For Fast, Fast, Fast Relief

I was watching a basketball game over the weekend with a crowd of people when a clever TV ad came on. It features an assortment of everyday items – purses, bathroom scales, kitchen cabinets, shopping bags, etc. – made to look like faces, with buttons or knobs representing eyes and some strap or zipper or curve in the item representing the mouth. In the first half of the ad, the mouths are turned down in a series of frowns. But in the second half, after discovery of the product, the frowns turn upside down, into smiles.

Everyone in the room chuckled. Ten minutes later, I asked them all who the advertiser was – and not one person in the room could remember.

Back in the day, I covered the advertising industry in New York for Sales & Marketing Management magazine. It was a time when a lot of creative hot-shots were leaving the old gray-flannel-suit agencies and starting their own shops. The old-timers were best personified by Rosser Reeves, chairman of the Ted Bates agency (and apparently the model for Don Draper in “Mad Men”). Reeves’ idea of a good ad was the anvil-clanging Anacin commercials “for fast, fast, fast relief.” Did they give you a headache? Exactly!

Reeves used to say that a great TV or radio ad mentioned the product within the first five seconds, then four or five more times throughout the commercial. “If you remember anything,” he’d say, “it’s the name of the product.”

The new generation, best personified by Mary Wells (a former Macy’s fashion advertising manager), believed in subtle humor rather than iron anvils. There were some terrific, humorous campaigns for Alka-Seltzer (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), Volkswagen (“think small”) and New York City (“I ♥ NY”). Wells understood 360-degree marketing. Not only did she invent the “end of the plain plane” ad campaign for Braniff Airways, she also dressed the flight attendants in groovy Emilio Pucci prints.

There were other funny campaigns back then. But, to Reeves’ point, people too often didn’t remember the name of the advertiser. That’s creative doing a great job – but brand-management dropping the ball.

Your profession is the creative side of retailing, and right now you’ve put your brilliance into holiday windows and in-store celebrations of the season. But you’re also brand management, responsible for the slogging work, the year-round effort to establish who you are and to keep establishing your brand when people are not in the holiday mood and are back facing the realities of the economy. That’s the anvil-clanging – but it’s the brand-management that makes the registers ring and keeps the doors open.