What the Dog Saw [37]
At McCann, Ilon Specht was working with L’Oréal, a French company that was trying to challenge Clairol’s dominance in the American hair-color market. L’Oréal had originally wanted to do a series of comparison spots, presenting research proving that their new product — Preference — was technologically superior to Nice ’n Easy because it delivered a more natural, translucent color. But at the last minute the campaign was killed because the research hadn’t been done in the United States. At McCann, there was panic. “We were four weeks before air date and we had nothing — nada,” Michael Sennott, a staffer who was also working on the account, says. The creative team locked itself away: Specht, Madris — who was the art director on the account — and a handful of others. “We were sitting in this big office,” Specht recalls. “And everyone was discussing what the ad should be. They wanted to do something with a woman sitting by a window, and the wind blowing through the curtains. You know, one of those fake places with big, glamorous curtains. The woman was a complete object. I don’t think she even spoke. They just didn’t get it. We were in there for hours.”
Ilon Specht has long, thick black hair, held in a loose knot at the top of her head, and lipstick the color of maraschino cherries. She talks fast and loud, and swivels in her chair as she speaks, and when people walk by her office they sometimes bang on her door, as if the best way to get her attention is to be as loud and emphatic as she is. Reminiscing not long ago about the seventies, she spoke about the strangeness of corporate clients in shiny suits who would say that all the women in the office looked like models. She spoke about what it meant to be young in a business dominated by older men, and about what it felt like to write a line of copy that used the word woman and have someone cross it out and write girl.
“I was a twenty-three-year-old girl — a woman,” she said. “What would my state of mind have been? I could just see that they had this traditional view of women, and my feeling was that I’m not writing an ad about looking good for men, which is what it seems to me that they were doing. I just thought, Fuck you. I sat down and did it, in five minutes. It was very personal. I can recite to you the whole commercial, because I was so angry when I wrote it.”
Specht sat stock still and lowered her voice: “I use the most expensive hair color in the world. Preference, by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about money. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not just the color. I expect great color. What’s worth more to me is the way my hair feels. Smooth and silky but with body. It feels good against my neck. Actually, I don’t mind spending more for L’Oréal. Because I’m” — and here Specht took her fist and struck her chest — “worth it.”
The power of the commercial was originally thought to lie in its subtle justification of the fact that Preference cost ten cents more than Nice ’n Easy. But it quickly became obvious that the last line was the one that counted. On the strength of “Because I’m worth it,” Preference began stealing market share from Clairol. In the 1980s, Preference surpassed Nice ’n Easy as the leading hair-color brand in the country, and in 1997 L’Oréal took the phrase and made it the slogan for the whole company. An astonishing 71 percent of American women can now identify that phrase as the L’Oréal signature, which, for a slogan — as opposed to a brand name — is almost without precedent.
4.
From the very beginning, the Preference campaign was unusual. Polykoff’s Clairol spots had male voice-overs. In the L’Oréal ads, the model herself spoke, directly and personally. Polykoff’s commercials were “other-directed” — they were about what the group was saying (“Does she or doesn’t she?”) or what a husband might think (“The closer he gets, the better you look”). Specht’s line was what a woman says to herself. Even in the choice of models, the two campaigns diverged. Polykoff wanted fresh, girl-next-door types.