Life’s Just a Bowl of Milk and Cookies

It began, as things often do in advertising, with a betrayal. Joanna Hughes Brach, who oversees advertising for Polaroid, the Cambridge, Mass.-based photographic company, was almost out the door for a maternity leave last summer when she received a phone call. Her New York advertising agency, BBDO, informed her that it was ditching Polaroid just as the company was planning to start its biggest campaign in decades. To make matters worse, BBDO was pursuing archrival Kodak. Brach was stunned but had no time to waste; her pregnancy due date had arrived, and she had one day to assemble a “wish list” of potential agencies to replace BBDO. At the top, she wrote Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

Though that name means little to people outside advertising, Brach knew that Goodby, Silverstein was perhaps the most sought-after ad agency in America. Based in San Francisco and run by Jeffrey Goodby and Rich Silverstein--a couple of shaggy-haired men who look like Haight-Ashbury holdovers--the agency has in recent years dominated national advertising award shows with its clever commercials, including the “Got Milk?” series.

Goodby, Silverstein was hot. Polaroid, on the other hand, was not. Since it popularized instant photography and became a household name 20 years ago, the brand had been eclipsed by competing photographic companies and nearly forgotten by the American public.

So Brach decided to give Goodby, Silverstein a try, but to play it safe, Polaroid invited several other agencies to join in a free-for-all competition to produce new commercials. Thus began a nine-month process during which Goodby, Silverstein, in its quest to find the perfect pitch for Polaroid, would endure trips to police stations, a batch of nude photos, a parade of sad-eyed dogs, many long working weekends, a group viewing of “Melrose Place” and various other indignities before producing a batch of striking commercials. During much of that time, as the agency hammered out idea after idea, there was no assurance that it would be hired.

Still, the assignment was irresistible. The company thrives on tough marketing challenges and fierce competition, a characteristic that allowed it to triple in size over the past four years and become “arguably America’s best agency” according to AdWeek. “We saw this as a chance to take a great American brand that has fallen and bring it back to life,” says SIlverstein, the agency’s 46-year-old co-founder. “For us, this is what it’s all about.”

Goodby, SIlverstein & partners’ cramped headquarters, in an old red-brick warehouse near fisherman’s Wharf, is the “ER” of the marketing world. Brands that are ailing--some sluggish, some nearly comatose--are wheeled in, whereupon Goodby and Silverstein survey the damage and mix up a batch of creative commercials. The agency’s advertising blends science and art--sophisticated forms of research in the hands of a cadre of young, talented writers and artists who infuse offbeat humor, layered meanings and cutting-edge film technique into the campaign. “More than anyone else today, they know how to bring together all the elements of a good commercial,” says Advertising Age reviewer Bob Garfield.

They are master diagnosticians. When Norwegian Cruise Line approached Goodby, Silverstein, it was adrift in a sea of look-alike cruise competitors, all relying on festive song-and-dance commercials. The agency produced a sophisticated and sexually suggestive black-and-white ad campaign that positioned the cruise line as a sensuous yuppie dreamboat, and helped the company achieve the highest occupancy growth in the business last year. When Sega, the video game company, found itself falling further and further behind rival Nintendo, Goodby, Silverstein prescribed a series of bizarre, anarchic commercials (one featured a teenager beating himself on the head with a dead squirrel, which eventually screams “Sega!”). Before long, Sega was the market leader. For the struggling Japanese auto maker Isuzu, the agency injected dramatic, cinematic scenes into the car company’s commercials, and record-setting sales periods followed.

Perhaps the agency’s most surprising turnaround job was not for a brand, but for milk, a product that would seem to defy attempts at hype. When the California Milk Processors Board came to the agency three years ago, milk consumption in the state had been declining for 20 years even as attempts were made by milk marketers to sell the cholesterol-filled product as health food (the old slogan: “It does a body good”).

Jeff Goodby understood that consumers weren’t buying the line and chose instead to focus on the real relationship people have with milk. Upon meeting the client, he slipped him a piece of paper with two words on it: “Got Milk?”

The question summed up an entire strategy that cast aside traditional advertising blather about milk being healthy. Goodby explained to the board that the simple truth about milk is that “people don’t realize how much they need it until they open their refrigerator and find it missing.” So the agency’s plan was to create ads in which the featured product would be absent, tantamount to advertising heresy. Goodby calls it “deprivation strategy.”

