Word: delia
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More than One. Much advertising today has a numbing sameness, says Delia Femina, but the adman is to be pitied, not blamed. He often finds it impossible to create individual selling pitches for the rising number of nearly identical products. "Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute," says the author, "trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn't been said may be 20,000 times before. If you're doing an ad for Tide, what do you say? What do you do about Axion...
Gasoline is another difficult product to sell. In Delia Femina's view, Mobil's "We want you to live" campaign is smarter than most because it says that the company really cares about its customers. Beer campaigns are tough. Delia Femina contends that Stan Freberg's "Ballantine's Complaint" campaign, a takeoff on Portnoy's Complaint, was based on the wrong premise. "How many beer drinkers can read?" Delia Femina asks. By his reckoning, Schaefer, a Brooklyn-based brewer, has the best advertising theme: "The one beer to have when you're having more...
Tomorrow the World. As Delia Femina tells it, there seems to be no end to the resourcefulness of agencies and their clients. Promotion reached a new level with the development of the increasingly controversial feminine-hygiene deodorants. "Businessmen ran out of parts of the body," Delia Femina explains. "We had headaches for a while, but we took care of them. The armpit had its moment of glory, and the toes, with their athlete's foot. We went through wrinkles, we went through diets. We conquered hemorrhoids. So the businessman sat back and said, 'What's left...
...adman is only as good as his latest ideas, and when he runs out of them, he walks the plank. Usually the agency boss does not like to do the firing himself, so he appoints a "killer" for the job. Of the killers, Delia Femina says: "In a lot of ways they're very much like the hit guys in the Mafia." At the big Ted Bates agency recently, "the retirement party for the killer was marvelous. Practically the whole agency showed...
...financially troubled agency had an area known as the "Floor of Forgotten Men," to which it assigned high-salaried managers who were working out their contracts before being let go. "None of them ever admitted that he was one of the fired people," writes Delia Femina, "but they never had a secretary or anything. They were walking around, but they were zombies...