The Fact Is Back as Crash Brings Truth to Advertising

Porsche has spent millions of dollars positioning its product as a car that’s sexier than sin.

But a few days after the stock market crash, ad man Tom McElligott began to wonder if Porsche ads needed a tad less spark and a smidgen more fact. After all, some potential Porsche buyers suddenly needed practical reasons for buying the costly car.

So McElligott, whose highly regarded Minneapolis ad firm, Fallon McElligott, just inherited the $20-million Porsche advertising business, decided to give practical-minded buyers one very good reason to consider Porsche. In sober, black-and-white advertising, the headline above the new Porsche print ads he created boasts: “At 107% resale value, it makes the Dow look positively reckless.”

It’s back to the future in advertising. Following a year when advertisers tried to outdo each other with splash and panache, 1988 will be a year that facts take the front seat and hyperbole gets stowed away somewhere in the trunk.

That’s not to say that glitz is gone. Pepsi has some flashy Michael Jackson ads ready for spring, and Coca-Cola has effusive ads this week toasting the Reagan-Gorbachev summit. But basically, an uncertain economy seems to have turned many advertisers conservative.

Most advertisers apparently believe that too much is at stake in 1988 to monkey around with obscure ads or purely image-building extravaganzas. And they plan to heavily use the 1988 Olympics and the presidential elections to sell their products.

This straightforward approach is, in part, a reaction to the more obscure, glitzy ads of the past few years. So, in 1988 advertising is expected to be a reincarnation of a marketing method devised nearly 30 years ago by advertising legend David Ogilvy. At the time, the headline for his first print ad for Rolls-Royce said: “At 60 miles per hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” Now, the hands of advertising time have been turned back: No-nonsense ads will again be advertising chic in 1988.

“The ads don’t have to be dull,” said McElligott, “but they have to tell people something about the product.” In that thinking, McElligott is not alone. “It will be harder to sell the emperor new clothes,” said Jack Roth, chairman of the Los Angeles ad firm Admarketing Inc. “Clients will demand advertising that they know will work.”

If one industrywide advertising trend stands high above the rest for 1988, it is the decline of obscure advertising and an expected return to ads that pull no punches. Interviews with a dozen of the nation’s top advertising executives and directors reveal that if 1987 was the year of larger-than-life advertising, 1988 will be the year of back-to-basics ads.

Indeed, 1988 will be a year the content of many ads will be determined, in part, by the events around them. After all, beyond the advertising aftershocks of the stock market crash, 1988 is also an election year and an Olympics year. Ad executives say their clients are eager to use all these events to get their products sold. “There will be an enormous pressure on advertisers to deliver,” said Graham Phillips, chairman of the New York ad firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Inc. “We’re all scrambling around trying to do just that.”

There will also be pressure on advertisers to pay more. “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Robert J. Coen, senior vice president at the New York ad firm McCann-Erickson Worldwide, “there won’t be many bargains around for advertisers in 1988.”

Just ask ABC, which is scheduled to televise the Super Bowl on Jan. 31. The highest price paid for a 30-second spot during professional football’s biggest game has jumped 12.5% to $675,000, compared to $600,000 during the CBS telecast last January, said William A. Harmond, vice president of sales of ABC’s western division. And of the 51 commercial slots, he said, “there’s next to nothing left.”

As companies vie for the best spots during the Olympics--and as political candidates jockey for the best commercial slots--ad spending in the United States could increase 9% in 1988, compared to 1987, Coen projected.

Advertisers will face the biggest price increases they’ve seen in four years. The cost of network TV ads could jump 10% to 12%, Coen said. As a result, ad spending will reach nearly $120 billion next year, compared to $110 billion in 1987, Coen said.

But as advertisers spend more, they will also face increasing pressure to get their messages across. And the best way to do that may be to simply present the facts. Nowhere is this emerging fact-oriented approach more visible than in auto ads.

In addition to Porsche, everyone from Nissan to Ford will be playing it straight. After all, most auto makers already foresee a sales slump in 1988. And automobile makers accounted for slightly more than 11% of $23.7 billion that was spent on all domestic advertising last year, according to New York-based Leading National Advertisers. With more than twice as many car models on the market now as there were five years ago, the competition is at full throttle.

