From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [81]
What the cigarette people did was to hire their own censor. They felt it would be easier to hire a guy to censor them now even more than the Government ever could. So they went out and hired Robert Meyner, formerly Governor of New Jersey. And the industry tells Meyner, ‘Censor us. Keep us from doing things that the Government will get mad at.’ He went so far that he’s censoring them now even more than the Government ever could.
A friend of mine said to me not long ago, ‘I’m going to beat them. I’ve got to get a cigarette commercial on the air.’ Finally he came up with an idea. He would get the rights to the ‘59th Street Bridge Song’ which has a line in the lyrics that goes ‘feeling groovy,’ and he would show a guy and a girl walking through Manhattan, smoking, and in the background, ‘Feeling Groovy.’ The Code said no good: ‘Feeling Groovy’ is a young song. It’s young music. Get some older music. My friend was dead, finished.
Do you remember the famous ads made by Colonel Elliot Springs for Springmaid sheets? Lewd, tasteless stuff. He would have an Indian maiden with her dress up to her belly button and next to her would be an Indian guy. It was obvious that they had just finished screwing around. If you couldn’t figure that out for yourself, the headline helped you out: ‘A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet.’ You don’t see that any more. In the end, the public killed it. They decided not to buy the sheets. Eventually tasteless advertising doesn’t work, and there’s no percentage in trying it.
The people kill bad advertising in a very good way. They don’t write too many letters to the manufacturer; they just don’t buy the product. All of a sudden you look around and you see sales dropping right before your eyes. The letters that the networks get are few and far between, as far as commercials are concerned. But when companies or networks do get letters, they get very uptight. I could control the entire advertising business with five little old ladies and five pens. All a company has to do is get more than twenty letters on a single commercial and it’s out, it’s dead. The company gets very nervous and the commercial is finished, washed up.
I once wrote an ad for men’s socks and the ad showed a man standing next to a dog. I don’t know why or can’t even remember why we had a dog in the ad but it doesn’t matter. The dog was there. Well, Kayser-Roth, the company that made the socks, got a letter from somebody in Ohio. The letter said that the dog is the filthiest of all animals and it went on to describe the habits of a dog – it was a pretty nauseating letter. But the letter got up to Chester Roth, the president of the company, and he thought enough of it to send it down to somebody, who thought enough of it to send it down to someone else, and it caused a little stir. Obviously, the guy who wrote it was a real nut. Four other dog haters could eliminate a lousy dog from an ad. We left our dog in but it was a close call.
The story that the censors put out is that they’re doing it for the public good. That’s all you ever hear about why they do it. They’re going to ruin commercials, they’re going to damage advertising, all because of the public good.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
RUMORS
AND
PITCHES
‘The outsider who reads about this kind of infighting might be horrified, but strangely enough I enjoy it. I think it’s a lot of fun. I like it when somebody zaps me. The guy who said we weren’t taking small accounts did a beautiful job – he really got me. He put me in a position where I couldn’t fight back and I can admire the job he did. The thing to remember about the entire rumor game is that you can’t touch a solid account and you can’t bother a solid advertising man …’
I once made a presentation to an account when I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. The guy who