Pitch Gets Pulled : TV Ads That Public Will Never See
It is one thing for a stomach to gurgle. It is another, however, for a bunch of stomachs to star in a television commercial--and grumble.
In the TV ad, the stomachs--which are actually made of clay--are noisily upset over spicy foods. One of the human-like stomachs even gets so enraged that it turns beet-red and its head flies off.
Does this sound like a commercial you’d like to see? Well, you probably never will. Not that anything is wrong with it. In fact, this commercial for Alka-Seltzer was made at great expense in the mid-1980s by Will Vinton studio, the same Portland production company that made the ballyhooed dancing clay raisins for the California Raisin Advisory Board. Such ads use a time-consuming and costly process called clay animation, which can cost upwards of $5,000 per second to film.
Product Was Dropped
So what happened? Well, Miles Laboratories, maker of Alka-Seltzer, decided not to introduce the new product featured in the ad--a liquid form of the more familiar Alka-Seltzer tablets.
“This is all part of the ad business,” said Vinton, president of the Portland-based production company. “But it’s not the part anyone likes.”
Few people realize it, but a surprising number of commercials don’t make the grade. Costly commercials filmed for some of the world’s biggest companies--from General Electric to American Telephone & Telegraph--have been quietly canned.
Some don’t make it to the television screen at all. Others get canceled shortly after they do. At a time when most companies are looking hard at ways to cut costs, it might sound peculiar that some go to the expense of shooting costly commercials that seldom--or never--see the light of the television tube. But executives generally say it is far better to swallow the $200,000 production costs of a commercial than to spend $20 million on media time for an ad that misses the mark.
Costly Mistakes
“The secret is to keep checking with the client every step along the way,” said David McCall, chairman of the New York ad firm McCaffrey & McCall. “Otherwise the mistakes can be very costly.” While more than $100 billion was spent on television advertising in the United States last year, executives say that dozens of ads that cost millions to produce never got on the air. Industry officials figure that about one in 10 completed television commercials are never aired. In fact, many commercials are seen only by the people who created them.
“It happens much more often than any of us would care to tell you,” said Marvin Sloves, chairman of the New York ad firm Scali, McCabe, Sloves. Indeed, only 10 of 30 ad chiefs contacted were willing to discuss those ads that never got aired.
Explained the chairman of one major New York ad firm: “It’s like asking Arnold Palmer to talk about his bogeys instead of his birdies.”
Generally, those executives who did talk are so fiercely confident in their agencies’ overall creative work that they didn’t mind discussing a clunker or two.
Before commercials appear on television, most advertising agencies screen the ads in front of “focus” groups--gatherings of 10 to 30 people who are paid to watch ads and comment on them. If the group doesn’t like an ad, the commercial may be radically changed or even axed.
Much of the time, however, the problem is not that the commercials are bad. Sometimes, the products themselves just don’t cut the mustard, so the ads are dumped with them--as with liquid Alka Seltzer. Similarly, Vinton’s studio created costly ads for what was supposed to be a low-priced children’s cereal, “Mr. Cheapskates,” made by Quaker Oats.
Concerns Top Executives
“We put a whole campaign together,” Vinton recalled, “only to have them later decide not to put the cereal on the market.”
Every once in a while, however, a new commercial so concerns the top executives at a company that it simply doesn’t make it to the air.
This was the case several years ago with a commercial that the Venice ad agency Chiat/Day created for General Electric. The ad, which has never aired, is extremely powerful. A man dressed as Uncle Sam is repeatedly--and forcefully--slapped in the face. In fact, one slap is so hard it knocks his hat off. Meanwhile, a voice-over rattles off statistics that reveal a growing trade imbalance and a weakening U.S. economy.
As the hand comes around for one last slap, however, Uncle Sam firmly grabs it and renders the hand helpless. The voice-over then states that General Electric has money-saving suggestions for so-called “factories of the future” that could help American corporations fight back.
“That commercial made it all the way up to the chairman’s office at GE,” said Lee Clow, president of Chiat/Day.
“But I guess he ultimately decided that it did not quite bring good things to life,” said Clow, playing on GE’s slogan.
Commercial Nixed
Similarly, senior executives at American Telephone & Telegraph nixed a commercial that their longtime ad firm, NW Ayer, had created. The commercial, which was supposed to be humorous, tried to encourage people to make more AT&T; long-distance phone calls. In the ad, a Jewish couple have an exaggerated argument over the price of a call on their phone bill. Worried that the possible stereotyping would offend Jewish customers, AT&T; decided not to air the commercial.
“Sure, things like that can be frustrating,” said Jerry Siano, chairman of the New York office of NW Ayer. “You have this little golden egg that you think is great, but you never get to see it hatch.”
Even though a client and its ad agency can agree on the concept of a certain commercial, Siano said, the completed advertisement can look very different from what the client had in mind. At that point, he said, it is much easier for the client to drop the ad than to spend millions of dollars buying air time for a commercial that it doesn’t really like.
Right on the Money
At other times, a commercial can be right on the money--but the client cancels it because product supply cannot keep pace with expected demand. Such was the case years ago with a commercial created for American Honda.
