I was sitting in my office at Young & Rubicam, an advertising agency on Madison Avenue, working on a print ad project. I heard a thump, and a small red rubber ball came bouncing off my open door into my office from the hallway. It came rolling over to my desk. I picked it up and put it into my pocket.
It wasn’t as strange as it seemed. I was working on Jell-O desserts, but down the hall they worked on child cereals and constantly looked at premiums to insert in the boxes as added incentives for kids – temporary tattoos, collector cards, reflector badges, small plastic toys… anything that cost less than 5 cents. Our office hallway was often littered with toys or bits and pieces of them.
No one came to retrieve the little red jack ball, so I went back to work.
A print ad looks simple at the end but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you go deeper, a lot of work and thinking goes into it. A lot of this is touched on in Overcome AD-verity but here is an example of a specific print ad.
For the Jell-O Pudding brand I was managing, as I sat at that desk, our research showed almost every home had several packages of pudding in their cupboard. They bought the product motivated by our TV advertising featuring Bill Cosby. Now the brand needed buyers to use the product to get it back on their shopping list and buy more.
One strategy that worked was providing innovative uses and recipes to reduce the pantry load and increase frequency of product use. We bought ads in what were called women’s service magazines: Family Circle, Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and more. In the 1970s, those magazines’ circulations were huge, most having more than 10 million readers each month. Buying a full colour page wasn’t cheap, so we needed to be careful what advertising we developed.
We started by having the agency kitchens and General Foods’ test kitchens come up with candidate recipes. The recipes had to be easy, use at least one package of product, look good for an ad, and be delicious. As a secondary goal, we thought if we could involve another packaged good product in the recipe, we might get their marketing group to contribute some ad dollars to help with media and production.
As the executive on the brand, I, my colleagues at the agency, and the Product Management group at General Foods had to sample all of these recipes. After 20 or so spoonfuls of dessert, you could swear off anything sweet for a week!
We had a few favourite recipes after the kitchen sessions. One we particularly liked was a chocolate bundt cake made with cake mix, chocolate chips and Jell-O Instant pudding. This recipe involved using pudding in a way that didn’t interrupt regular cup dessert use of the product. It was pudding in disguise. We knew that having pudding in the recipe increased the moistness of the cake and, from our testing, that the chocolate chips stayed liquidy which made it seem like there was chocolate icing on the inside of the cake.
General Foods sold Baker’s brand Chocolate Chips, so we were able to get some funding from that small brand, but they couldn’t offer much with only a tiny marketing budget.
I got on the phone to Nordic Ware, a company in Minneapolis that had made its reputation selling bundt pans and owned the rights to the use of “bundt” for cakes. The Bundt pan was a doughnut shaped, fluted pan that was made in cast or stamped aluminum. The hole in the middle allows the cake to cook more evenly.
I arranged a meeting in Minneapolis (it was my first trip there) to meet with their Vice President of Marketing and their President. I outlined what we had planned and how much we were spending behind this recipe. We wanted their approval and some contribution to the effort.
I had negotiated similar deals of this kind with other complementary products including Blue Diamond almonds from the California Almond Growers Exchange (who I handled about 15 years later) and others as well.
It was a win-win arrangement for both products; each product gets twice the impact for the same funds. Nordic Ware’s goal was sales of bundt pans. They were on-board if our ad could include a discount offer to sell more bundt pans. We were happy to do so because a special offer added value for our customers as well.
Back to me in my office. Our creative team was struggling with a idea for the ad and I was headed down to the eighth floor to meet them. The team was a nice Italian guy as art director and a cute black copywriter, one of few women in the department. Betty, the copywriter was always flirting with me and teasing me with double entendres which I didn’t mind. Copywriters love their words. She was clever, coy and fun to work with.
I arrived at their office and they looked like they were in a funk, stuck without inspiration and needed something to get started. As an icebreaker, I looked at Betty with a twinkle in my eye and said slyly with a lift of the eyebrows, “Hey, Betty, wanna ball?” with a clear double meaning intended. I don’t think you could say that and get away with in today’s culture.
She gasped, blushed hard, looked down at the floor and then giggled.
That’s when I pulled the little red rubber ball out of my pocket and gave it to her. She took it and playfully threw it back at me as we all laughed. Once they were relaxed, thinking of ideas suddenly became easier and Betty came up with a great headline, “The Deeper You Bite, The More Exciting the Chocolate Gets” which she directed back at me like a red rubber ball. We called the cake an Inside Out Chocolate Bundt Cake.
Our layout with copy now had to go through agency approval levels in the creative and account management departments, client product management, legal, GF Kitchens, the Bakers Chocolate brand group and the Nordic Ware folks. While it might take an instant of inspiration to come up with an idea, it needed persistence to get it approved. There is a lot below the tip of the iceberg.
The photo shoot once the idea was approved also involved all these players, plus the photographer (as I recall, it was Phil Marco), a food stylist and print production professionals. There are a lot more ingredients in the “bake an ad” recipe than there were in the cake.
The ad was an instant success. Our Nordic Ware partners sold a lot of pans; consumers used up a lot of Jell-O Pudding. Nordic Ware was eager to run the ad again.
The cake was delicious, easy to bake; I made it a few times myself. You could say it was a ball to make. Try it!