My very first assignment at Young & Rubicam New York in 1972 was to work on the Rums of Puerto Rico account. The advertising goal was to promote the many rums that were produced on the island, which included Bacardi, Don Q, and many more that were less well known such as Ronrico, Ron Superior, etc.
We created some elegant advertising focusing on the white/clear version of the rum as a mixer, showing very trendy people in romantic situations. By showing people who we were too early to call influencers, we hoped to create a trend for fashionable, hip young people to try the product. We featured the white rum because rum had had an established image of dark rum with cola, a teenagers drink, that we wanted to break out of.
One ad that the client particularly liked featured mixing rum with hot apple cider. It stood out from the usual perception of rum being a summer drink. The client held a public tasting at Rockefeller Center that I went to and the drink was delicious and an unexpected hit.
This got me thinking about the new and different cocktails we might develop featuring white rum. So I got a stack of cocktail recipe, or mixology, books from the agency library and other sources, to see what other cocktail ideas we might be able to use either in advertising or promotional material.
I found a lot of them with various types of rum and selected a few I thought might be promising. I went to my bosses, Al Paris and Fred Goldberg (who later was CEO of Chiat Day heading the team that created the famous Apple 1984 commercial, and then Goldberg Moser O’Neill in San Francisco). I asked for some money to buy liquor to do some recipe testing.
I guess this is where advertising is a different type of work. Some 20 something year old, a few months into their first job, comes in and asks for money to buy liquor… and they gave it to me. Off I went to buy a whole lot of bottles of various rums, cordials, and other mixing ingredients to make my select list of about 20 t0 25 cocktails.
At that time, Y&RNY had a test kitchen on the second floor of our building that was used to develop and test recipes. Mostly we used the kitchen testing team for food recipes that we were going to feature in ads. Y&R had many food products that we did the advertising for and many featured recipes in their ads.
I booked some time with the kitchen staff for “recipe development.” Little did the three Home Economists know that the recipes were cocktails, not casseroles or cakes.
I arrived with a couple boxes full of liquor bottles and a stack of cocktail recipes for them to prepare. They were surprised and claimed not to be very expert at mixology or even casual bartenders, but we pressed on with our explorations and prepared the cocktails on the list.
We invited my bosses to come down to the test kitchen and we sampled the array of about twenty drinks. We asked the Home Economists for their opinions as women, and so they joined in sampling. Pretty soon we were all fairly well lubricated and having a great time, laughing and joking. Really, this is work?
Two things came out of this exercise. Firstly, the Y&R Home Economists became very supportive whenever I had some products or recipes to test. I was welcomed with open arms.
Secondly, I came up with a small table tent idea for our client.
The table tent (a cardboard folder that was designed to stand on bar tables) featured a rum daiquiri that had a blended date in it which was probably the best tasting of our strange cocktails. The table tent also had a rum and brandy cocktail called Between the Sheets and a more complicated rum cocktail featuring 3 types of rums that was sold at Trader Vic’s Tiki Bars called the Suffering Bastard. We named the date daiquiri the Blind Date.
So the table tent read Blind Date – Between the Sheets – Suffering Bastard. An evening for young adults in New York. The client thought it was funny enough and used a range of products. so they printed up a batch. Three months into my Madison Avenue career, my creative idea was published!
These drinks were much better than our rejected recipe targeting an older market: rum mixed with prune juice which we dubbed the Rum Runner.