That is why a no-nonsense approach is even finding its way into agencies that have traditionally been best known for their creativity. “Simple is better,” said Jay Chiat, chairman of Chiat/Day, the Los Angeles ad firm that recently inherited the $150-million Nissan advertising account. “During any kind of economic crisis--whether real or perceived--clients and agencies tend to lose their sense of humor.”

There’s certainly nothing funny about the new ads that Chiat/Day has created for Nissan. In the first set, a group of design engineers (who are actually actors) sit in a room discussing how Nissan cars and trucks are designed to fit people. In the next set of Nissan ads, scheduled to air later this month, these same engineers are seen at the car test track, still discussing how the cars can best fit the drivers. And by next spring, Chiat said, Nissan will roll out a harder-sell series of ads that specifically plug Nissan’s individual models.

Likewise, Chevrolet’s advertised image of the “Heartbeat of America” will soon be upstaged by company ads that more forcefully push the car maker’s separate models, said Sean Fitzpatrick, who created the “Heartbeat” campaign at his Warren, Mich.-based agency, Campbell-Ewald Co. “We’ll continue to use the ‘Heartbeat’ image,” he said, “but there’ll be a much harder sell underneath it.”

When the market crashes, “the flash also crashes,” explained Cliff Einstein, president of the Los Angeles ad firm Dailey & Associates, which has created new ads for the Southern California Ford Dealers Assn. “This is the year that people will want a little more honesty and a little less of the trendy fads.”

Although the Southern California Ford Dealers have nabbed the actress who plays the Bionic Woman to pitch their products, Lindsay Wagner has been cast as a serious spokeswoman and not as some superheroine. In one ad, Wagner simply reminds viewers that they can still get the Mustang, “the car you’ve wanted since high school.”

Hyundai, certainly, has relied on the back-to-basics advertising theme since it was introduced three years ago with the slogan: Cars that make sense. “We’ve never believed in the glitzy approach,” said Carl Spielvogel, chairman of the New York ad firm Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide Inc., which creates all the ads for the Korean auto maker’s economy cars. “And now that Wall Street has gone through a shakeout, my scenario is that people will go back to buying basic values.”

That could result in more business for directors like Joe Sedelmaier, who has directed Alaska Airlines ads for six years. He says the purpose of his ads has always been to present facts. But his biggest problem in 1988 will continue to be finding actors who don’t look like actors.

Sedelmaier--who works out of Chicago--frequently goes back to his hometown, Orville, Ohio, to find characters for his ads. On a recent visit home, he stopped by the local phone company office and signed up a salesman who handed him a pencil. Sedelmaier says he has no use at all for Hollywood. “The hardest place in the world to cast is in Los Angeles,” he said. “Once people get to Los Angeles, they get their teeth capped and their hair transplanted and they don’t look like anyone you know.”

Some executives have invented their own names for this trend. Norman Campbell, chairman of the giant New York-based ad firm BBDO Worldwide, calls it “user-relevant” advertising. But, he adds, “It must be presented in an interesting way.” Indeed, his firm, which created the widely praised Pepsi commercials featuring Michael J. Fox and Michael Jackson, also created a recent ad for Apple Computer that features a handicapped kid in a wheelchair. “That’s something that advertisers wouldn’t have done a few years ago,” Campbell said. “But this is an engaging ad that also says something about the product.”

Director Joe Pytka, who has handled a number of BBDO’s Pepsi spots, said he is pessimistic about the look of most advertising in 1988. He doesn’t a foresee any dramatic shift to facts-first advertising--or even one toward splashy ads, for that matter. Instead, Pytka expects basically boring, copycat advertising in 1988. “I see a lot of negative trends,” said the Venice-based director of a number of Pepsi’s Michael Jackson and Michael J. Fox ads. “I see a bunch of what I call Mixmaster advertisements. You know, the kind that are just a bunch of quick cuts thrown together.”

Other experts agree that ads will need more than facts to arouse viewer interest in 1988. “Ads that are simply straight and honest will get lost in the clutter,” said Dave Vadehra, president of Video Storyboard Tests Inc., a New York firm that monitors advertising. “The trick is to make commercials that don’t look like commercials,” he said, “then, people will watch them.”