Around this theme, a series of one-minute farces and morality tales evolved. One commercial featured a wild-haired character obsessed with Alexander Hamilton, who misses his opportunity of a lifetime--to answer a contest question on who shot the famous Federalist--because he has no milk to wash down the peanut butter sandwich in his mouth. (“Owum Buh,” he screams into the phone, to no avail). Another was named “Heaven,” and it was a hell of a commercial. In it, an obnoxious executive is run over by a truck (perhaps the first time anyone’s ever been killed in a commercial), only to reappear in an ethereal world where he’s surrounded by chocolate chip cookies and containers of milk--heaven, he assumes. Stuffing his mouth with cookies, he reaches for the milk--soon realizing that every container is empty. As he wonders aloud, “Where am I?” a flaming “Got Milk?” logo burns on-screen.

Almost as soon as they appeared, the milk commercials, along with their accompanying billboards--single images of cupcakes, peanut butter sandwiches and other milk-related foods--became a phenomenon that quickly spread beyond California. Time magazine named it the best advertising of 1995. (After seeing the ads, Steven Spielberg called Goodby, Silverstein’s offices to ask for a reel of the agency’s work.) But the real magic of the ads was that they didn’t just entertain. The “Got Milk?” punch line served as a nagging question that followed consumers all the way to the supermarket. The first full year of the campaign, Californians bought about 15 million gallons more milk than the year before.

All of this was not lost on Polaroid’s Brach, who had been admiring the agency from afar. “I thought, if these people could bring excitement to something as old and familiar as milk, is it possible they could do the same for us?”

Goodby and Silverstein set out to answer that question. And, as always, the highly competitive ad industry was watching to see if this red-hot agency would stumble, as other streaking ad agencies have in the past. Already, the pressures of explosive growth have caused a few cracks in the surface. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein have been seduced by a Madison Avenue conglomerate and abandoned by some old friends. There have been internal battles over money and ambition, and a lot of frayed nerves. But so far, the partners have remained committed to a lofty goal that they began with 13 years ago: to use the medium of commercials as a way to, in the 44-year-old Goodby’s words, “have an impact on popular culture, and maybe change the way people think about advertising.”

Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein never wanted to be in advertising in the first place.

Goodby had been a newspaper reporter in Boston and was, he says, “naturally suspicious of advertising.” The outspoken Silverstein, a native New Yorker who began his career as an art director at Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco, puts it more bluntly: “I thought advertising was ugly, crass, a sellout business.”

But each needed a paycheck. Goodby had moved west to be with his wife and couldn’t find a newspaper job, while Silverstein had grown restless and dissatisfied at Rolling Stone. They ended up working for ad agencies in the late 1970s. Silverstein soon found, to his surprise, that he enjoyed designing ads--”You got to work on something new every day,” he says--while Goodby, who had written poetry as well as news stories, began to view advertising as “another form you could write in, kind of like haiku, with this weird 30-second format.” They eventually worked together at the San Francisco office of Ogilvy & Mather, and then joined a third partner, Andy Berlin, to launch Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein in 1983.

Their sense of being outsiders never went away. In a business of posturing, self-promotion and endless networking, they keep to themselves. Even today, Silverstein says, “I try to have very little to do with the world of advertising outside this place.” Goodby, meanwhile, likens advertising to pollution. “It’s just so much noise that comes at people all the time,” he says.

From the outset, the partners decreed that at their agency, creativity would be given top priority. That’s not an unusual dictum, but Goodby and Silverstein defend it fiercely. (Last month they walked away from the multimillion-dollar Sega account because Sega had asked them to tone down the campaign and then angered the partners by farming out a project to another agency.) The two also felt that by eschewing boasts and exaggerated claims in their commercials, they could produce a more contemporary, seemingly “honest” form of advertising--one that still tries to sell, but does so in an understated manner that amuses. “I think it’s possible that our contribution to the noise level can be a positive one,” says Goodby, who realizes that cynics will dispute any such claim from an ad man. “I take kind of an environmental view about advertising. If you do it well, you can clean up your little corner of the communication world.”

