Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) by Ken Auletta Read Free Book Online Page A

until 2016.
    Randall Rothenberg has been immersed in the industry for more than a quarter century. He wrote one of the most instructive and entertaining books about advertising, Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story , * and today serves as the spokesman for digital companies as president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. He believes the commission system fortified the agency business, boosting their profit margins. “There was collusion between the agencies and the publishers to keep prices high. The myth was that the client was the marketer. In fact, the client was the publisher. The ad agency acted as a broker for the publisher.” Ad agencies did not often haggle with publishers on price. The more ad dollars publishers received, the more the agency got paid.
    Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Bill Bernbach—the creative decision-maker behind such iconic ad campaigns as Volkswagen’s “Think Small,” and “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s”—reigned at a time when ad agency execs and their place in the world was secure. When the CEO of fledging Avis offered his account to Bernbach, he qualified his acceptance by telling him, “But you must do exactly what we recommend.” * The campaign Bernbach crafted—“When You’re Only No. 2, You Try Harder. Or Else”—changed Avis’s fortunes. George Lois, like Bernbach a Bronx-born maverick, had won a basketball scholarship to Syracuse, and his hulking physicality and booming voice could be menacing. More than once, Jerry Della Femina, a creative colleague, recalls Lois screaming at clients, “I’ll jump out this window if you don’t approve this ad!”
    “In the old days, creative guys were the only ones in the room to pitch clients,” recalls Michael Kassan, whose advertising career started in media buying. “They never met Harry”—Harry Crane, media buyer and head of Sterling Cooper’s TV department—“who was treated as a nerd in Mad Men . But in the late 1970s, independent media buyers spun off as companies, and in the ’90s they gained respect. The suede-shoes guys challenged the power of the white-shoes guys.”
    A recurring debate within agencies in the Mad Men era was over what constituted a great ad campaign. In the 1950s, Rosser Reeves, the chairman and creative head of Ted Bates & Co., argued that advertising was a quasi science. He promoted what he called a “Unique Selling Proposition,” claiming that one idea that consumers could latch on to foretold whether an ad campaign would succeed. It had to be unique, but it also had to win the approval of survey research predicting it would sell. Colgate ads for toothpaste that “comes out like a ribbon and lies flat on your brush” was unique, but it wouldn’t sell, he said. Colgate ads for toothpaste that “cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth” was both unique and successful. Recruited to pioneer thirty-second TV ads for Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign, Reeves ordered a Gallup poll that identified three issues on which the Democrats were vulnerable: corruption, the economy, and the Korean War. Reeves coined the phrase “Eisenhower, Man of Peace,” and portrayed Ike as a war hero returned to America to bring about domestic and international peace. His opponent, Adlai Stevenson, who didn’t own a television and thought TV ads talked to citizens as if they were second graders, countered by spending 95 percent of his TV ad budget on a half-hour telecast of his speeches. He reached a minuscule audience. *
    Reeves’s peer Bill Bernbach had a very different view. He was not a slave to research, relying instead on gut instinct. Research, he told Martin Mayer, * “can tell you what people want, and you can give it back to them. It’s a nice, safe way to do business.” But it usually produced pedestrian ads. “Advertising isn’t a science, it’s persuasion. And persuasion is an art.” Another legend, David Ogilvy, was both Reeves’s