Ad Magic : N.Y. Company Is One of Dozens That Specialize in Seeing That Products Put on a Pretty Face
Ever wonder if your TV screen is suddenly playing tricks on you when the commercials come on?
That colorful-looking jar of Maxwell House coffee never looks nearly as bright when you see it on the grocery store shelf. And that fluffy-looking package of Angel Soft toilet paper often looks comparatively fluff-less at the store.
It’s not your TV that’s playing games with you. It’s companies such as Prop Art.
Prop Art has one mission: to make product packages look more beautiful than life. And with good reason. The packages that the Manhattan-based company produces are the ones that may ultimately help coax consumers to buy a certain brand of coffee, candy bar or toilet paper.
“What we do is like putting on makeup--except we use packages instead of people,” said Bernard Gentry, general manager of Prop Art, which is a division of Characters Typographic Services Inc. “We make the package the hero.”
It is a lucrative niche of the advertising industry that few consumers know about. Advertisers spend tens of millions of dollars every year to buy specially designed packages that appear only in their advertisements.
Why? Long before most consumers ever see the products they buy, they usually see the product packages--in advertisements. The packages must look inviting. Although Prop Art is one of several dozen specialty companies from New York to Los Angeles that craft these packages on demand, it is one of the only shops that crank them out around the clock.
“It’s painstaking work,” said Gentry, who oversees about 20 artists at the company’s unusual facility, which is awash in different colors of ink and different styles of type. “The general public doesn’t know about any of this. They look at a commercial and think someone went into the grocery store, pulled a box off the shelf and placed it in the ad.”
That rarely--if ever--happens.
Each year, Prop Art makes special packages for nearly 600 products that appear in TV and print ads. There are strict guidelines that require most consumer products--from Big Mac hamburgers to Nintendo games--to look the same in advertisements as they do in real life. But there are few rules that forbid the sprucing up of the packages in which the products are placed.
Advertising executives insist that fake packaging in ads--which mostly involves slapping on new labels with brighter colors and fewer written words--isn’t misleading. They say it’s simply part of the business.
“If I showed you the real product package in an ad, that would be misleading,” said William Tragos, chairman of TBWA Advertising, which creates ads for Absolut Vodka. Television cameras, for example, can make certain blue labels appear black. When Absolut Vodka’s bottles are shown in print ads, colors are often brightened and the small print removed from the labels. “That fuzzy stuff gets in the way if it isn’t fixed,” Tragos said.
When Little Caesar’s advertises its pizza, it also eliminates most of the small print on the pizza boxes, said Cliff Freeman, chairman of Little Caesar’s agency, Cliff Freeman & Partners. “We’re not deleting anything of any importance,” said Freeman. “It’s not as if we’re doctoring up the pizzas.”
Remember the TV commercial about a year ago for Colt 45 malt liquor that featured hundreds of Colt 45 cans that appeared to come flying out of a refrigerator? Prop Art remade the labels on the cans with a specially treated plastic shrink wrap. “These were all cosmetic changes,” said Paul Hagan, vice president and creative supervisor of W. B. Doner & Co., the Baltimore agency that created the ad. “They’re not meant to deceive anyone.”
Spruced-up product packages don’t come cheap. The agency paid $100 each for the labels on the Colt 45 cans. The hand-painted label on the Maxwell House jar on TV went for about $150 a jar. The Angel Soft toilet paper package--for which each individual roll was carefully rerolled and the label specially painted--was priced at about $300. And an over-sized cardboard box of Fab detergent hand-painted for an advertisement cost a cool $750.
Because of the high costs, those who handle the carefully crafted packages on the commercial sets usually wear special gloves that leave no smudges.
Artists mix and test different colors for hours until they come up with one that will look just right on the TV screen or in the print ad.
The firm has painted labels on bottles for Canei wine ads. It has helped create packaging for Lifesaver product ads. And for print ads, it has spruced up the packaging for Camel, Salem and Vantage cigarettes.
Then there are the products--such as ice cream--that simply can’t withstand the hot lights of commercial filming. So for a TV ad, Prop Art recently made a special six-pack of Klondike ice cream bars--stuffed with wood and tissue paper. To the naked eye, the Prop Art version looked good enough to gobble.
“It’s all part of advertising,” said Gentry, looking around his office at rows of sparkling packages filled with little besides Madison Avenue pixie dust. “It’s legalized lying.”
