We’ll Buy It : INVENTING DESIRE: Inside Chiat/Day: The Hottest Shop, the Coolest Players, the Big Business of Advertising, <i> By Karen Stabiner (Simon & Schuster: $25; 339 pp.)</i>
Pity poor Dick Sittig, an ad man from Chiat/Day, the hyper-hip Venice-based agency that produced some of the most memorable advertising of the 1980s. He has created a new commercial for Nissan in which an upwardly-mobile Everyman dreams of owning his own car company so he can design his ideal car (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Nissan Sentra). To distinguish the dream from reality, Sittig calls for it to be shot in black and white--striking angles and shadows, “in the Expressionist style of the 1926 German film Metropolis.” It is a strong commercial that will ultimately prove effective in selling cars. But the client wants a change. He wants the dream to be in color. Sittig, after having triumphantly staged impromptu performances in his office for admiring colleagues, discovers that once again, “people who knew nothing about creative were going to tromp on his execution.”
Crises like these occur regularly in Karen Stabiner’s “Inventing Desire,” an entertaining chronicle of a year in the life of Chiat/Day. The author spent much of 1990 cruising the cubicles of the firm’s open-plan warehouse headquarters, and she found the agency at a crossroads. Proud of its creativity, disdainful of those who didn’t appreciate the ads its creativity spawned, Chiat/Day had grown up proclaiming its difference from other ad agencies: they were the Navy, Chiat/Day was the pirates. Now financial pressures impelled Chiat/Day to seek major new clients. But it was not certain that large corporate advertisers would want to employ a crew flying the skull and crossbones.
Some Chiat/Day executives were eager to modify the firm’s image. “We’re not arrogant assholes, but it’s the world’s best-kept secret,” one argued in one of the many unguarded meetings recorded by Stabiner, who apparently had full access to the firm’s inner workings. But Chiat/Day traditionalists were wary of succeeding too well. Big clients often demanded bland advertising. An agency grown accustomed to the income derived from big clients would not be able to afford to resist. It would grow “dronish,” dull, creatively dead. The soul of Chiat/Day was at stake.
How big a problem was this? Entertaining ads can certainly be fun to watch; I’ll take the Energizer bunny (a Chiat/Day creation) over ring-around-the-collar any day. But if the writers and artists of Chiat/Day really wanted to be true to their muses and avoid the tampering of Philistines, maybe they should have considered an outlet for their talents that wasn’t an advertising agency. It’s just a thought. “Commerce owned every imagination in the room,” Stabiner observes, “but for their minds to flourish, they had to believe it was not so.” But it was.
And so, although the soul scraping never really stopped, Chiat/Day accepted financial reality and set off in search of new clients, including some it would previously have shunned. The agency had once voted against taking on a defense contractor, and it still declined to pursue cigarette makers, but now it sought the business of the U.S. Marine Corps and the Chemical Manufacturers’ Assn. “Just change (our) flag,” one agency veteran suggested. “From a skull-and-crossbones to a swastika.”
In clear and lively prose, Stabiner describes the competition between ad agencies for new business, a process slightly less bloody than the Civil War. Marching into a meeting room to set up their pitch to Century 21 real estate, the Chiat/Day pitch team was “elated” to discover a wastebasket filled with material left behind by the team from McCann-Erickson that had pitched the account earlier in the day. Included was an ad that had made reference to the homeless problem. The Chiat/Day people made sure to mention casually during their presentation that they had considered a homeless ad but had discarded it as a lousy idea. On their way out of the room, they deliberately shoved into the wastebasket a proposed ad of their own that they had decided not to use, the better to mislead the next scavenger in the trash.
Stabiner’s fly-on-the-wall approach occasionally reaches points of diminishing returns. Some snappy comments by Chiat/Dayers seem to be in the book because the writer happened to hear them, not because they add anything to the story. And her chronological structure can be frustrating when a narrative thread ends abruptly, displaced by other, unrelated events.
These lapses, however, are compensated for by her inside-the-sausage-factory view of campaigns like the Nissan Sentra ad with the black-and-white dream (later, it was dutifully switched to color). That campaign, which did not even attempt to argue that the Sentra was a better car than a Toyota or Ford, represents a growing trend in which ads are selling not a product, but an image of a product, not a piece of machinery but a feeling.
Concerning the low-cost Sentra, this was no easy task. The car’s sales were slipping, and those that were selling were being bought by undesirable customers. The head man on the campaign studied a demographic survey and saw the problem: “If you’re younger, poorer, dumber and your prospects for the future are bleak, you buy a Sentra.” (For the sake of full disclosure, I must mention here that in 1990 I owned a Nissan Sentra. I bought it because it was cheap. But I had prospects--I swear.)
To turn things around, and create Sentra customers who would eventually step up to buy Nissan’s higher-priced models, Nissan restyled the Sentra, raised its price, and sicked Chiat/Day on the American public. The agency created ads that positioned the Sentra not as the cheap car you settled for because you couldn’t afford anything else but as an “affordable sports sedan,” snazzy and fun, aimed at car buyers who were “tired of rich guys having all the fun.” It broadcast the ads via a “300-point” network television buy; they would theoretically be seen by every potential Sentra buyer in the country three times (or, failing that, by 75% of them four times, or 50% of them six times.) And it worked. Sales increased. Demographics improved.
It even worked with me. When I gave up my old Sentra I seriously considered buying a Maxima, the top of the Nissan line. Which is a little scary. I believe the Maxima to be a fine car. But why do I believe it?
