug guys again, and then the cars. They’ll get down to the soap guys eventually. Just watch. When somebody tries to stop them their rationale is, ‘Look, it’s only one slice of this great business and we’re doing it for your own good.’
The salami technique also has been used in truth in advertising and packaging. The U.S.Government has decided that you cannot call your cherry pie cherry pie unless it has thirty-two cherries per pie, or something like that. Now who’s going to yell about the