Passing the AID Test
NORD, PETER
Passing the AID Test From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor By Jerry Delia Femina Edited by Charles Sopkin Simon and Schuster. 253 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Peter Nord Creative...
...Cute (read shrewd) because implicit in his copy is this message: Advertising really isn't the glamorous, exciting life you see in Hollywood movies, where terrific looking guys drink a lot and fight a lot and make out with pretty girls a lot...
...You're the president or marketing director of a big company and you're sick and tired of going to cocktail parties where everyone talks about the funny, or dramatic, or whatever commercials being done for somebody else's product...
...Another way to certify a good ad is by peer evaluation (the reason more awards are given each year for advertisements than there are advertisements written...
...Does anyone but a red-neck condemn a lawyer for defending a ma-fioso...
...it's really more like a bunch of insurance men running scared容xcept at our place...
...That schmuckl" Which brings us to a very terrible problem advertising people face...
...Things are so good that now when we get a $500,000 account we only announce $750,000 instead of $1 million like we used to have to do...
...That's roughly the style of his book: a collection of truths and near-truths about his experience in what can only be called葉he way he plays it葉he advertising game...
...The writing itself (Delia Femina spilled it into a tape recorder, and the tapes were edited by Charles Sopkin) is similar to Delia Femina's advertising style: ballsy (like his ad for Pretty Feet, headlined "What's the ugliest part of your body...
...The problem with this method is that too often an Alka Seltzer campaign wins every award around, and the agency responsible for it loses the account...
...FTWFWGYPH is essentially a long-copy advertisement for Jerry Delia Femina, and should be appraised as such...
...D, does it create demand...
...Delia Femina is no longer at Bates...
...Reviewed by Peter Nord Creative Director, Solow/We.xton Fifteen minutes ago I left a babel of advertising copywriters, into whose laps some sneak had dropped this bomb: "What do you think of Jerry [in advertising, as in most branches of show biz, everybody calls everybody famous by his or her first name] telling the world about how he once wrote ads selling electric sewing machines to Peruvian Indians who weren't within 500 miles of a socket...
...Yes, it holds your interest...
...Meanwhile, William Esty Advertising has kept Winston cigarettes for something like 786 years, doing things like the fake English lady (who's probably really English, but such a bad actress that she sounds like someone from the Grand Concourse imitating an English lady) and the hoky announcer who introduces today's standard advertising chorus (six smiling wasps and Sidney Poitier) singing "What do you want, good grammar or good taste...
...On the run, my friend asked him how business was...
...The difference between his title and Delia Femina's reflects the difference between their approaches to advertising...
...Does it capture attention...
...Delia Femina has a Jimmy Bres-lin eye for color, ear for dialogue, and mind for what I assume is apocrypha様ike the Agency Killer, a sort of button-down button man at big agencies whose sole job is to fire people, and who holds his job because he's good at it and enjoys it so...
...And cute...
...If you're not, you'll get a lot of good ammunition...
...Great," puffed Delia Femina...
...memorable (like his ad for the National Hemophilia Foundation featuring a bleeder bleeding on camera...
...It derives from a "brainstorming session" Delia Femina was part of after he had conned big, bad Ted Bates into hiring him as resident freak...
...I'll nominate From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor as the catchiest sexless title of the year...
...If it hurts a whole lot, well then, advertising people are at least as good as anyone else in constructing the necessary rationalizations...
...With everybody sitting around, tensely trying to come up with a campaign idea for Panasonic, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, Delia Femina attempted to break the ice by announcing a great idea...
...There are a number of ways to judge an ad...
...FTWFWGYPH certainly passes the AID test, and it really is one hell of a funny book...
...In fact, it is the same very terrible problem nonadvertising people face...
...Compare, for example, the diffidence of Ogil-vie's Rolls-Royce campaigns with the chutzpah of Delia Femina's hairspray ads featuring Yogi Berra...
...You never heard of any of them . . . except . . . what's that...
...A friend of mine once met Delia Femina, by this time president of his own agency, chasing a fire engine on Madison Avenue...
...And it should create demand...
...Ogilvie thinks British...
...The very big, very rotten agencies (by my standards, which are similar to Delia Femina's and I'll wager are similar to yours) characterize good advertising as advertising that sells...
...First, because the radical press has already shafted him pretty good for the "Peruvian" anecdote and what it says about advertising and advertising people...
...Advertising people are merely advocates, and bear no responsibility for their client or his product...
...Definitely, when my play is produced...
...Does the book hold your interest...
...That's as much of a philosophical critique of Jerry Delia Femina's book, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, as you will get from me...
...The big, rotten agencies, though, often get bigger and rottener, so they may not be all wrong...
...David Ogilvie called his book, with his customary disarming candor, Advertisements for Myself...
...And advertising people handle it about the same way non-advertising people do葉hat is, if it doesn't hurt too badly (if the account is a tiny one, or it only means swearing off seedless grapes), they will make the sacrifice...
...And the agency president telling the prim female tv executive about the souvenir Statue of Liberty with a rectal thermometer placed where a rectal thermometer should be placed...
...Finally, your advertising manager gives you a list of 15 "hot, creative boutiques...
...And the Ball Point Pen Stabbing...
...The headline is: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor...
...We booze it up more than they do at other agencies...
...No, for the purposes at hand I'll fall back on the schoolbook formula for judging an ad, AID.A, does it capture attention...
...This is a moot criterion, however, since it is virtually impossible to be absolutely certain whether a product was sold by the message in the ad, the frequency of the ad's appearance, the medium that was used熔r the fact that the manufacturer offered the grocer one case free with every six, and the grocer proceeded to push hell out of it...
...I, does it hold your interest...
...These were some of the answers...
...So I'm going to quit on Monday, or maybe Tuesday...
...Isn't he the guy who does those outrageous things...
...funny (like his ads for Talon Zippers and Tio Pepe...
...And play strip-poker with great-looking broads...
...Wouldn't it be kicks to have meetings with a guy like that, and he even does terrific ads, so why not call Delia Femina...
...But if you're in advertising, be prepared to ask yourself some tough questions...
...Delia Femina, Yiddish...
...Second, because I want to review it on its own terms...
...You spend $15 million a year and no one ever talks about your stuff...
...So you go to Doyle, Dane Bernbach, but they've got a competitive account, and Mary Wells is in Acapulco and won't answer the phone...
...If / had to write on an account like that I'd refuse, and Monday, probably, I'm going to quit my agency because we've got a cigarette account and I think pushing cigarettes is immoral...
...Look at it this way...
Vol. 53 • August 1970 • No. 16
