I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘And my husband uses it too.’ I raised my eyebrows a little bit. I said, ‘Do the children use it?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, no, we wouldn’t let the children use it. Just my husband and me.’ I politely thanked her and told her that the people at Feminique would be very happy to hear.
Some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. My partner, Ron Travisano, was working at Marschalk when they got a cake mix that was almost too good for the marketplace. All you had to do to make a cake was add water, but the product was going nowhere. They ran tests and then they ran more tests. They found out that the average housewife hated the product because if she couldn’t do something physical in the making of the cake, she felt that she was being cheated. If all she had to do was add water, well, she felt that she really was nowhere as a homemaker and a cook. The product was just too slick.
So they pulled it back and did whatever you do to cake mixes and they fixed it so now to make a cake you had to break an egg. In the instructions they said if you break an egg into this mix and add water, you’re going to have one hell of a cake. But without the egg the product is nothing. It worked. The very act of breaking an egg told the housewife that she was a cook again. The product worked, sold like hell. It was unbelievable.
Ron also was involved with a problem dealing with a first-aid cream, a Johnson & Johnson product. This stuff was a painless antiseptic for cuts, scratches, things like that. Now here’s Johnson & Johnson, a hell of a good company, and they go and invent an antiseptic that doesn’t drive you up the wall when you put it on. They send it out on a test and nobody buys the stuff the second time around. The company can’t figure out what’s wrong. They ran tests again and they discovered that people have to feel pain before they’ll accept the fact that they’re getting healed. They have to feel a burning sensation. And what’s wrong with this stuff? It’s obviously no good because when you put it on it doesn’t burn. Forget that the cut is healing, there wasn’t any burn.
So the guys at Johnson & Johnson who broke their backs to figure out this marvelous stuff put a little alcohol back into the cream for no other reason than to give the stuff a little wallop. I figure the research scientists really wondered what the country was coming to, but as soon as the alcohol got put in the sales started to go up again. People wanted to feel that burning sensation because when you’re burning that means you’re suffering, and everyone knows you’ve got to suffer in order to get better.
The poor copywriter? He’s sitting there turning out the greatest campaign of all times that says this stuff doesn’t burn – when burning happens to be the one thing you need to sell the product. It really isn’t such an easy business at times.
The Hertz-Avis campaign is a classic in so many ways. According to people I’ve talked to, the Avis ‘We Try Harder’ campaign by Doyle, Dane was never meant to beat Hertz. But that’s the way it looked in the ads and the commercials. When the Avis campaign began, Hertz was number one and Avis and National were running neck and neck for number two. But look how clever it was: Avis attacks the guy who is number one and makes it a one-two situation and nobody even remembers that National is still around. I really don’t think Avis took all that many customers away from Hertz; they grabbed them off from National, from Olins, from Budget-Rent-A-Car, from all the smaller car-rentals companies who are running four, five, even number six to Hertz.
Everybody’s looking at the ads and saying, Wow, what strategy, they’re attacking Hertz! But they really weren’t. What happened is that the guy who used to rent from the number-four outfit decides to trade up: he’ll now try the number-two company. It also was a great campaign for the businessman who does a lot of renting of cars. He sits there and says to himself that his boiler-plate factory is maybe number six to American Standard and he feels sympathy for these Avis guys, so instead of going to National, he’ll try Avis.
Now the Carl Ally people, who took over the Hertz account, were faced with the Avis problem. They helped Avis, really, because suddenly they acknowledged the existence of someone else in the field. For the first time the guy who was on top admitted that there was a guy under him. But they had to do this. Their surveys showed that the Hertz employees actually felt lousy about the Avis campaign, so it was necessary to come up with a campaign that answered Avis. In doing this, they helped cement the one-two situation that Avis had begun. They’ll be teaching the Avis campaign in advertising classes for years. It was brilliant, and it will be a classic.
Next to destination advertising, the easiest kind of campaign to produce is public-service advertising. Anybody – but anybody – can write great public-service stuff. Every year agencies win all kinds of awards for their public-service campaigns and there’s a reason why: the subject matter lends itself to dramatic advertising. I don’t want to sound cynical, but think about it for a minute: you’re talking about starving people, diseased people, Korean kids without families; you’re talking about bigotry, about people who can’t rent apartments; you’re talking about Vietnam and nuclear explosions. Who couldn’t do a great ad on rats and roaches in New York City housing?
I tell the kids who come in to see me for a job to write me ten public-service ads. The kids want to know what the story is. Well, the story is that in this terrible world there is always somebody starving. The children in Europe may not be starving but they’re starving in Biafra. There are always kids starving someplace in the world. One kid produced an ad that said, ‘There’s more protein in a can of beer than a kid in Biafra gets in a week.’ Another kid came into my office with an ad that said, ‘You’ve got the cure to heart disease in your wallet.’ I used to teach advertising at the School of Visual Arts and one of my students there produced this headline on an anti-Vietnam ad: ‘Will Your Son Be a Light-to-Minor Casualty or a Heavy-to-Major Casualty?’ Y. & R. did the great ‘Give a Damn’ campaign for the Urban Coalition in New York City. Great stuff. And someone produced a classic commercial showing a Negro trying to rent an apartment. The renting agent showing the apartment tries to flush the toilet but it doesn’t work. ‘Ah, a ten-cent washer will fix that,’ he says. The place is falling apart, and the agent keeps pressing the Negro: ‘Come on, are you going to take it or not? I’ve got people waiting to rent this place if you don’t.’ Very powerful stuff and beautifully done.
Where advertising starts to get tough is when all of the products are almost alike. If you take a close look, the rates on a lot of cars you rent are pretty much the same. For Hertz and Avis, they’re almost identical. The plane fare to London is the same whether you fly Pan Am, TWA, BOAC. If you want to go to London by way of Iceland, then the fare is cheaper, but otherwise it’s the same. So the advertising has to come up with the difference. When you look for differences, sometimes you have to stretch a bit. George Lois’s agency – Lois, Holland, Callaway – did a series of commercials for Braniff using two celebrities sitting in a Braniff plane saying, ‘When you’ve got it, flaunt it.’
Shep Kurnit, the president of Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller, once made a remark about that campaign that is pretty accurate: ‘I wouldn’t want to fly on the same plane with Andy Warhol or Sonny Liston.’ Most people in advertising don’t like the current Braniff campaign but that could be their jealousy of George Lois. I’ve got a feeling that the jury is still out on the campaign. ‘Flaunt’ is a very tough word for people to grasp. Actually, if you’ve got it, you usually don’t flaunt it. I think that Mary Wells did a much better job with Braniff when she painted the airplanes because there was something real, something you could see.
What do you do with gasoline? There’s very little brand loyalty in gasoline, so the companies are breaking their necks with their contests. The gas companies are in trouble and they know it. They know the consumer couldn’t really care less what kind of gas he puts in his car. You’re running out of gas and you go into a gasoline station. So to point up the difference they come up with lucky bucks, lucky dollars, the Presidents game, the antique-car game, the professional football players game and every other game they can think of. Not only are the games a must, but the government is going to make the rules for them a lot tougher. People realize you can’t win, that the chances