Advertising fundamentals with a happy outcome. About time, you’d think, particularly if you work in the sector.
“You never allow a bad shot, ever, of your product. You never allow your client to be seen in public looking or sounding anything less than great when on the job. This is career suicide…. All your endorsements will go straight down the tube if that gets out,” said Al, to the champion athlete Henrietta Thorpe and her young but rather rustic looking agent/publicist, a guy called Jack Weiss.
They’d been looking at a commercial which the agency had had made for Lotta Crust Bread. The athlete, in full gear, of course, had been extolling the virtues of the product, sounding like a two year old child reading from a primer….. “It-is-a-won-derful-source-of-fi-bre-and-protein…” Woeful. Al had discovered that she’d been doing elocution courses and a public speaking course and was therefore saturated with information on how to speak normally. This was rather sad, because the selling point was her speaking as herself.
Al, who’d seen this before, was unimpressed to an unusual degree. He was also unimpressed that Mastermind Productions, who’d done some other good ads, were responsible for the result. He smelt a lifetime supply of stenches. They knew a lot better than this. He looked slightly more sympathetically at his guests. He’d asked them in, to warn them about this terrible self mutilation. They were sitting there like a couple of school kids. He had Carla take them in hand while Felicity fumed prettily about how her copy, admittedly sponsor-dictated, had turned into the horror it now was. Al smiled briefly and rang Jane Wright, CEO at Mastermind.
“Jane, I just saw the Lotta Crust thing. You have to be kidding. It gets redone, and we aren’t going to pay for it until it is……”
“Al, I haven’t seen it. I just got back from Perth. What’s wrong with it?”
Al explained, getting a wry few laughs out of Jane in the process. She also had a listen over the phone and was perhaps more horrified than Al had been. Some people in media do take their firm’s work personally, and that was one of the reasons Al had made a point of contacting her. Jane, having understood, was almost unable to speak.
“That …whatever it was….is horrendous. No wonder you’re upset. Give me half an hour.”
Carla had meanwhile settled the two victims into the reception area and started filling them up with some food. As they ate, she steered the conversation around to their debacle in a way that it was bearable to speak about it. Weiss was almost in shock. Al had penetrated with his comments, and he was terrifyingly aware that he might have done Henrietta some real damage. Henrietta, for her part, was a typical athlete, needing support from those she could trust who knew how to manage her business. She also liked Jack personally, more than she wanted to admit. She was therefore trying to calm him. Carla noted that the elocution lessons had produced a surreal usage that was somewhere between extreme self-consciousness and genuine concern. Each word was a lottery.
“O Jack…yer do try so hard……Ay don’t hold it a-gainst you…..Yer always been a good friend….”
“I should have said something……”
“How were you to know? Oi fing you did ay good job in your part. Ay also think Oi shoulda been payin’ more attention.”
It was an interesting tableau; the quite pretty athlete, very trim, and her large but utterly shocked friend, it could have made an ad for something in its own right, in Carla’s opinion. At this point, Joe, who’d been staring at a loaf of Lotta Crust for far too long while arranging the shots for the print ad, walked in holding the thing and asked Carla if there were any pigeons she felt deeply about that that she wanted to feed it to and kill them. This generated some desperately needed laughter from Henrietta and Jack. Felicity, Al and Bill, who’d by now separately decided that they wanted to personally remove certain anatomical necessities from whoever had produced the ad, were in the mood for a change of temperament, heard the laughter, and went to see what was happening.
Joe, Al and Bill instantly found themselves in unknowing agreement with Carla. Henrietta and Jack, together, were quite a visual presence. Just putting good looking people together isn’t a guarantee of a worthwhile image. There has to be some chemistry that translates to the viewer. They really did look like a mutually supportive couple.
Despite the tendency of the media to incessantly manufacture couples hating each other, betraying each other and generally making life a misery, it should be understood that the public don’t want to think about things like that when they’re shopping. Family images are supposed to be reassuring, and promoting, ironically, the domestic ethos. The most successful TV shows create an environment like that, largely for that reason. Sitcoms are usually domestically oriented. The perpetual “dysfunctional” family usually isn’t, on that level.
So the family image does matter. Advertising people register images like that the way fish swim. Joe had instantly grabbed the image of Henrietta and Jack, but wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Bill, who was a quick study and had absorbed every word from Joe and Al, translated the couple into almost any conceivable setting. Felicity was thinking that as a scene the copy wrote itself. Al, clicking faster than them, was mapping out a few other gigs for them. The three of them almost burst into applause when Carla said,
“Don’t they look right together, like that? Why didn’t we do the ad with the two of them?”
Carla’s “secret” agenda was actually to reassure Henrietta and Jack, although professionally she meant what she said, and meant it as a person whose views were respected. Al, realizing that the couple were a few light years behind in the logic, and noting how pleased Henrietta looked and how surprised Jack seemed, followed up immediately.
“Carla, you’re a genius. If we paid you in kisses we’d go broke. Bill, get Michael from Lotta Crust over here. Felicity, that setting, with product, how long?”
“Already written, just needs to get on the computer. Thirty seconds, right?”
“Yeah. Joe, the set? “
“Right there. We’ll just throw in some domestic stuff.”
They sprinted to work, literally. Jane rang back with some irritating but not entirely unexpected news. The producer, or ex-producer, as Jane pointedly said, had a friend who had a model as a client. The director was also fired, for being an invertebrate. The lousy ad was to sabotage Henrietta and get the sponsor primed for an alternative presenter, meaning the model-friend. Jane was furious. She apologized sincerely and profusely, and was very relieved when Al outlined the new idea. Jane had the production crew moving before Al got off the phone.
The new ad won several awards, which Al attributed to getting the right people on set. It was a straight domestic piece, husband Jack expressing concern over Henrietta’s constant training and need to eat properly, because they were hoping for a baby. Henrietta, whose diction had been returned to the forgivable by Carla, explained that she could always rely on a good meal with Lotta Crust. Sales were impressive.
Al took the couple under his wing and kept a friendly eye on things while Jack learned the ropes. Henrietta and Jack went on to become one of the most sought-after couples in advertising and TV history, even having a long running sitcom of their own. They also married, with Carla as bridesmaid and the others in attendance as honored guests.