Advertisements for Themselves

...when words necessarily mattered...

...Weeding through fifty years of the world's commercials would make anyone weary—or mad...

...Freberg hit full stride in the late 1960s, when he produced a series of movie parodies for, among others, Jeno's Pizza Rolls and Banquet Frozen Foods...

...And for over a decade, the firm produced similar "torture test" ads featuring Swayze and the same "licking and ticking" tagline...

...Produced in the late 1950s, Freberg's first radio commercials spoofed advertising's bombastic and lavish claims...

...But in other respects Watkins's specimens seem like relics from an ancient time...

...An updated version, "The New Stan Freberg Show," aired on the BBC and NPR in the early nineties...

...the 1959 edition added a sampling of typically crisp and stylish ads written by David Ogilvy, who died, at the age of eighty-eight, this past July...

...Her list "honors aesthetics more than effectiveness in moving product...

...The low-budget "Snow-plow," first aired in 1963, showed the humble Bug chugging along snow-packed streets in the dark of pre-dawn...

...Diesel's ad director told Kanner that his company's commercials "are about making our mark and establishing our image as a company...

...In the wake of the raucous 1960s, Coca-Cola proposed "to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony...

...This trend has long been clearest in Britain, where Hugh Hudson and Ridley Scott are among many well-regarded directors who have worked in advertising throughout their careers...

...pet food commercials with a pet and a bowl of the product...

...Instead, it offered "fantastic imagery to forestall wear-out," luring viewers to watch "repeatedly without getting bored...

...People thought it was for spaghetti sauce and Alka-Seltzer sales slumped...

...And Listerine promised to end the halitosis that has left so many unfortunates "often a bridesmaid but never a bride...

...Ogilvy also created one of modern advertising's more enduring icons— that suave fellow who sports an eye-patch in countless ads for Hathaway shirts...

...They belong to an era when major advertisers still turned primarily to radio or print...

...Such oblique and "edgy" spots, Kanner writes, have created "a counterculture personality" for Diesel's "$80 dungarees," making them "the second-best-selling jeans behind Levi's in many European countries...

...Still, most prime time advertisements link products to popular "images" or fashionable attitudes: Sports shoes, snack foods, cars—even Cadillacs—are pitched primarily on the assumption that they too are, somehow, cool...

...And, more frequently, commercials offered nostalgic images or patriotic themes...

...By the late 1970s, Fox writes, ads "came to resemble each other...

...According to Watkins, this ad's "fundamental appeal" stemmed from the fact that, "like ole man river, man's desire to get ahead, to earn more money, to be admired, to get the gal, and to keep in the running, is as changeless as the orbit of the earth...

...These commercials "took a strong-selling proposition" and "served it to customers in a fresh, surprising, and unusually persuasive way...

...And, for the most part, television advertising in the 1950s belonged to what Watkins called the "rockum and sockum" school...

...So, too, in its use of dark sarcasm, Diesel is hardly alone...

...For them, Ogilvy, stylish and urbane, represented standards that prevailed when the world—and their profession—seemed generally less chaotic and mean...

...Back in 1949, Julian Watkins argued that "great advertising" was not only "clear" (offering "an idea" that "can't be buried regardless of presentation") but "sincere" (its "belief" reaching "right out from the page and into your heart...

...Most of these first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, but they promoted products— Coca-Cola, Camel cigarettes, and Campbell's soup—that remain mainstays in the marketplace today...

...Like "Swimming Pool"—and countless commercials since—"Big Brother" was less concerned about the product than the presumed values of its buyers...

...But he also directed what is arguably the single most influential American commercial ever made: Apple computer's "Big Brother," which first aired during the Super Bowl in January 1984...

...By 1970, however, funny commercials had become commonplace...

...Have you ever wondered," the voice-over asks, "how the man who drives the snowplow drives to the snowplow...

...In this regard, contemporary advertising owes far less to Stan Freberg than to a sensibility—and a sense of humor—shaped variously by Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, David Letterman and Howard Stern...

