Putting the Splash Back Into Ads

McDonald’s has not gone Mc-mad. That is a two-story Big Mac you might have seen last night on the tube. And yes, sitting on top of the latex creation is a real grand piano with a man-in-the-moon look-alike at the keyboard. He croons for McDonald’s while his 10-pound head rotates 360 degrees.

This is the future of advertising--and it is here. In the year ahead, splashy, flashy, emotion-filled ads like this will stop at nothing to grab viewer attention. It is a trend that chief executives from six of the nation’s most influential ad agencies say will pick up steam in 1987.

The trend toward larger-than-life ads has been resurrected thanks to quick-to-click television viewers who, executives predict, will see more advertising panache then ever in the year ahead.

“People are watching television in a much more restless way,” said Burton J. Manning, chairman and chief executive at J. Walter Thompson USA in New York. “Advertisers will have to do something to stop them from flipping the dial.”

As the forerunner to this trend, many agency chiefs give a nod to ad firm Chiat/Day, which was ahead of the pack three years ago when it created the then-unorthodox ad campaigns for Apple computers and Nike athletic shoes--accounts it has since lost.

“Rather than verbal, rational exposition, there will be a continuing trend for more visual, emotional work,” said Norman Brown, president and chief executive of Foote, Cone & Belding Communications Inc., Chicago.

This is no passing fad either, “but something absolutely fundamental and rooted in the present generation,” said Brown, whose company created the current fast-paced Levis ad campaign.

Although 1986 was an advertising year mostly filled with the sort of folksy advertising that made a couple of old geezers named Bartles & Jaymes cult heroes, executives predict that there may be a rather radical turn toward bigger, splashier ads during the next 12 months. Among the strongest continuing influences on advertising, executives say, will be rock videos, which have not only picked up the pace but also enhanced the images and loosened the language.

This trend has already been discovered by one mid-size Los Angeles agency, Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto (DJMC) Advertising Inc., which took one year to create the $500,000 “Mac Tonight” commercial--to the tune of “Mack the Knife”--for the McDonald’s Operators Assn. of Southern California. The 30-second spot, shot two weeks ago, was scheduled to premiere last night in various markets nationwide.

“I call it the zap attack,” said Brad Ball, president of DJMC. “We have to make commercials that are more riveting to viewers than the prospect of flipping through the channels at breakneck speed.”

Hal Riney, regarded by his peers as one of the top creative minds in the business, says the trend is unmistakable.

“Ad agencies are finally getting back to doing what we’re supposed to be doing,” said the chairman of San Francisco-based Hal Riney & Partners, which created the Bartles & Jaymes campaign. “We’re developing imaginative ideas. There’ll be a lot less of the expected stuff.”

Indeed, agencies will work like never before “to establish unique connections between products and customers,” said Peter A. Georgesku, president of Young & Rubicam Advertising, a subsidiary of Young and Rubicam Inc.

“Mass advertising won’t be like aspirin anymore. You won’t simply take two and feel better in the morning.”

So-called “homogenized” ads--which fail to clearly differentiate a product--will be a thing of the past, agrees Charles D. Peebler, chief executive at Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt, the New York firm that created Chrysler’s “The Pride Is Back” spots.

“Emotional appeal is basic to what we see up ahead,” he said.

No big fan of this return to razzle-dazzle advertising is Jack Roth, president and chief executive of Admarketing Inc., a Los Angeles agency that has produced numerous AirCal commercials.

“Sometimes,” he said, “people forget the object of an advertisement is to get results, not awards.”

Indeed, producing advertisements peppered with glittery images and emotional appeal “is like dating the most beautiful girl on the block,” Roth said. “When all your friends tell you how beautiful she is--even if you don’t like her--it’s hard to give her up.”

Fewer Big Ad Agency Mergers Seen for ’87

If 1986 was the ad world’s year of the mega-merger, 1987 is expected to be the year of the mini-merger.

Ad agencies won’t stop growing during the next year, but they won’t continue to grow like sunflowers in Kansas, industry executives and analysts predict.

“Who’s left to mega-merge?” posed Alan Gottesman, ad industry analyst at L. F. Rothschild in New York. “Eventually, you’d just have one big ad agency called Advertising Inc.”

Indeed, most industry executives say they do not expect to see anything like the jumbo-size agency mergers of 1986, which pulled Ted Bates Worldwide, Backer & Spielvogel and Dancer Fitzgerald Sample Inc. into Saatchi & Saatchi Co. PLC, the world’s largest ad agency, and the formation of the second largest, Omnicom Group Inc., with the mergers of BBDO International Inc., Needham Harper Worldwide and Doyle Dane Bernbach Group.

“The reactions on the part of clients has been so negative,” said Foote, Cone’s Brown, “that it has probably driven away all mergers except those agencies with a true need to get together.” Instead, he said, most big agencies--including his--will concentrate on “selective strategic acquisitions,” particularly outside the United States.

Most industry acquisitions will be more “tactical” in 1987--and not just for the sake of growth, said Young & Rubicam’s Georgesku. His agency, among the largest and most profitable in the world, will probably pick up some smaller firms with expertise in direct marketing and sales promotion next year, “but don’t look for any major acquisitions on our part.”

But Admarketing’s Roth hopes the mega-mergers continue in 1987. After all, he explained, when disgruntled clients leave the big, mega-merged firms, “it makes more business for us smaller guys.”

Belt-Tightening Will Limit Ad Agency Rolls

If all the ad industry layoffs that were rumored to have taken place in 1986 actually did, there wouldn’t be enough agency executives left to form a string quartet.

Still, as major advertisers became more stingy with their marketing dollars and ad agencies began to merge at a fast pace, there were scars left behind in corporate payrolls.

In recent years, basic economics has forced ad agencies to generally cut back on employees. Somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 ad agency professionals lost their jobs during the past few years, according to industry estimates. Although mega-mergers were a factor, they were hardly the leading cause. Most layoffs resulted from an industrywide job preening that reflected a belt-tightening among most major advertisers.

Agency chiefs and industry consultants say this trend is expected to continue in 1987.

But unemployment will not run rampant in the industry, executives say, because many of those who are laid off never leave the industry--they just open their own shops.

“People tend to overemphasize the number of professionals on the street,” said Richard Kane, partner in Kane Ford Buck & Associates, a New York executive recruiting firm that specializes in ad agency placement. “The total number of people in the industry may not be down at all. Many who are let go simply turn around and start new agencies.”

Kane also said half of the layoffs reported in the industry last year may not have actually been in the “professional” ranks.

A decade ago, many ad firms employed up to seven people per $1 million in billings. Today that figure is closer to one person per $1 million in billings, say industry executives. Last year, for example, J. Walter Thompson cut its U.S. staff by 3%, including 50 people in its New York office.

“Our clients spent less, so we had to react,” said Thompson’s Manning. But he projected “no big cutbacks” in 1987.

Salary inflation among the top creative executives at ad firms has also led to cutbacks at some agencies, said Hal Riney, president of the San Francisco ad firm.

“The salaries of my best people have gone up 100% in the last four years,” he said. “Good people don’t come cheap.”