From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Jerry Della Femina

else is saying, ‘Visit a gasoline station this week,’ like it’s a great experience. Other people are saying, ‘Our rest rooms are terrific, you’d be proud to have them in your own home.’ That’s crazy. Nine-tenths of the rest rooms in this country are pigsties, and nowadays gas stations are putting in locks so you have to pay to use them.

      Mobil is smarter than this. They’ve got games but they’re also asking you not to wrap your car up. They want you to live long enough to play their game, which is the best of both worlds. Most of the gasoline companies play it safe and stick with the heavy, starchy agencies. The heavy agencies have difficulty with unique products; and with something like gas they’re really stuck. A bright young agency might run into trouble with gas but at least they would approach it in a different way. A small agency, Smith/Greenland, got a shot at Flying A gasoline, and they turned out a very good job. Their pitch was that we design the gasoline for the way you drive in city traffic instead of country traffic. And they show a guy stuck on the Long Island Expressway someplace, trying to get through traffic. In the history of gasoline commercials, nobody has ever been stuck in a jam. You’re always seeing guys zipping down empty roads at ninety miles an hour. No one has ever hinted that you can get stuck in traffic. The campaign was good: they told motorists that most driving in the city is stop-and-go and that Flying A is the best gasoline for such conditions. It was the first time a small agency had a chance to do something with gasoline and I think they did a good job. (In January 1970 the account moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty. My guess is it’s because the copywriter who conceived the campaign, Helen Nolan, had herself just moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty.)

      Of course some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. There’s a big New York agency about to lose a very big account in the Midwest. Nobody talks about it, but what happened is that the agency guy was having an affair with the wife of the president of the account. He got caught, and his agency got him the hell out of town by promoting him to the presidency of the New York office, which as far as I’m concerned is the ultimate promotion. Despite the agency moving this guy out of town, they’re still going to lose the account. Getting caught in the saddle is almost always grounds for losing an account.

* Delehanty changed its name to D.K.G. late in 1969, but mostly I call it ‘Delehanty’ throughout the book – which is how the place continues to be known in the business.