Legendary New York agency Cliff Freeman and partners just shuttered its doors. And anyone in creative advertising of a certain age shed a quiet tear.
Cliff ruled American advertising like a giant in the 1990s. The 90s wasn’t our best decade. It was full of shite, to put it bluntly. What set Cliff apart was his unrelenting love of overtly selling stuff while all around him pondered Gen X’s teenage brooding.
Cliff was of course, the man who penned “Where’s the Beef?” for Wendy’s hamburgers, which went through the culture like a dose of salts. He then went on to pioneer, and specialize in, a new form of retail advertising: really, really, really funny ads that stuck in your head. He realized that if you’re going to be funny, be really funny. that’s the only thing worth going for.
Starting out in NYC in the early 90s, working for Cliff Freeman was a shortcut to fame and awards glory. It was Shangri La. And a lot of his employees went on to become industry titans. Because they had had such an affirming experience. Being rewarded for just being themselves. you can’t beat that. i knew the guys that did this at CFP. bastards!
I met Cliff once at an ad awards do in New York. It was the History Channel’s top ten ads of all time thing. we both had catchphrase based ads in the top ten. we chatted about the recent superbowl. we’d both had ads in it. cliff was much more psyched about being in the superbowl than i was. i found that strange.
Having catchphrase fame in common i asked him for advice. He said he didn’t want to be “that guy who did that one famous thing”. that stuck with me. neither did i.
Cliff clearly had the most fun anyone ever had in advertising. I’m sure that will be a consolation to him.
I just read famously reclusive ad legend Charles Saatchi’s new book: My name is Charles Saatchi and I am an artoholic. It’s basically the interview he never gave. He talks mostly about his legendary modern art collection. And a little bit about his advertising career.
Saatchi and Saatchi had an enormous impact on the ad industry and the UK culture. They famously helped elect Margaret Thatcher in 1979 with their LABOUR ISN’T WORKING poster, which captured the zeitgeist of the time. Britain was in bad shape and Maggie was the cure.
Charles was the creative guy, his bespectacled brother Maurice (now Lord Saatchi) was the business guy. Their mantra was “nothing is impossible” and they lived really lived up to it. They had boundless ambition and chutzpah, buying and selling agencies all over the world like they were second hand cars.
Charles is now mostly retired from the ad game. But in his day he was really good. He had a disarmingly direct but artful style.
I read something he said once that had a huge impact on me. It went something like this: in order to create something great you have to have an attitude about it. In other words you have to have thought about it from every angle and be 100% confident that you are right. Not just have vague feelings and lightly held opinions.
Having an attitude about something gives you and your work energy. And the energetic tends to displace the passive. So even if you’re wrong you may well prevail over those who aren’t quite as intense and focused as you are. Because chances are you’ll win all the arguments.
i came across this in the newspaper this morning. it’s a neat little idea to promote the upcoming release of a kids’ movie. Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: the squeakquel!
my son and his friends LOOOOOVED the first incarnation of this, which was a big hit. It featured the legendary David Cross getting paid and doing a great turn as a record company bad guy out to exploit the falsetto singing chipmunks. innocent fun for innocent kids.
the movie comes out around christmas. and someone had the smart idea of doing a print ad that featured a chipmunk stencil pattern that kids (ie: their dads) can carve onto halloween pumpkins.
A nice idea that makes sense and is involving and adds to peoples’ lives. yes advertising can be more than empty hype. But only if you try!
last night we found out we won best of show in our local award show. We had a blast and are moving a bit slow today. we won for our penny pranks campaign for wonderful client OfficeMax. this is a big award. no seriously. it’s a monster. it’s the stanley cup of ad awards.
this is the third time this decade i have been lucky enough to win best of show in Chicago. my first win with The Escape Pod. It never gets old! congratulations to all at OfficeMax and everyone at The Escape Pod. and of course une grand merci! to director Henry Alex Rubin of Smuggler and thanks also to our flame-haired penny defender Matt McCarthy. It feels good to beat the big boys. Don’t mean that in a vindictive way, just in terms of the accomplishment.
And speaking of that, best of luck to my old comrades at DDB Chicago who are nominated (twice) for an Emmy for best ad this weekend. Both Budweiser and Bud Light got nods. If by horrid chance you don’t win guys, here’s my suggestion. Leave immediately. don’t waste your time fake congratulating the winner. Head to Chez Jays in Santa Monica and get royally plastered in the privacy of the back room. It did the trick for me.