It may seem like a utopian approach to a mercenary business, but as Adweek writer Noreen O’Leary notes, “Goodby, Silverstein is the counterculture answer to conventional advertising agencies.”

Both men grew up in the 1960s, bombarded by advertising yet shaped by the anti-commercialism of the time. Goodby, a Harvard hippie who wrote for the Lampoon, seems perfectly cast for the role of advertising’s gentle revolutionary. His sereneness, his quiet confidence, and particularly his hair--which has a kind of presence unto itself, flowing down his back and cascading around his shoulders--give the man the aura of an advertising guru. His speaks in a hesitant manner, frequently using the word “cool” as he shares ironic observations. At home in Piedmont, where he lives with his wife and three children, he usually rises at 5 each morning and retreats to a studio to write essays or poetry. He also draws and does his own silk-screen printing. Occasionally he takes a break to play his guitar.

At times, Goodby’s reserved, dreamy manner makes him seem “like a type-B personality in a type-A world,” says client Carol Eleazer. But, she adds, that appearance is deceptive.

At the agency, Goodby rules in a kind of a passive-manipulative manner. Recently, he casually strolled in late to an important client meeting, wearing jeans and Docksiders, sat down and began munching on pastries as the client argued with members of the agency’s creative staff. Gradually, and very subtly, Goodby took control of the meeting. “You know what would be cool, what if we did this?” he said at one point, offering a suggestion that quickly resolved one of the conflicts.

“He says things like ‘cool’ and ‘neat’ in meetings,” says Steve Stone, an art director who worked for Goodby for years, “but if you notice, he’s getting people to do exactly what he wants.”

Silverstein, on the other hand, is fast-talking, skittish and hyperkinetic, “like a Tasmanian devil,” says Stone. He loves to drive expensive sports cars at high speeds and is also a bicycle racer. He bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge to work each morning, flipping scenes of commercials in his mind as he pedals furiously. Sometimes he shows up in the office wearing full racing regalia; on a recent afternoon, he stalked the halls in a skintight yellow nylon bodysuit that made him look not unlike a banana.

Small, wiry and intense, with a bushy mustache and a perpetual gleam in his eye, Silverstein is, in many ways, Goodby’s polar opposite. Where Goodby seems to chew over every utterance, Silverstein just spouts. This occasionally gets him into trouble. Once, as the agency was traveling to a pitch for IBM’s account, Silverstein turned to Goodby in an elevator and said, “I hope I don’t end up sitting next to some computer geek.” From behind them, an IBM executive said, “You should be careful about what you say in elevators.” The agency didn’t win that pitch.

Rounding out the original trio was the even more colorful Andy Berlin--big, brawny, bearded and adventurous, a man who rode motorcycles and once set up his office on a boat. Berlin, who emerged as the agency business manager in the early ‘90s, talked incessantly about advertising, philosophy, Dashiell Hammett and almost everything else (a few years back, a cartoon in Advertising Age depicted Goodby, tossing in his sleep, muttering, “Shut up, Andy.”).

The idiosyncrasies of the partners startled some of the more buttoned-down companies that approached them. Eleazer, a vice president at the insurance company UNUM, says that after hiring the agency three years ago, she awoke one morning to the realization that “these guys with ponytails were going to have to go before my board of directors. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ ”

Even more unsettling were the agency’s commercials, many of which resembled short independent films. They starred quirky “real people” instead of fine-boned actors or celebrities, never used jingles and were frequently shot in a rough, cinema-verite style, with stylistic references to films by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Spielberg. The sense of humor in the ads could be wicked: Old ladies were nearly run down by trucks and college professors were pummeled by flying hockey pucks.

In its first five years, the agency remained small but won many awards and was eventually named Advertising Age’s U.S. Agency of the Year in 1990. Shortly thereafter, clients flocked to Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein, and things started to change at Jeff and Rich’s little oasis.

Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein wasn’t the only cutting-edge creative agency that caught fire in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Clients, battling the recession and the continuing fragmentation of the TV audience, turned to creative agencies to try to attract the wandering eye of consumers. Los Angeles-based Chiat/Day was the first to flourish (Chiat would eventually suffer growth pains and ended up merging with a larger agency, TBWA), followed by Portland’s Wieden & Kennedy, the creator of Nike’s stylistic “Just Do It” advertising campaign, and Goodby, Silverstein’s leading rival.

