TV Spots for Light Bulbs, Diet Pepsi This Year’s Big Clio Award Winners

About the only time people notice light bulbs is when they blow out. Yet a trio of TV commercials for a light bulb company--including one where two men are trying to defuse a time bomb when the lights go out--not only got noticed Monday evening, they also walked off with the top award in advertising.

These ads, a series of humorous spots about light bulbs failing at just the wrong time, took honors for the best national TV campaign at the 29th annual Clio Awards ceremony at New York’s Lincoln Center. A record 23,009 entries were received from 51 countries.

Besides the light bulb campaign, created for North American Philips Lighting Corp. by the New York ad firm Cliff Freeman & Partners, the other big Clio winner was the New York ad firm BBDO, which received a total of six trophies, several of them for a Diet Pepsi commercial that features actor Michael J. Fox.

The two largest Los Angeles-area winners were the ad firm Chiat/Day, which won five trophies--four of them out of its New York office--and the production company, Pytka, a repeat winner, which took home four trophies.

For more than a year, television viewers have been chuckling at the off-beat antics in the light bulb ads. Perhaps one of the most memorable features an older woman who appears to accidentally vacuum up her screeching cat after a light bulb blows and she’s in the dark.

The Clio-winning light bulb ads were this year’s version of that gag. In addition to the time bomb ad, one features a wife who complains to her husband at the dinner table that “the magic’s gone. The minute the lights go out you fall asleep.” The lights go out and you hear the sound of the man’s face falling into his bowl of soup.

The other shows a maintenance worker finding a racy novel and beginning to read it aloud to a co-worker. Just as he reads the phrase, “ . . . and whispered into her ear . . . “ the lights go out.

The agency that created the ads, Cliff Freeman, is a tiny New York ad firm with fewer than 20 employees. Although the agency is owned by the giant British advertising conglomerate, Saatchi & Saatchi, the year-old firm operates independently.

“If you don’t have an interesting ad, people will simply turn you off,” said Cliff Freeman, who previously created the where’s-the-beef? ads for Wendy’s. “This is especially important with a product like light bulbs, because it’s a product people don’t really have an opinion on.”

Most people do, however, have opinions on the light bulb commercials--which were made for a relatively modest $100,000 each. And while the campaign took the ad world’s top honors, not all advertising experts think the commercials are a success.

“Most people don’t know who the ad is for,” said Dave Vadehra, president of the New York research firm, Video Storyboard Tests Inc. “People laugh with the commercial, but they do not know who they are laughing with.”

At least, that was the case when the campaign first aired more than a year ago, he said, when North American Philips attempted to muscle in on General Electric’s dominance in the light bulb market. At the time, a Video Storyboard survey showed that nearly half of those responding didn’t know who the light bulb the ad was for. In fact, 20% thought it was a General Electric ad, while only 17% correctly named North American Philips.

But, in an interview last week, Freeman insisted that things have changed a lot since that year-old survey. His agency’s own surveys reveal that while almost no one had heard of Philips one year ago, awareness of the brand name is now at 67%, he said. And the light bulb maker, whose parent company is Dutch-based, reports that its sales are up 84% since January.

Meanwhile, two of the most familiar ads among the Clio winners were made by the ad firm BBDO Worldwide. The agency’s ad for Diet Pepsi features actor Michael J. Fox dashing out in a rainstorm to get a Pepsi for the gorgeous girl next door. And its ad for Du Pont shows a disabled Vietnam veteran playing in a heated basketball with the help of artificial limbs developed by Du Pont.

Locally, a Foster Farms chicken spot about a mother-in-law showing her daughter how to prepare chicken won a Clio award for the Los Angeles office of the ad firm Chiat/Day. And director Joe Pytka won several Clios, including two for Apple computer ads that show executives in tense business situations.

Unlike previous years, however, there was no real “pattern” to this year’s award winners, said Bill Evans, president of the Clios. “I don’t see any sort of trend,” he said. “Maybe that’s because so many advertising agencies have merged, that it’s hard to tell who’s doing what anymore.”

Hard-Hitting AIDS-Prevention Ads Are Proposed for the Networks

A frightened mother, clutching her 14-month-old baby, looks at the camera.

“I have AIDS and my baby has AIDS,” she says. Tears come to the woman’s eyes. “Every night I pray that my baby won’t die.”

She sobs, almost uncontrollably.

This is a real mother and a real baby, and they are not acting. Both have the AIDS virus. And they are part of a gripping public service television campaign scheduled to be released sometime in August.

This AIDS-prevention campaign, organized by the New York-based Advertising Council, was created by the New York office of the ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves.

Monday afternoon, plans for the provocative public service campaign were revealed for the first time at the American Advertising Federation’s annual meeting here in Los Angeles.

The question remains, will the major networks accept such hard-hitting commercials?

“I’m pretty bullish that they will,” said Ruth Wooden, president of the Advertising Council. “But we’ll have to see what happens.”

Today, in fact, executives from a number of independent television stations are scheduled to review the campaign for the first time, she said. Executives from the major networks will not see the campaign until later this month or next, she said.

“This will be the first national campaign for AIDS prevention,” said Wooden. In all, four commercials have been produced at a cost to the agency of about $200,000, she said. All end with this advice: “Help stop AIDS. Use a condom.”

No Catastrophe If Fancy Feast’s Classy Feline Is Out of Pocket

OK, the cat’s out of the bag. It turns out that the beautiful white cat that’s been starring in those highbrow Fancy Feast cat food commercials for several years has several stand-ins.

For those who aren’t familiar with the commercials, they always feature a pristine cat in museum-like settings. The silver Persian is seen gawking at paintings by Goya or perhaps taking a nap on the keyboard of a Steinway piano.

But that cat, S. H. III (the same initials as its owner and trainer, Scott Hart), can’t be two places at once. And since the 8-year-old cat is often touring the country making appearances at cat shows, on talk shows and even in movies (including “The Jerk” and “The Howling”), the pet foods division of Carnation must occasionally use other cats to stand in for S. H. III, said Carnation’s Linda Stegeman.

In the ads, S. H. III will eat his Fancy Feast cat food only out of a Waterford Crystal glass. Has Carnation considered some sort of tie-in with Waterford? “That’s not a bad idea,” said Stegeman. “Maybe we’ll look into it.”