(I emailed this story to UK advertising legend and fellow twitterer and blogger Dave Trott. It’s about a man whose work we both admire a lot and was my first boss in advertising. His name is Ed McCabe. It’s the story of how I got hired by him. Dave said it would make a good blog post for advertising students. Dave is right. As usual..)
I was living in London at the tail end of 1989 and attending a D&AD creative workshop. By day I sold airtime on ITV, the UK commercial TV network. I wasn’t that good at it. And I urgently felt the need to do something I loved doing. And creative advertising was and remains it. I was smitten. I had just gotten a US green card in a visa lottery and was headed to New York in the New Year. The last stop on the workshop was BBH. The brilliant Martin Galton and Will Awdry taught it. In the pub afterwards I asked them who they recommended working for the USA. They asked me who I’d like to work for in the UK and I said “Dave Trott”. They gave it a bit of a think and replied “Ed McCabe”.
So off to NYC I went with one name in my head: Ed McCabe. After a while I began spending Saturdays in the library of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn perusing their vast ad annual collection. Pretending that I was a student there. Seeing Ed’s work through the years confirmed that this was the guy for me. His work was so arresting and direct and strategically sound. He created the campaigns that made Perdue Chicken, Maxell Tape and Volvo – to name but three – household names and premium brands. He was a true advertising genius. The only one I’ve ever encountered in advertising. He was also a bit mad. But in a good way. Someone once described Ed as having adrenaline instead of blood. And dynamite instead of adrenaline. I’d say that was pretty accurate, if difficult to imagine perhaps.
The only problem was he had left Scali McCabe Sloves a few years previous and was off doing the Paris-Dakar rally and other fun things. But then he came back to New York and started a new agency. Unfortunately for me, only had a handful of creative’s working. So the chances of getting hired by him looked slim. Someone had to get fired or die. I would find out later that working for Ed increased the risk of both of these possibilities immensely.
But I was dead set on achieving my goal. I decided to create a book of ads targeted purely at Ed. And the best way to do this would be to stalk him. Literally. I knew where he lived and I knew where he worked. And I also knew he frequently took the subway to the office. So I followed him around observing the products he used. I read somewhere in an interview that he drank Fernet Branca and sparkling mineral water at lunch while he spoke to the journalist. I knew from experience this was a hangover cure so I created a campaign for that. I knew he hated then-upstart New York agency Kirshenbaum and Bond, so I submitted a really bad book of ads to their recruiter just so I could get a rejection letter from them. I put this letter at the front of my book with the headline DEAR ED McCABE, I HOPE YOUR IDEA OF GREAT ADVERTISING ISN’T THE SAME AS MESSRS KIRSHENBAUM AND BOND’S. It worked. I was hired. Only took me two years!
I snapped these this morning. I remember when A-B introduced Michelob Ultra Light a few years back. it was the first ultra-light beer. they wisely chose Michelob instead of Bud to do this line extension. We at the agency used to refer to it as “wet air”. it was spectacularly lacking in substance. I wasn’t a fan of the taste. but it was surprisingly successful. especially among the over 40 crowd. it started a trend. or rather continued an existing trend.
the trend among american beer drinkers has been towards ever lighter beers (lagers) since the early 1980s. the revival of craft brewing here being perhaps a reaction to this. Samuel Adams certainly made hay by being the anti-big brewery. I won’t even go into their, ahem, questionable brewing practices. That train has sailed baby!
now i know there are those out there (European visitors especially!) who make fun of American beer. And some of that is justified. But tastes are what they are. You can’t fight that.
Although, at a certain point, it’s no longer beer anymore. it’s beer flavored water. And you certainly could argue that we may have reached that point. Like now!
Huge fan of The Seth Godin. Read his blog daily. He’s an idea machine. I also love thinking about media and society. and the interplay between the two. he likes thinking about that too.
As he points out in this post, ye olde post-TV cognitive surplus is a bear that has been roused from its slumber. it’s a powerful beast whose behavior is still developing. and one that hasn’t been kind to the post-war forged-by-TV-ads brands whose enjoyed a very symbiotic relationship with the TV and Cable Networks. The Green Giant ain’t so jolly about the internet.