The ad, which would have aired during the gasoline crunch in the mid-1970s, was for Honda’s five-speed Civic. In the ad, a Civic is being filled at a gasoline pump while an announcer notes that the car has the best mileage of any car on the market.
But Yoshihide Munekuni, president of American Honda, decided that there simply weren’t enough of the hot-selling cars available to satisfy customer demand.
“We got paid for the ad,” said Gerrold Rubin, president of the Los Angeles ad firm Rubin Postaer & Associates, “but after reflection, Honda decided it would be misleading to run an ad for a car that basically wasn’t available.”
Simply Too Hot
Then there are those ads that are simply too hot to handle:
“I’m 36 years old, and yesterday I did it for the first time.”
This confession, by a very attractive woman, is not dialogue from the Oprah Winfrey show. It’s from a Jack in the Box television commercial. What was it that the woman did for the first time? She ate a grilled chicken sandwich.
The advertisement appeared only in one test market, then it was shelved. For one thing, executives at Foodmaker, the San Diego-based owner of Jack in the Box, decided to hold up introduction of the product. For another, company executives were queasy about the commercial itself.
“It was a fun ad,” said John Farrar, the company’s director of advertising, “but it just didn’t make the grade.”
A commercial that featured actress Susan Anton munching a slice of pizza never got aired, either. Pizza Hut officials made certain of that. The problem, it seems, was the sensual manner in which Anton ate the pizza.
‘Almost Too Erotic’
“It was almost too erotic,” recalled Guy Day, retired co-founder of Chiat/Day, which created the ad. “Remember, Pizza Hut is a small-town franchise. The ad was just too strong for the folks in Wichita. And in retrospect, they were probably right.”
Still, because the costs of creating commercials are so high, most companies air whatever ads their agencies produce. Ten years ago, most commercials were filmed for well under $100,000. Today, most 30-second network spots cost at least twice that much, and some may cost upwards of $1 million, such as several of the Pepsi ads, starring pop singer Michael Jackson, that the firm BBDO Worldwide created.
Advertising agencies, of course, don’t want to see their ads dumped. So to make certain that doesn’t happen, many ad firms try to wait until as close to air time as possible before showing new commercials to their clients.
‘It’s Too Late’
“That way,” said Lee Weinblatt, chief executive of Pretesting Co., an Englewood, N.J., outfit that tests commercials on consumers before the ads are aired, “even if the commercial bombs in the testing, it’s too late to do anything about it.”
Martin Puris, co-chairman of the New York ad firm Ammirati & Puris, said some of his clients have killed completed ads.
“When that happens, it’s best not to argue too much,” Puris said. “It’s usually best left dead so you can go on and do another one.”
Sometimes, however, a client’s top management changes and the ads go out with them. Several Los Angeles ad firms know what that’s like.
About four years ago, Chiat/Day’s advertisements for the computer maker, Apple, were the toast of the ad industry. When Apple was preparing to introduce a new computer, Chiat/Day executives decided that they could make a commercial TV spokesman out of Steven Jobs, who was then chief executive of Apple. The ad firm simply filmed Jobs answering reporters’ questions at a real press conference.
Out of a Job
“We thought they were pretty good ads,” said Jay Chiat, chairman of the ad firm. So good, in fact, that the ad agency made three advertisements out of the press conference for a total cost of about $100,000.
But shortly after the commercials were filmed, John Sculley gained gained control of Apple and Jobs was out of a job. The commercials with Jobs were canned.
“It didn’t bug us all that much,” said Chiat, whose agency was still paid for its work. “These were political issues that we couldn’t do anything about.”
Other times, a company is sold and changes advertising agencies. That can deep-six an entire ad campaign before it ever airs.
This was the case last year with an ad campaign created for the Denny’s coffee-shop chain. The campaign, which featured about 16 ads filmed for $1 million over the course of nearly a year, was canceled when Denny’s was bought by TW Services.
‘Most Frustrating Experience’
“After all that money and all that time, it’s supposed to go on the air,” said Peter Angelos, executive creative director at Foote, Cone & Belding’s Los Angeles office. “But of course, it didn’t.”
What happened, instead, was what Angelos described as his “most frustrating” experience in the ad business.
It began in November, 1986, when Angelos and three top marketing executives from Denny’s met at the Miramar hotel in Santa Monica. He told the executives that Denny’s needed a stronger image.
“I told them we needed to get Denny’s into the consumers’ mental Rolodex,” Angelos said. “Denny’s needs to stand for something besides food that’s cheap.”
Angelos started tinkering with the advertising concept of Denny’s as a place where people go not just for good food, but for good company. So he hired one of the top directors in the advertising industry and filmed a series of commercials that showed people sitting in the coffee shop, doing as much talking as eating.
‘Good Food, Good People’
In one of the ads, four men in their mid-30s eat heartily while discussing their families. “What I liked best about ‘Father Knows Best’ is that nobody yelled,” one of the characters says. “In my family everyone yells.” His buddies laugh and continue to gobble up their dinners. The ad ends with the slogan, “Denny’s: Good food, good people.”
Just three days before this campaign was supposed to air, Denny’s was bought by another company. The ads were killed before they ever aired.
“We were absolutely convinced that it was right for Denny’s,” Angelos said. “More than 11 months of work was just sitting there, waiting for the public to see. But now, that will never happen.”