...Hudson, best known for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, also directed several commercials to win a place on Kanner's list, including "Swimming Pool," a widely celebrated spot for Benson & Hedges that first appeared in British movie theaters in 1978...

...Kanner discusses more recent campaigns for Diesel Jeans, including one 1997 spot in which "a handsome guy in impeccable Diesel Jeans kisses his wife and baby good-bye before dueling with a grubby, despicable man who kicks dogs—and shoots our hero dead...

...The firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach had long specialized in humor...

...Thus the makers of Odorono, a "delightful toilet water," reminded women that "it is a physiological fact that persons troubled with perspiration odor seldom can detect it themselves...

...it "took a licking," Swayze intoned, "and kept on ticking...

...This one owed directly to the spread of cable and the VCR—to the new ubiquity of remote control...

...Emily," her husband asks in the concluding shot, "why do you always have to make such a big production out of everything...

...The song, Kanner recalls, became "an anthem," played by "by organists at ballparks while airplanes flew overhead with banners...

...But it also gave him pause...

...Its adherents place their faith in visual gimmicks, unaware of the fact that pictures don't sell unless you put some hard-selling copy underneath them...

...Ogilvy stressed the same points repeatedly in interviews and his own published writings...

...It relied heavily on the sort of "visual gimmicks" and catchy jingles that Ogilvy so roundly deplored...

...when copy was king...

...and Kanner, not surprisingly, had help...

...Adds Kanner: "People who think an ad is cool think the company is cool—and that buying their product makes them cool...

...Best known for his 1963 bestseller, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy was a former door-to-door salesman who mastered his craft by studying the work of such legendary figures as Claude Hopkins, Sterling Getchell, and Raymond Rubicam...

...the agency he founded (now called Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide) continues to thrive...

...One cringes as Kanner exclaims: "If Michelangelo were alive today, he'd probably be working on Madison Avenue...

...As the economy dragged, the ad business tightened its belt, putting renewed emphasis on marketing and research...

...Six years later, "Funeral" again stressed the car's durable economy through a wry tale of wastefulness and greed...

...In one, a chorus of singers merrily proclaim that "ninety-five percent of the people in the USA are not buying Chun King Chow Mein...

...But within a decade, thanks largely to advertising, Beetles were everywhere, a familiar feature of American life...

...Kanner—who used to write the "On Madison Avenue" column for New York magazine—describes and briefly discusses each of her choices, most of which were produced by top agencies in Europe and the United States, including Young & Rubicam, Chiat/Day, Saatchi & Saatchi International, and the Leo Burnett Company...

...As a result, a growing number of commercials—like Diesel's—are determinedly "artistic," often with pretentious results...

...At the same time computerization made special effects increasingly cheap and easy...

...Big Brother," they recognized, symbolized "Big Blue"—Apple's dominant rival, IBM...

...In Morse code, the can blinks out the now legendary advertising question: "Who puts eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can...

...Another early spot, for the Contadina Company, prompted listeners to picture a mammoth can of tomato paste trimmed with lights and perched atop the Empire State Building...

...Presumably such caricatures are designed to make viewers feel better about themselves and somehow superior to others...

...Their elliptical structure aims partly to exclude undesirable viewers—namely, unhip schmucks who can't or won't put down eighty bucks for a pair of jeans...

...With this new machine, Apple buyers would decisively declare their independence and creativity...

...This spot won Freberg several awards, including two Clios—the ad industry's top prize...

...In 1974, in the midst of Watergate, General Motors commissioned a spot for Chevrolet that mixed images of family fun with an upbeat country tune celebrating the timeless pleasures of "Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie...

...On January 24," a voice proclaims, "Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh...

...In effect, during the 1980s, Ogilvy's nightmare came true...

...A recent television spot for Agilent Technologies, for example, mimics Wim Wender's beautiful 1987 film Wings of Desire, and manages to suggest that eternal questions of time and mortality are pretty much the same as the universal need for speedy e-mail...