But in 1991, Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein began to surge ahead of the pack. The turning point for the agency was winning the $80-million Isuzu account, quickly followed by Pizza Hut.

As the agency kept growing, internal pressures began to mount. Insiders say the workload was daunting; a staff of about 30 writers and artists had to generate a couple hundred advertisements, in TV and print, each year. (The rationale for keeping the staff small was to avoid having to fire people if accounts unexpectedly left the agency). Creative people suddenly began to defect--some because they felt Goodby and Silverstein weren’t willing to share creative authority (the two insisted on overseeing almost every ad)--and some to pursue lucrative offers at other agencies. “When people would leave, Jeff and Rich would really take it personally,” says former associate creative director Erich Joiner, who left last year.

The agency’s morale problem worsened in 1992, when war broke out between the partners. Berlin wanted the agency to open satellite offices around the country and overseas. “We’d come so far, and I wanted to see if we could move to the next level,” he says. But Goodby and Silverstein feared that rapid expansion might dilute the quality of the agency’s creative work. “Andy wanted this to be a $500-million company,” says Silverstein. “But that’s not what drives me or Jeff.” As the dispute continued, “there’d be closed-door meetings,” says Joiner, “and you’d hear Andy screaming.”

Fearing an impending breakup, the three partners decided to sell their individual ownership shares to the Omnicom Group, a large New York-based holding company, which has other ad agencies. By selling the company, the partners assured their staff, there would be more money for future growth of the agency. But the sale did not sit well with some employees, in part because all the proceeds went to the three partners. “There were people in the agency who felt they should have been cut a piece of the pie,” says one former staffer. (Goodby concedes that the partners “may have made a mistake” in not sharing the wealth). The sale of the agency also dashed some employees’ long-term goals of becoming part-owners.

Shortly after the sale to Omnicom, Berlin announced he was leaving for New York, first joining DDB Needham and then founding his own small agency. The partners, particularly the emotional Silverstein, took the breakup hard. “I felt that the way he left was ugly,” says Silverstein, who would not speak to Berlin for the next three years. To make matters worse, Berlin’s departure was viewed in the press and much of the ad industry as a crippling blow to the agency. “The perception in the outside world was that the agency was losing its main guy, who brought in all the new business,” says Joiner. The New Yorker ran a profile of Berlin, describing his new operation as the “ad agency that everyone is watching” and scarcely mentioning Goodby or Silverstein.

Back in San Francisco, Goodby and Silverstein were determined to prove something. Shortly after Berlin left, the agency competed for the high-stakes $40-million Sega account. “It turned into an agency crusade,” says Joiner. For the final presentation, every employee boarded buses to cheer on Goodby and Silverstein, who set up the most elaborate demonstration they’d ever done for a pitch. In a hotel conference room, they installed a huge sound system borrowed from the Grateful Dead and a wall of TV screens, which flashed bits and pieces of proposed Sega ads. The agency won the account. A few months later, they picked up Norwegian Cruise Line, then Porsche cars, and then the California milk board. The clients just kept coming, culminating last year with Budweiser and Polaroid.

Meanwhile, in New York, Berlin’s “agency to watch” spun out of business. Berlin is now working at his third New York agency, a small outpost of a Minneapolis company. “So, as it turned out,” says Silverstein, “who was right and who was wrong?”

On a recent morning at the agency, Silverstein sits perched behind the old chipped and scarred wooden drafting table that serves as his desk, barking into the phone. Someone within the agency has just called to tell him that Polaroid wants to change the music at the end of a new commercial. “Jesus Christ, it’s supposed to sound disjointed,” he says. “Don’t they understand that it sounds that way for a reason?”

The agency is in the final stages of producing the Polaroid commercials. Silverstein likes the ads and doesn’t want the client tinkering with them. But he knows he has to handle this gently. Both Silverstein and Goodby, observers say, are extremely skilfull at persuading clients to run ads that are a little strange and scary. But they never bully. When the agency initially presented the “Heaven” idea to milk board executive director Jeff Manning, the story’s complexity and its opening death scene caused Manning to reject it. “So every meeting after that, I’d mention it,” says Goodby. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, this new idea’s pretty cool, but I keep thinking about that ‘Heaven’ idea.’ ”

Goodby kept nagging, and then promised to direct the spot himself. Manning relented. Similarly, Silverstein prevails here, making a minor adjustment in the music (“something nobody would even notice,” he says) to keep the client happy.

