One of my first major assignments in advertising was as the Account Executive on Jell-O Pudding at Young & Rubicam, a huge advertising agency in New York.
I went to meet the client in White Plains for the first time a couple weeks later that summer and was surprised at all the varieties of pudding and related products that were part of the brand assignment. I hadn’t tried very many of them, so I casually asked if they could send us samples of all the products. I felt that you should know as much about your product as possible, and that meant knowing all about it.
A week or so later, at my office in Y&R New York in Manhattan, Jim from office services (which included the mailroom) came up to my little office to see me. He asked me what I wanted to do with the pallet load of product that had just been delivered and was taking up much for the mailroom space. I had no idea what he meant, so I went with him to investigate.
Sure enough, the kind folks at General Foods had sent me a sample of each SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) of their branded pudding product line. Since they couldn’t order individual boxes from their warehouse, they sent me a case of each and every SKU. A case ranged from a dozen boxes of each SKU to even more.
Piled on the pallet was a case of each package size and each flavour of cooked pudding, each size and flavour of instant pudding, each flavour of tapioca pudding, custard puddings, cream pie kits, canned pudding snack cups, various parfait mixes, specialty deserts and so on and so on – each with many flavours. All in all, there was a cube of pudding products about 3 and a half feet by 3 and a half feet by four or five feet high. Perhaps the brand management group had no idea how limited or valuable space was in Manhattan offices compared to their space in White Plains.
To solve the problem of no space in the mailroom, first we needed to find a small empty office with a lockable door to store the stuff. Which we did, but office services was none too happy to give up valuable Manhattan office space, no matter how small, for a load of pudding. Product was loaded onto the mailroom trolley carts and load by load was relocated to the small office. I looked at my pudding riches, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
Great! Now I could try as many types of pudding as I wanted. We had plenty of product to test recipes in our agency kitchens – perhaps surprising today but we did have three or four home economists on staff in test kitchens because so many print ads featured recipes. The company was most of an entire building at 285 Madison Avenue and had about 2,000 employees in that building and an adjoining building facing Park Avenue.
Immediately, I was a villain to office services because the pudding was taking up an extra office and I was still a very junior executive and had very little equity with them.
Although I was trying quite a few different kinds of pudding every week, you can only eat so much of the stuff before your stomach feels like you swallowed a shotput.
As the months crawled past, I was getting more and more frequent requests from office services to “get that damn product out of the office.” Something had to give.
Jell-O Pudding (JOP) was hardly a plum assignment at that time. JOP was a tired, low ad budget brand that had been around for eons. One of those little brands that paid some of the agency’s bills but not one that highlighted anyone’s resume. It was difficult to get people to work on a minor brand in a large agency where everyone works on so many more exciting well known accounts with big budgets. There are lots of these little, low budget brands competing for staff attention. Jell-O Pudding barely got the attention we needed. It was still a few months before we launched the Bill Cosby advertising nationally.
I called on a good friend for help. Bob Sayles was a talented guy working as an entry level Account Coordinator but he wanted to work in art direction and production. Together we came up with an idea to solve both problems: Getting rid of aging product occupying valuable office space and getting staff interested in working on JOP.
Bob designed a Christmas card saying “Have a Merry Christmas… Pudding on us!” written with a string of Christmas lights that he illustrated himself. While the idea of Christmas Pudding was normal for me growing up in Canada, it wasn’t that common as an idea in the U.S. and it certainly wasn’t the kind of pudding we were dealing with. But who is a stickler for details when you have a problem to solve. We got our production department to print off about a 100 of these cards. Bob wasn’t even working on the account but helped out as a friend.
We put little gift packages together, little hampers of pudding, in our secret office. Each package had a card and half a dozen different boxes of pudding. One for each of the people who was assigned to work on the account in each of the many departments, from network scheduling, to talent, to media buying, to billing, to art files, to budget control, market research, art buyers, media, creative, and on and on as only a huge agency could muster. And yes, even office services. Many of them hardly knew they were assigned to the brand.
Then off we went like Christmas Elves around the office one evening after work close to the holidays, delivering little packages of Christmas cheer, leaving a little package and card on each person’s desk. Bob got his choice of as many puddings as he wanted. And we emptied the extra office.
Most people in these position NEVER got anything free and NEVER saw any of our clients’ products. They were thrilled at being thanked for their efforts. Recognition is more valuable than the cost of a few boxes of pudding. It was a sign that whatever efforts, if any, that folks put in to help our brand, we appreciated it and thanked them as members of our team.
It was amazing!
Soon we were getting “thank you“s when we came by and responses when we needed help or advice in the huge agency. We got more than our share of attention for our little brand. While giving someone a couple dollars of product seems like very little, the bar was really low. Jell-O Pudding emerged from the twilight into their spotlight, We had been background; we became foreground. All to solve an inadvertent problem, we turned a negative into a positive. Many times there are paths you might not think of right away that can change a set back into a leap forward.
And then we went on air with the Cosby advertising and everyone noticed us.