...It showed high-diving champion Raul Garcia plummeting from Mexico's "famous La Perla cliffs," a Timex waterproof watch strapped to his wrist, with the veteran broadcaster John Cameron Swayze noting that Garcia "hits that water at more than eighty-five miles an hour...

...Brian Murray teaches in the Department of Writing & Media at Loyola College in Baltimore...

...Another ad, for the International Correspondence School, depicted an excited husband telling his delighted wife that at last they were headed for "easy street"—and all because of the home study courses designed by the International Correspondence School...

...Curiously, however, Kanner's list overlooks the work of Stan Freberg, who did much to inspire the so-called "creative revolution" that—to the chagrin of many on Madison Avenue— changed the face of advertising during the 1960s...

...In 1960, the Volkswagen was still widely considered a comical car for bohemians and cranks...

...Ridley Scott gained acclaim as a film director with the 1979 Alien and 1982 Blade Runner...

...As Kan-ner notes, Timex came to account "for more than half of all watches sold for less than $100...

...Internationally, today's top commercials are more than ever like mini-movies, offering elaborate visuals and, increasingly, big stars: Burt Reynolds, Anthony Quinn, Michael J. Fox, Catherine Deneuve...

...Tip of the Freberg, a recently released box set containing four CDs and a video, covers nearly five decades of Freburg's work...

...And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984...

...Watkins's book has been frequently reprinted...

...A wealthy man, recently deceased, looks down upon his own funeral and comments bitterly on the profligate ways of his relatives and friends...

...By the middle of the decade, "creativity" was no longer the buzzword, and— as advertising historian Stephen Fox has observed—the industry returned generally to "hard sell" techniques that had prevailed twenty years before...

...Big Brother" featured a grimly futuristic setting in which an ominous Big Brother figure, projected from a huge TV screen, addresses a large group of dronelike people with shaved heads and gray uniforms...

...Don't insult her intelligence...

...Kanner, however, isn't primarily interested in advertising as "an instrument of sales," to use Julian Watkins's respectful phrase...

...To the business partner "whose only motto was spend, spend, spend, I leave nothing, nothing, nothing...

...Accompanied by dozens of sequined dancers, Miller hoofs it up atop a giant soup can, singing "Let's Face the Chicken Gumbo and Dance...

...The consumer is not a moron," he declared, many years ago...

...After fifty years of television, it still seems like sound advice...

...This assortment, she explains, "was selected from the industrywide Great Commercials Library and winnowed down by creative directors"—a process that "practically guaranteed what I'd be slurping was cream...

...Freberg first earned wide attention during the 1950s, when he recorded a string of hit comedy records and hosted his own network radio show...

...Dozens of takes are botched, and the hapless actor, gorged and nauseated, can barely utter his big line: "Mama Mia, that's a spicy meatball...

...Some, in fact, aren't illustrated at all...

...A good advertisement," Ogilvy once wrote, "is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself...

...Garcia's watch, of course, easily survived his nose-dive...

...In fact, Watkins's selections reveal that, in some ways, advertising has changed little over the years: It appeals bluntly to our basic wants and fears— our longing for acceptance and success...

...That eye-patch," he complained in the late 1950s, "has inspired an entire school of adver-tising—a school which I deplore...

...Even David Ogilvy was impressed...

...macho sportsmen in beer ads...

...In 1949 the veteran copywriter published The 100 Greatest Advertisements...

...she is your wife...

...Kanner, like Stephen Fox, is largely right when she suggests that "advertising holds a mirror up to show us who and what we are...

...The more Garcia plunged, the more Timex soared...

...they buy the image, what surrounds the jeans...

...The "Hathaway Man" campaign, Ogilvy admitted, "made me famous...

...it confirms him as one of the top talents of modern adver-tising—an unusually witty and inventive comedian and parodist whose most memorable campaigns, like the best Marx Brothers skits, have stayed fresh for decades...

...According to Kanner, Ogilvy called "Funeral" the "funniest commercial he'd ever seen," and credited it with "changing his mind that people don't buy from clowns...

