When the guy walking the Arab through the office opened my office door he started to say, ‘And this is Mr. Della Femina, one of our creative …’ He took one look at the walls and turned the Arab completely around and ran out of there. Later on, he called me down to his office and said, ‘Jerry, that was a terrible thing you did. If Abdul had seen those ads it would have been very embarrassing to him as well as to the agency and it could have cost us the account.’ But they all smoothed it over and I kept my job.
To get back to Fuller & Smith when they had Volkswagen, it’s interesting how an agency thinks of an account after it leaves and becomes a smash success. The attitude is, Gee, isn’t it amazing that Volkswagen, which was run by lunkheads when they were at Fuller & Smith, went over to Doyle, Dane and became a very hip group of guys. Same management, same people. They’re at Fuller & Smith and they’re turning out crap. The next day they go to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach and they turn out great advertising. So how can you blame the management of Volkswagen?
Eastern Airlines was considered a terrible account in the industry when it was at Benton & Bowles in 1964. One day they went over to Young & Rubicam, which turned out great advertising for them. The management of Eastern didn’t change overnight, the advertising did. Benson & Hedges was regarded as a dumb, rotten client at Benton & Bowles. They go over to Mary Wells in 1967 and she produces a great series of commercials showing people getting their extra-long Benson & Hedges stuck in elevator doors, and suddenly they turn out to be a bright, intelligent, great client.
There is no such thing as a bad client. But there is such a thing as bad advertising. This list is endless. Talon Zippers, when it was at McCann-Erickson in 1961, was considered to be one of the worst clients of our time. McCann would present campaigns, which were turned down by Talon. Talon hated the stuff McCann turned out and became very frustrated. They couldn’t get what they wanted, and naturally McCann, seeing all these rejected campaigns, thought that they were a lousy client. They weren’t. So with the same advertising manager, the same management guys, they move over to Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller and suddenly Talon has great advertising.* I know for a fact that the Delehanty people don’t regard Talon as a difficult client to deal with.
The blame isn’t with the client. He’ll take whatever is right for him. If he can’t get it out of an agency that may be giving him garbage, he’s stuck with that agency unless he makes a change. Braniff was at a little agency in Wisconsin when it moved over to Mary Wells, who then was working at Jack Tinker & Partners. The advertising improved right away. Take Alka-Seltzer. An agency called Wade had invented this little fairy, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, who could have passed for the son of Johnny from Philip Morris. They were trying to sell Alka-Seltzer with this little Speedy creep. Well, one day they moved the account over to Jack Tinker and the first thing Tinker did was to kill off Speedy. Or if they didn’t kill him they had him arrested in the men’s room of Grand Central Station on a charge of exposing himself. And they came up with a great campaign, ‘Alka-Seltzer on the Rocks.’ In 1969, Miles Laboratory pulled it out of Tinker and gave it to Doyle, Dane. I don’t know why, but I do know that everybody concerned with the move praised Tinker for the superb job they had done.
Too many agency guys spend their time complaining about their clients. ‘My client won’t let me do anything. My
Good advertising comes from a good subject. Amend that: Good advertising is easier to come by when you have a good subject. Most airline advertising is terrific. In fact, almost all destination advertising is very good. They are talking about romantic spots throughout the world. I mean, who could fail when he’s doing an ad for Tahiti? But have you seen a good ad lately for Korean Airways? You’ve got to admit their advertising isn’t as good as, say, the advertising for Eastern where they used to show a kid jumping off a cliff into the water in Acapulco. You would really have to be a total incompetent to mess up an ad for Jamaica or actually a commercial for any city in this country. You can usually make something out of a city no matter which one it is. The airlines have produced commercials that make Chicago almost look like a palatable place. I mean, that’s great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you’d want to spend more than three hours in. It gets a little tougher when you take a place like Detroit. Have you ever seen a good commercial for Detroit?
Destination advertising is the easiest stuff in the world to do. When I was at Delehanty we had the TAP (Portuguese) Airline account. You don’t have to show a plane. You show the place you get to if you get on that plane. We turned out beautiful ads because Portugal is a great place to do ads for. We were very careful not to mention Salazar or the fact that if you did something wrong in Portugal you could have the world’s first thirty-year vacation.
Advertising agencies can take an off-the-wall country like France and do a terrific job with it. But I’m always amused by the fact that some of the country’s great liberals are in advertising and the ads these guys do for some of our better-known dictatorships in the world are terrific. They do great stuff for Spain, almost as good as Portugal. It’s interesting how some people drop their political convictions when it comes to advertising. I know guys who would make you fly Nazi Airlines in a minute or get you to pack your voodoo kit for a little trip to Haiti.
The quality of most advertising really depends on what has to be said. You’re writing ads on insurance, it’s easy. It’s great to do ads on the stock market. It’s simple to do ads on a camera that gives you a picture sixty seconds after you shoot it. The big problem is the guy who has to do an ad for soap. Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn’t been said maybe twenty thousand times before. I mean, what do you say? Where do you go? No matter what you say, it’s still soap.
This doesn’t mean that your average soap ad or commercial couldn’t be better. There are some guys who have given up a long time ago, but let me tell you there are reasons for a guy to struggle with a soap ad. It is very tough. If you’re a guy doing an ad for Tide, what do you say? What do you do about Axion? Well, you go out and get Arthur Godfrey or Eddie Albert to say a few kind words about Axion, or whatever enzyme you’re hustling.
We’re having different problems with a product called Feminique. It’s a vaginal-odor spray, plain and simple, but the magazines and the networks have decided in their minds that this country is not quite ready for the word vagina. We can’t even say what our product is.
Feminine hygiene is going to be a big business for agencies. Our stuff, Feminique, is selling well. FDS is doing well. Johnson & Johnson came out with Vespré and it’s doing well. The American businessman has discovered the vagina and like it’s the next thing going. What happened is that the businessman ran out of parts of the body. We had headaches for a while but we took care of them. The armpit had its moment of glory, and the toes, with their athlete’s foot, they had the spotlight, too. We went through wrinkles, we went through diets. Taking skin off, putting skin on. We went through the stomach with acid indigestion and we conquered hemorrhoids. So the businessman sat back and said, ‘What’s left?’ And some smart guy said, ‘The vagina.’ We’ve now zeroed in on it. And this is just the beginning. Today the vagina, tomorrow the world. I mean, there are going to be all sorts of things for the vagina: vitamins, pep pills, flavored douches like Cupid’s Quiver (raspberry, orange, jasmine, and champagne). If we can get by with a spray, we can sell anything new. And the spray is selling. In the first few months of 1969 the manufacturer of Feminique put something like $600,000 worth of it into the stores in test areas without one commercial ever being on the air. The maker of Feminique expects to break even if he has sales of $1,500,000 in the first year. But before the advertising even starts he’s got $600,000 in the till. He’s going to make it on reorders alone.
The first commercial we shot for Feminique was almost a disaster. We had a Swedish model walking through the woods in a scene very much like a take from the movie Elvira Madigan. The trouble was the girl couldn’t speak English and then we discovered she couldn’t even speak Swedish. And she was wooden. We shot the commercial up in a place called Sterling Forest, which is near Tuxedo Park, New York. When you’re shooting commercials,