It’s been a long road getting to this stage. After Polaroid explained its problem--that no one seemed to use instant cameras anymore--the agency immediately turned to its chief nutcracker, Jon Steel. Some believe Steel is Goodby, Silverstein’s secret weapon. A native of England, he came aboard in 1989 and brought with him a British tactic known as planning, still relatively new to the United States, which represents a departure from the traditional ways of analyzing consumers. Rather than conducting standard question-and-answer focus groups, Steel visits people’s homes and workplaces, spying on them in their natural habitat. “You might say we invade their space, as well as their psyche,” he says in a polite British accent.

For example, as Goodby, Silverstein prepared to create advertising for Sega video games, Steel stationed himself in children’s bedrooms (with parents’ consent) and watched closely as they played video games. He observed the coded language shared by 10 year-olds, and that influenced the agency’s Sega ads, which are nearly indecipherable to adults.

As he began his research on Polaroid, Steel sent his spies out to a police station to see how the camera was used on the job. To find out how it was used in homes, he gave out free cameras and asked for photos in return. He was surprised when he received nude photos of one participant’s girlfriend. But this became the germ of an idea for a commercial titled “Architect.” (An architect in the midst of a business meeting is interrupted by a call from his wife. He tries to rush her off the phone, but she insists that he check inside his briefcase. His facial reaction, as he opens the case, indicates that he has seen a revealing picture of her. He tells her that he’ll be home in minutes.)

Steel’s research confirmed what Polaroid already knew: that the instant camera was a tool, enabling the user to do things such as gather proof, keep a visual record of a job in progress or play tricks. The agency came up with a double-entendre tag line--”See What Develops”--and the next step was to weave stories around that theme. There were a couple of creative teams working on the account and they generated dozens of commercial ideas, all presented to Silverstein, the creative director on Polaroid (he and Goodby divide accounts between them). Both partners are nearly impossible to please, says copywriter Harry Cocciolo. “No matter what you show them,” he says, “they always come back with, ‘OK, but could you make it funnier?’ ” Eventually, about 15 ideas were shown to Polaroid.

“They were all good,” says Brach. But the client, who had not yet hired Goodby, Silverstein, insisted that the ads be tested in focus groups. The focus groups killed off some interesting ideas, such as this one: A couple buying a new home can’t believe the phenomenal deal they’re getting. As they wander through the house, they snap Polaroid pictures in each room, but in their excitement they leave the photos behind without seeing what develops in each picture--the presence of a poltergeist who leers like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Test groups found the idea too complicated. “That’s why I hate testing ads,” says Silverstein.

But the test groups loved an idea called “Dog & Cat,” in which a sad-eyed dog is continually blamed for the misdeeds of the family cat. He redeems himself by producing Polaroid proof of the cat tearing through the trash. The creative team of Scott Aal and Grant Richards started with the idea of police using a Polaroid for evidence, but they wanted to bring that application into the home. They considered a sibling rivalry tale, but thought a dog and cat would be more fun. Aal sheepishly admits that dog-and-cat commercials are a bit of a cliche, but the ad overcomes that through hard work. Distorted camera angles and bright colors give it a cartoonish feel; its pace is almost dizzying, with 30 scenes squeezed into 30 seconds; the face of the dog, chosen from among many droopy-eyed beasts vying for the role, elicits instant sympathy; the music, which sounds like something out of Hitchcock, adds a touch of over-the-top melodrama. Finally, there’s a priceless scene in which the dog considers the possibility of resorting to a rolling pin or meat cleaver, before settling on the camera.

Aside from being fun to watch, what makes “Dog & Cat” special, says client Brach, is that it works on a couple of levels. Polaroid’s research found that people who use a camera on the job immediately saw the ad as a logical demonstration of evidence-gathering capabilities; others saw a sibling rivalry story suggesting that a Polaroid could be used for hi-jinks around the house. “People saw what they wanted to see in this ad,” says Brach. “It sells to everyone.”