...Kanner's "100 best" commercials "have been admired and envied as breakthroughs" within the industry and throughout the world...

...In other words, Diesel's ads try not to look like ads at all...

...Still, one senses in his remarks of forty years ago a lament for the passing of an era—a recognition that, with the coming of network television, the golden age of copywriting was nearing its close...

...In America at least, it was a time for "naked women in bath-oil spots...

...Nor did it illuminate the product's virtues...

...During the 1970s, production values for commercials continued to improve, and as a result many more took on the tight, polished look of little feature films...

...Like them, Ogilvy specialized in "long copy," and, like them, he consistently landed leading accounts: Shell, Schweppes, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Rolls-Royce...

...Advertising today is more varied— and ubiquitous—than ever before...

...And, aptly, she dubs the Diesel spots "Nihilist Chic...

...Consumers, he suggests, "don't actually buy jeans...

...In this climate, it's no wonder that so many of Ogilvy's colleagues paid him tribute in recent years...

...two of their most creative Volkswagen ads are well-known to students of advertising and not surprisingly rank among Kanner's top hundred...

...Kanner's earliest selection—"Acapulco Diver"—first ran in 1962...

...Indeed, Madison Avenue wasted no time embracing the medium presciently described by RCA president David Sarnoff as "the most effective sales agent in the history of merchandizing...

...Alka-Seltzer's famous "Spicy Meatballs" spot, first aired in 1969, depicted an actor downing endless forkfuls of spaghetti during the filming of a commercial for "Maga-dini's Meatballs...

...Ogilvy, the consummate adman, adapted well to advertising's changing venues and styles...

...in 1991, for example, the Association of National Advertisers hailed him as "perhaps the last great figure in the advertising world...

...In Freberg's 1970 ad for Heinz's new line of "Great American Soups," the dancer and actress Ann Miller stars as a wife who—promising her husband something a little different for dinner— magically transforms her modest kitchen into an elaborate stage set fit for a Busby Berkeley musical...

...On radio, Freberg specialized in imagery at once outrageous and precise...

...And yet, by the early 1970s, many in American advertising were eager to eliminate the clowns, contending that wit and whimsy no longer suited the country's tired and contentious mood...

...Fox's The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators appeared in 1984, just as a second "creative revolution" started to boom...

...Whether selling fast food, pistachio nuts, or credit cards, many recent commercials present the world as a grotesque place inhabited primarily by bizarre characters in absurd situations...

...As a narrative, "Swimming Pool" made no sense...

...Swimming Pool" featured no commentary, only "rhythmic rock music" and an arresting series of images that, as Kanner notes, included a desert, lizards, a glimmering swimming pool, and a helicopter transporting oversized cigarettes in what initially appears to be a "large tin of sardines...

...Apple owners, the ad implied, were fit, energetic, rebellious—and bright enough to savor this updated allusion to George Orwell's famous novel...

...As Kanner notes, "the most famous commercial about making a commercial didn't work...

...The commercial itself—regarded by some industry leaders as the best ever made—aimed to put Chevy "back into a position of trust after a year in which people believed nothing...

...But to his Volkswagen-driving nephew, a model of prudence, the narrator bequeaths "my entire fortune of $100 billion dollars...

...And they're frequently directed by the sort of high-profile directors who, twenty years ago, would have very probably dismissed advertising as a low and vulgar trade...

...Advertisers and their clients now knew that, unless riveted, most viewers would disappear after a second or two, zapping their way to more gripping pictures...

...Relatively few of Watkins's choices relied mainly on clever slogans or eye-catching illustrations...

...Not surprisingly, Bernice Kanner all but ignores the 1950s in her new book The 100 Best TV Commercials, which attempts to "chronicle the evolution and impact" of a medium that, for better or worse, has "commandeered a place in our psyche...

...Moreover, some studies suggested that humorous irony left too many viewers distracted and confused...

...Suddenly, a young woman in red jogging shorts breaks through the crowd and, hurling a sledgehammer, shatters the screen projecting Big Brother's grim face...