Ad Executives’ Favorite Commercials Don’t Rate High on Mass Appeal

Sorry, Spuds MacKenzie. Nothing personal, dancing raisins. No harm meant, Domino’s Noid.

Those off-the-wall commercial creations may have caught the fancy of TV viewers nationwide, but the favorite of some top New York ad executives wasn’t made of clay, nor can it stand on four feet and wag its beer-soaked tail.

Instead, they said, the best campaign of 1987 featured a human being: Michael J. Fox who dashes through a rainstorm and a maze of other obstacles to fetch a Diet Pepsi for his next door neighbor. The ad, “Apartment 10-G,” created by the New York ad firm, BBDO Worldwide, was the choice of half of the dozen ad executives asked in a informal survey about the work of their rivals.

“Even with Michael J. Fox in the ad, the product is still the center of attention,” said John S. Bowen, chairman and chief executive of rival ad firm D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Inc. “Everything revolves around getting the Diet Pepsi.”

What makes the Pepsi ad campaign so effective, adds Carl Spielvogel, chairman of the ad firm Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide, “is its ability to keep the product eternally youthful.” Agrees Kenneth Roman, chairman and chief executive of the Ogilvy Group Inc., “Pepsi ads are with it.”

Besides the Pepsi ads, the ad executives had some other favorites. Several of them gave nods of approval to recent commercials for Club Med, Wang, the Wall Street Journal, American Express and McDonald’s.

Some commercials that are very popular with the general public are not admired by all ad agency leaders. In a recent poll of 25,000 consumers by Video Storyboard Tests Inc., the California Raisin Advisory Board’s dancing raisins ad and Bud Light’s Spuds MacKenzie campaign were named as the top two commercials of 1987. But neither of them were even mentioned by the 12 New York ad chairmen surveyed.

“What do you expect?” said Dave Vadehra, president of the New York ad research firm, Video Storyboard Tests. “These are businessmen, not consumers. They see things very differently.”

Indeed, several of the executives said they are big fans of an abstract ad campaign for Wang Laboratories Inc. created by the Boston-based ad firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos Inc. The ad features office workers speaking in what sometimes sounds like high-tech nonsense. The ads all take place in office settings, but rarely show the people who are talking.

Even Wang executives concede that the ads have upset many TV viewers who have called or written to complain that they have no idea what’s going on in them.

Still, some ad executives think those ads are terrific. “These ads are written to a very, very tight audience,” said Robert L. James, chairman and chief executive of the ad firm McCann-Erickson Worldwide. “It doesn’t really matter if most people don’t understand them.”

Spencer Plavoukos, chairman and chief executive of the New York office of the ad firm Lintas: Worldwide agrees. “The Wang advertising works because it doesn’t try to talk to everyone. The ads are so narrowly targeted that they only talk to the people most immediately involved in buying computers.”

Ad executives say the Wall Street Journal’s current ad campaign--”The daily diary of the American dream”--is also right on target. The campaign, created by the Minneapolis ad firm Fallon McElligott, “does what advertising is supposed to do. It is literate, tough-minded and persuasive,” said Burt Manning, chairman and chief executive of the ad firm J. Walter Thompson.

Concurs Martin Puris, chairman and chief executive at the ad firm Ammirati & Puris, “It shows an exceptional understanding of the Wall Street Journal’s market.”

Puris’ agency developed a campaign for Club Med--”the antidote for civilization”--that has also earned praise from several rival ad chiefs. The Club Med commercials are actually visual puns. They feature shots of exotic scenes while a background narrator reads newspaper headlines. A shot of a couple kissing in the sand is paired with the headline, “Tensions ease in the Gulf.”

“It’s terrific advertising,” said Marvin Sloves, chairman and chief executive of the the ad firm Scali, McCabe, Sloves Inc. “It says exactly what its market wants to hear.”

And how did Puris come up with Club Med’s slogan? “I commute a total of 2 1/2 hours each day,” said Puris. “I thought of it while I was stuck in a traffic jam.”

Thompson Office Isn’t a ‘Crystal Palace’ Now

Clients used to not-so-jokingly call it the “Crystal Palace.” They were referring to the highly polished New York corporate offices of the ad firm J. Walter Thompson. But more than ownership has changed at Thompson over the past year. Amid worldwide cost-cutting efforts at the agency under its new British owner WPP Group, the “Crystal Palace” has also lost much of its luster.

Gone is the executive dining room. Gone are plush executives offices that--in several cases--were larger than entire executive board rooms at some competing firms. In fact, gone is the agency’s entire 70,000-square-foot third floor. It is now rented to a law firm.

“The excesses we had simply weren’t appropriate for an ad agency going into the 1990s,” said Burt Manning, who returned to Thompson as chairman and chief executive less than one year ago. “We’re not in the business of having luxury living quarters. We’re in the business of creating great advertising.”

Manning, who once enjoyed a sprawling, glass-enclosed office at the agency’s Lexington Avenue headquarters, now sits in a moderate office that was formerly that of a Thompson researcher.

But more than office space has been cut at Thompson. Since Manning rejoined the agency in July, Thompson has let go more than 200 employees, including 12 of its 14 staff lawyers. Also, all Thompson executives must now fly coach, unless first-class seats are directly approved by Manning. But that’s a rarity. “It isn’t often,” says Manning, “that anyone has the nerve to come in here and ask.”

Ogilvy Ends Practice of ‘Belly-to-Belly’ Staffing

Just weeks after being named chairman of Ogilvy Group Inc., Kenneth Roman last week returned from a tour of the ad giant’s Pacific divisions, where he has accelerated cutbacks.

Two weeks ago, Roman closed the firm’s Tokyo office, which employed seven people. And over the past year, Ogilvy also has closed four of its more remote Australian offices and consolidated its Australian advertising business into its two remaining offices in Melbourne and Sydney. “These are signs of strength, not weakness,” said Roman in an interview. “Our strategy is to create great advertising, not to just put dots on the map.”

Of course, Ogilvy still has plenty of dots on the map, with 220 offices in 48 countries. But over the past two years, the firm’s U.S. operation also has laid off 300 workers, Roman said. “Our clients are asking for less belly-to-belly staffing,” he said, “so we have reduced head count.”

L.A. May Be the Place but It Has No Ad Row

In New York, it’s Madison Avenue. In Chicago, it’s North Michigan Avenue. And in Los Angeles, it’s--well--it’s not really anything.

What we’re talking about are streets whose names have historically been linked with great advertising agencies. And even though most ad firms have long since moved away from these expensive addresses, the street names continue to philosophically link both New York and Chicago with great advertising.

But what about Los Angeles?

“In order for Los Angeles to make an important contribution to advertising,” said Dave Vadehra, president of the New York ad research firm, Video Storyboard Tests, “you may need a street that ad agencies can call their own. . . . Perhaps the L.A. ad agencies should all consolidate on a single street, and you could name it Avenue of Advertising.”