I know what you're thinking: "Why did Eddie put up a picture of a homeless man to illustrate an article about advertising? The answer is that I didn't...nope, I didn't...because he may not be a homeless man. He could be an ad guy, in fact he could be one of the biggest ad guys, and he, or someone who looks just like him, could be the guy who came up with the famous "Where's the Beef?" campaign for Wendy's. Let me explain.
By the end of the 50s advertising was really big business. Ad men worked in skyscrapers and had college degrees. A young executive who worked hard could hope to own a fancy house in the suburbs and even get...dare I say it...the (gasp!) key to the Executive Men's Room!!!!! They sold cereal, coffee, soda, shaving creme, beer, cigarettes, men's cologne, and cars.
Advertising, along with everything else in the 60s and after distorted and warped. The agencies still attracted bright people, but a lot of them weren't really comfortable with capitalism and selling things. You got the feeling they'd all have been happier making ads against consumption.
In this period expensive, heavily art-directed ads evolved. They were ads that didn't feel like ads. They were more like showpieces. It was hard to tell what they were advertising. Traditional products like gum and soap were given the short shrift. These advertisers were selling the social responsibility of their clients, along with drugs, and insurance plans.
The problem for these gentle, socially responsible agencies was that they still had to sell a certain amount of tooth paste and foot powder, and nobody working for them had a feeling for it. A crisis developed. What to do!????????
The answer was something utterly bizarre that nobody could have predicted.
The answer was this bedraggled man (above). It turns out that number of talented ad writers from the 5os and 60s were living like beach bums in shacks and trailers on surfer spots like Laguna and Hermossa Beach. They just sat around drinking beer and ogling girls, living the good life off the money they'd put away when they were younger. Maybe, thought the agencies, THEY could figure out how to sell the foot powder!
Pilgrimages were mounted, money was offered, but these salty old men were not easily wooed. Years of neglect, real and imagined, had left them bitter and eccentric. They demanded and got the freedom to work at home or in their favorite bars. They got motorcycles and escort girls and expensive hip replacements. Nothing was too much to ask for. They got all that, and we got "Got Milk?" and "Where's the Beef?"
BTW: I just learned that Mike Pataki, the voice of George Liquor, just died. That's horrible news. Mike was a one-of-kind genius, and the voice he did for GL was among the greatest voices ever done for a cartoon character. For more information see John K's blog and Cartoon Brew, links in the sidebar.
29 comments:
Advertising is one of my field of interests, so I'm interesting in reading more about what you have to say.
You a Mad Men fan Eddie?
Very sad to hear about Mike Pataki.
I hate to be a smart aleck, but "Where's the Beef?" was Wendy's, not Burger King.
I noticed that TV commercials are trying to get clever so people won't change the channels. I still think the commercials that stick to the old-school tacky shilling, like the late Billy Mays, Vince from "ShamWow", and Anthony Sullivan, are hilarious.
I like it! These slogans reach me right through my alcoholic haze.
theres nothing socially responsible about advertising, you want to get paid, the company wants their product to sell, people like to buy. if its social responsibility you want join greenpeace or the naacp, dont take million dollar contracts to help sell a product then complain about it. sorry to hear about mike pataki, in time he maybe remembered in the same revered and hushed tones along side people like mel blanc.
Issa secret!
SSSSSHHHHHHHHH!
Jennifer: Thanks for the name correction!
Billy Mays and Vince are terrific. They do a hard sell and it's okay, because it's entertaining and people can see the beauty in it.
Anon: Naw...there's some truth in it, but they cast and shot it as if it was a James Bond show. It's way too slick.
Commercials and ads are crap nowadays.
P.S.: It's a real big shame that Mike Pataki passed away. He was one-of-a-kind.
Personally, I think the Geico gecko and the Progressive lady should procreate and make their own advertising company. All the corporate mascots of the world would be played by the mutant offspring of the two of them.
Make a nice horror movie....
Yes, good call on Madmen.
Condolences to you and others in the John K circle of friends who lost one of their own.
Please post more on this subject Eddie. This is quite interesting. I loved the way ads were presented back in the 1950s and 60s. Ads today are the primary reason I don't watch that much television anymore, even though most of them are better than the damn program itself these days.
Beer ad from the 50's...
A MAN IN SEARCH OF A MANLIER BREW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBhebeaf-8o
What happened to all the comments???
Anon: I didn't erase them. All my comments going back to 2006 have been erased, but not by me. I'll have to ask Blogger what happened.
I know I asked before, but have you seen MAD MEN yet? It is right in step with your current musings:
TITLES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRr-Fb5xQo&feature=PlayList&p=A696DB298C64DA60&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=3
DEFINITIVE SCENE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus
Awww, I loved reading some of those comments. Hope you find out what happened.
Great story-- what are the sources? Or is this an Uncle Eddie's yarn of fabricated history? It's a long way from Madison Ave to Hermosa!
I'm saddened that many beach bums have vanished, I can remember in the late seventies and eighties there being many of the sort at Topanga, even as far as Point Dume, (denizened with eccentrics and washed-up porn stars, - then ripe real estate for the picking, now disgustingly shod with the likes of James Cameron, Julia Roberts and Kenny G! God help us!)...
If Blogger has a decent server everything should be backed up. Somewhere. Unless you were hacked by terrorists.
Holy cow, all those great comments are gone? Hope you can get them all back.
Here's an advertisement from the 50's that I think would fit in good here:
A MAN WITH A SEARCH FOR EXCITEMENT
A MAN IN SEARCH FOR A MANLIER BREW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBhebeaf-8o
Nacht: This was told to me at a party by a young guy who currently works in advertising. I can't remember what examples he used, so I plugged in "Where's the Beef?" and "Got Milk?"