Polaroid finally gave the job to Goodby, Silverstein. “They wore us down with good ideas,” says Brach, referring not only to the many TV spots but a series of print adds showing deceptions exposed through instant photography. To observers in the ad industry, it suggested that Goodby, Silverstein, whose media billings lifted to about $360 million, was moving to yet another level. “With Polaroid and Budweiser,” says Adweek’s O’Leary, “they seem now to be chipping away at blue-chip corporate America.”

That was something that many--including Andy Berlin--believed would be difficult for the agency to do unless it started behaving more like a large global corporation. Goodby’s and Silverstein’s reasons for resisting expansion are threefold: They want their commercials to be created close by, under their watch; they’ve seen other creative agencies, such as Chiat/Day, undertake expansion and have problems, and, finally, they like San Francisco.

Berlin--who seems as if he’s pining for a lost love when he talks about Goodby, Silverstein these days--insists that his plan to take them to the top of the world made sense. “I think you just reach a size as an agency where, in order to grow, you must be able to deal with international clients, which means you must become an international agency,” he says.

Berlin is certainly not alone in this thinking; in recent years, there has been a wave of mergers in the ad business as agencies have tried to cobble together global networks to better serve large clients. But Goodby, Silverstein may be able to win over the big clients without leaving San Francisco. So far, in dealings with Polaroid, Pizza Hut and Anheuser-Busch, the agency has been hired on a project basis, which is part of a separate trend now underway in advertising. Anheuser-Busch is among a number of larger companies, including Coca-Cola, that have recently opted to parcel out pieces of their advertising to smaller, more creative agencies, while still using big agencies for larger needs, such as global marketing.

So far, Goodby, Silverstein’s big clients seem to like this arrangement. Anheuser-Busch was so pleased with the agency’s work for Bud Ice (the ads feature a creepy penguin that stalks people) that last month it passed along more projects, including an assignment to promote the general image of beer. Goodby, the creative director on Budweiser, responded with a characteristically absurd approach: One commercial, slated to run this summer, opens with a scene that appears to be, in Goodby’s words, “one of those maudlin beer moments.” A bunch of guys play football in the mud as a macho jingle is sung. Then the gang heads for the local bar, where the bartender serves up a round of . . . broccoli. A tag line appears on-screen, saying: “It’d be weird without beer.”

The agency’s success in dealing with Anheuser-Busch has led some to believe that there may be no limits to what Goodby, Silverstein can accomplish. “I think big companies will come to them,” says Steve Hayden, a former creative director at Chiat/Day who’s now a top executive with Ogilvy & Mather in New York. “Because when they go to a lean agency like Goodby, Silverstein, they’re not paying for overhead, they’re paying for the ideas. In some ways, I think Goodby, Silverstein may be the model for the agency of the future.”

Still, Goodby and Silverstein live very much in the present; when you’re juggling as many projects as they do, you have no choice. Of global expansion, Silverstein says, “You know what? If it happens, fine.” Then he slides the latest videotape of the Polaroid commercials into the VCR for one more look. When one of his assistants informs him that the campaign will debut on “Melrose Place,” he responds: “ ‘Melrose Place’? That’s cool.”

When the commercials finally do run, Silverstein travels to a hotel room in Boston, to sit with a group of Polaroid people while “Melrose Place” plays on the TV. Nobody really watched the show, Silverstein reports. These were advertisers, so naturally they watch TV backward, paying attention to the ads and tuning out the show. The people in the room didn’t know it at the time, but these ads would generate strong word of mouth for Polaroid. Sales figures won’t be in until later in the year, so it’s too soon to say if they’ll bring Polaroid back. Maybe nothing short of a time warp will bring Polaroid back. But for now, Brach reports, “people are talking about Polaroid,” and that hasn’t happened in a while.

Back in the hotel room, Silverstein says he watched quietly as “Architect” came on--”Dog & Cat” would debut the next night, during “NYPD Blue.” Around the room, there was applause for the ad, but Silverstein, who doesn’t usually watch his own commercials on TV, says he had a funny feeling watching it. “I couldn’t help thinking,” he says, “all that work--for 30 seconds.”