The
Battle For Coca-Cola
Rages On.
Ain't
Nothing Like
The Real Thing, Maybe.
I
Don't Mean To Say
I Told You So, But...
Are
Consumers Smarter
Then We Are?.
The
Four Great Myths
Of Global Branding.
Mr
Bevis Butts Heads
At Mitsubishi
The
Best Laid Plans
Of Mice And Men.
Dare
to Be Great:
The Mad Genius of "The Matrix"
Mitsubishi's
New Marketing Boss
Out Of The Frying Pan.
Concept Is Stronger Than Fact.
Value
Perception In A World
Gone Mad With "Cool"
The
Future of Advertising
The Brand
The
Future of Advertising
The Targets
The
Future of Advertising
The Grid
The
Future of Advertising
The Swarm
Technology
Making The Message
Meaningful
The Only Business That Matters Is The One You're In.
What
Ever Happened To The
Big Idea?
The Post-Advertising Era Is Here
Confessions Of A" Liar For Hire"
Good, Bad and Ugly At the Moment of Truth
A Post-Advertising "Big Idea".
The Value Of A Paying Pustomer.
Emergence Of the "Empire of One".
All customers Are Created Equal
Playing God An Other Atrocities
the
City That Spawned
The Age Of Advertising..
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Fear And Self Loathing In Advertising. Two
things happed last week that made me put aside my intended column
for this week and pick up my cudgel to once again start bashing
numbskulls. Once again, the amazingly wrong-headed culture that
inhabits the corridors of power in our industry have given me cause
to take them to task. |
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Next, an article written by Stewart Elliott in the Advertising column of the New York Times on May 27, 2002 recently revisited in MadisonAvenueJournal.com, that made my former boss lady Mary Wells Lawrence seem like an over-the-hill dowager hungry for a quick comeback. Both of these events conspired to just plain piss me off. The letters all said pretty much the same thing. "We don't have the bandwidth to..." "clients won't pay us to..." "Nobody out their reads, so why should we..." "If I want to keep my job, I have to..." Whine, whine, whine. Grovel, grovel, grovel. If the Sloan Wilson best seller were released today it would be titled "The Man In The Gray Flannel Kneepads." |
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"I think you are so cool. I want to be just like you when I get too old to do anything useful" .-Lorie C. Boston. Cool as in dead?-HW |
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Mary Wells Lawrence was quoted by Stewart Elliott as railing against the "cheap, easy advertising" of today. "Now, the advertising gives you pain instead of curing your pain," she is reported to have said in an interview promoting the second printing of her book "A Big Life in Advertising" (Knopf). She went on to state that advertising agencies are "not interested in advertising." Instead, they are obsessed with offering clients "one-world marketing, one-stop shopping" rather than concentrating on developing "really well-thought-out, well-crafted ads." In addition, the chief executives of client companies are no longer as intimately involved in the ad-making process as their predecessors were during the so-called creative revolution of the 60's and 70's. Ms. Wells Lawrence fondly recalled the era when, as she put it, "the top people would take a big idea and create a miracle." "Even in the years I was dealing with the C.E.O.'s, there were always people in charge of marketing who were not as talented as they should be, just as at agencies there are people not as talented as they should be," Ms. Wells Lawrence said. "But if you have people who understand the potential of advertising, there's a real opportunity." You give 'em hell, Mary. When I was at Wells, Rich, Green co-creating the "Quality Is Job One" campaign, Mary Wells Lawrence was considered a confidant of Ford Chairman Phillip Caldwell. Those of us on the Ford business believed that we had a hand in turning around one of the great nose-dives in American Corporate History. Consiquently, w hen Ford stock split 4:1 as a result, a lot of us got rich. When the "I Love NY" campaign turned around the entire perception of New York City just two years after the city went into default and the garbage unions held the city hostage, everyone in the agency walked a lot taller. That was 20 years ago. Today, I doubt whether anyone that works on the Ford Business could muster any pride or self-esteem. The last thing they did to move the needle was to knockoff the GM Employee Discount Program. And it was 9/11 not an advertising campaign that gave New Yorkers their latest shot in the arm. Stewart Elliot sought to characterize Ms. Wells Lawrence as an unlikely comeback candidate by stating," Some executives in the industry are not so sure. Ms. Wells Lawrence's return may prove to be as unsuccessful as that of Norma Desmond, the silent-film star in "Sunset Boulevard" who was shunned when she sought to return to the movies because she was deemed incapable of adapting to a new Hollywood."
I am generally a fan of Mr. Elliot's column. But this time I think
he got it wrong. WRG had a staff of tuxedoed valets who served lunch to the members of the creative department who chose to avail themselves. The carpeting on one floor cost more then most agencies spend to outfit their whole shop. This lady made us all look good. We got a perverse pride in coming up in the elevators of the General Motors Building to put in another day toiling to save Ford Motor Company at WRG. These were the things that made us feel larger than life. That and creating an ad picturing the Ford headquarters in Dearborn, MI with the headline "Happy 100th Birthday General Motors, From Your Oldest Competitor." Then slipping up to the GM executive floors after hours and taping a copy of the ad to the inside door of every stall in every one of their bathrooms. And running it full page in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times,Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and Automotive News. Advertising lost that kind of swagger long, long ago. That, and the kind of relationships and trust that Mary Wells and Bill Bernbach and Allen Rosenshine and Steve Frankfurt had with the Chief Executives of their respective clients. A couple of months ago Advertising Age reported that global corporations no longer consider advertising agencies as trusted advisors or marketing partners. In fact they no longer see the advertising industry as the ultimate resource for the creative ideas that can solve their business issues. Trust, gone. Confidence, evaporated. Respect, vanished. All in just two short decades. Mr. Elliot should have asked, where is Mary, now that we need her?.
Stay tuned.
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