Craig: I was put off by the slickness of that show. The art direction reminds me of the direction on The Godfather. What an odd treatment to give a show about advertising. But I've only seen a couple of episodes. I'll Take a look at the videos you linked to.
Alex: Haw! Nice link. I also like that "Best Ad Ever" in the sidebar, the one with the kid in the supermarket.
Charles: I'm working hard on getting the comments back. Half the character and personality of the site are embedded in the comments. It's not Theory Corner without them.
I'm wondering if Blogger dropped them accidentally in an effort to fix a spam problem that I complained about a few days ago.
I get a lot of spam these days, mostly from a guy in Singapore and a guy in Africa. Every day the Singapore guy sends me ads in different languages and computer generated fake letters about philosophy. The African guy sends me links to his poems, sometimes 25 a day. They're probably also computer generated.
Apparently people can add links to the bottom of other people's Blogger pages without the host knowing about it. They don't appear in the most current blog, but in previous blogs in the archive. You see them when you view the posts in the one post per page mode.
I changed a couple of settings to try to fix this, so maybe I accidentally blocked my previous comments. Or maybe Blogger did it in an effort to help me out. I have great respect for the Blogger staff who provide a lot of free goodies for their clients, so if they did it I won't be mad, I just need to get it fixed.
My task for today is try to figure out how to get the comments back. If the problem persists I might have to move to another hosting service. What a drag!
In the meantime, the spam forces me go back to moderating comments again. Sorry about that. Don't worry, though. I won't enable those annoying twisted letter things unless I really get desperate.
Hey Eddie. I'm very sorry about what happened with Blogger deleting almost all the comments off your blog. A lot of good stuff was in the many interesting comments people would write as a response to your posts. Maybe you should migrate to Wordpress or something. I doubt you'd get as much spam from using something like that instead.
That's a shame about the comments Mr. Fitzgerald.
Hope you get it sorted out.
This is a pretty interesting post. I much prefer ads about small, everyday stuff and I usually really dislike ads about cars and insurance and it's one of the main reasons I dont like watching tv that much nowadays.
This actually reminded me of the Mr.Plow episode of the Simpsons where the Mr.Plow ads at the start are simple jingles and they end up as the black-and-white "Heavily art - directed" one where some guy smashed a snow globe off the ground.
Hope you get the thing sussed out. What a drag....
I definitely agree that Mad Men is slickly directed but part of the fun is seeing cracks develop in that slick facade.
One of the best early scenes from Mad Men is when all the young admen are ogling the famous Volkswagon "Lemon" print ad and Don immediately comments that he doesn't know what he hates more about it. You can tell that there is going to be a culture clash soon with the oldschool Madison Avenue boys club style and the irreverent style of the late 60's.
I'd definitely agree that for all the period detail it probably isn't the most realistic portrayal of what an ad agency was like in the 60's but it has the best acting and writing on television today.
Have you ever done a post on Oghilvy? I read his book awhile ago and it was full of solid advice and principles but the best part was all his weird personality quirks and asides.
Anon: Oghilvy? I love that guy! He influenced my ideas about animation and cartooning, and even influenced how I write this blog.
He bucked the system by advocating ads with lots of copy, where the readers learned something and were influenced by the personality of the writer. He respected the intelligence of his audience. Not only that but he believed that people respect ads that don't pretend to be something else. People actually like to be pitched to. I know I do.
Why? Because the world really is an interesting place, and a pitchman makes you realize how wonderful even the small details of life are. In that sense he's like a poet.
I think of Vince doing the ShamWow commercial. The latest one that's on TV now isn't so good, but the first one was terrific. He made wiping up stains seem so pleasurable. For the price of a simple cloth you got to enjoy picking up all the spills you'll have to pick up for the rest of your life. What a bargain! But the cloth really does have to be something special. An ordinary cloth won't do.
One of the reasons I wanted to do the Theory Store was to see if I could learn the nuts and bolts of what it takes to pull O's ideas off. I wanted to learn how to be a poet celebrating the little material things of life that have brought me so much happiness through the years..
I realize that there are terrific ads that don't follow O's rules, but he made me aware
Anon, Oisin: Oops! in the answer to Anon above I meant to say Ogilvy AND John Caples. I read both their books and I often forget which of them said what. The principals stuck, though.
I love how romanticized the copy is in old print ads.
What bothers me is how disingenous most ads are today, like they're trying to hide the fact they're trying to sell you something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE this is amazing. So much better than some commercial with "bros" hanging out who you just want the Monty Python foot to fall on. I wish we had some sort of modern day Equivalent to Mad Magazine or SCTV cause aspirational ads need to have the piss taken out of them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrvLR0pVQ3A I hate every single person in that ad.
This is a great topic, Eddie. We've done many TV commercials with our puppets, from Singing Socks in a Sleigh to Swashbuckling Salads. But the most successful one we did was for the Super Bowl. We were up against the craziest most pyrotechincally loud spots money could buy. Ours was a quiet little three hander that by it's very nature and execution made it stand out. It was voted the #3 Super Bowl Commercial of all time, and the Funniest Office Commerical in the World. It was the Talking Stain for Tide-To-Go - - I was the talking stain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2cs8gnb42A
So once again the hippies destroyed western civilization? I think your theory is wrong, Eddie.
I think it was MAD Magazine in the 50's that caused the downfall of advertising. Once the cynicism and artifice of modern advertising was ridiculed in the subversive pages of MAD people wised up. The ad men had to think up newer ways to try to convince people to waste their hard earned money. After awhile they lost their confidence.
MAD also influenced the generation that became...wait for it...THE HIPPIES!! IT'S TRUE!! HA HA, EDDIE! Take that!
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