TV really was like a mild sedative on the masses. The hippies were right in that respect! But it wasn’t a grand conspiracy. it was just a unique opportunity to create the biggest audience ever. And profit from the creation of it. TV was where it was at for a very long time. and old habits die hard.
the internet is a very different kettle of fish. it is resoundingly not dependent on advertising for its existence. and in fact it is kind of allergic to advertising. advertising doesn’t really belong there. we have to force our way in.
most brands aren’t cool. they’re functional. nobody cares about them. nobody talks about them. and quite often they come from cultures who may be stuck in the past organizationally too. in a sense the whole operation is predicated upon carpet-bombing their brand into the public consciousness via TV ads. these are the ones that are most adversely affected by the diversion of consumers’ attention away from the TV screen. they’re in a bit of a bind. their cultures quite often militate against doing the right thing in the current media landscape. they are bound by what worked in the very different recent past. but that’s OK! everyone over the age of 15 is in transition mode to some extent. the rate of change has been crazy. let’s not forget that.
Like we have pointed out, the internet is great for selling Irish bagpipes. Seth similarly uses the example of the Best Made Axe company. ultra-niche brands who can now talk to the whole world. they win online. meanwhile nobody cares a fig about the poor not so Jolly Green Giant online. he was a TV creation.
i have worked in the media/ad biz for 20 years now. and i’ve been lucky enough to have been in the eye of the storm for a lot of those years. i worked on big brands with big media budgets. and i got the opportunity to innovate. and i like to think that i took chances whenever i could.
and here’s what it all feels like to me. it feels like i was floating down the mississippi for years and suddenly the river started to get narrower and narrower. and narrower. how many people will read this? maybe 300 in one day. that’s about 80 million less than watches the superbowl. advertising is only as good as the audience that sees it.
I have no media bias except this one. The bigger the audience the better i like it. This post was brought to you by OfficeMax who urge you to check out their great back-to-school deals and unequalled product selection. Thank you!
It would appear Chicago is beset by an attack of enigmatic and baffling and let’s face it, boring beer ads. Perhaps it’s a stealth move by the spirits industry to create a state of stultification among beer drinkers and curb demand for beer. who knows.
today’s entrant is for Peroni, a very pleasant light lager from Italy that is gaining traction over here. In Chicago at least. It appears to be riding Stella Artois’ coat tails to an extent. the future looks bright for this beer IMHO. so what the hell is going on in this ad? a wee ribbon on the label is spun out so it collides/melds with a dominatrix-looking stiletto heeled boot. i have seen other iterations of this campaign. where the wee ribbon attaches itself to vaguely italian things. on the upside it’s more graphic than the previous perplexers. but it’s very far from exciting the viewer into a froth of thirst.
as i’ve previously posted, selling beer is about creating the right vibe. and furthermore with booze, it’s all in your head! so how about creating advertising that has a chance of getting into beer drinker’s heads?
Over dinner in new york recently i got into a fascinating discussion with my old colleague and all around good and wise egg Arun Nemali about the future (and present) of advertising. In a rapidfire discussion about the universe and everything we concluded that the future of advertising might well lie in out-of-home advertising. Not just billboards but everything that can be encountered in the real world. because, at some point, even the most wired of the wired have to go out and get some toilet paper and cheetos. and occasionally occasionally avert their gaze from their mobile device.
A couple of years ago i went to the Miami Ad School to give a little talk to the students. while there i met a woman named Margo Berman. Margo asked if she could interview me for a book she was writing. I received a copy of the book recently.
It’s an educational textbook designed to give an overview of advertising and the creative process. It’s a great read for anyone interested in advertising and marketing.
of course the pages where i’m quoted will have extra appeal!
its’ a Christian rap video trying to encourage a new behaviour among the youngsters. You see, apparently Jesus doesn’t like “front huggin’”, so they are trying to popularize a less sexual and more Christian “side hug”. File under: Only in America. Wow. Just wow.
The former account director on Budweiser when i worked on the brand at DDB, Marty Kohr, put this on youtube recently. It’s a highlight reel that demonstrates the impact our work had on the culture. This was the bit that fascinated me most. Winning awards is nice but it’s really just the [...]
Recently I got an email from a talented young art director living in London. His name is David Fitzsimons. He wanted me to look at his work etc. And I did. And he’s really good. Since graduating from college two years ago he has spent a year working at McLaren [...]
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