A Lesson from a Stranger. And My Father.

For the first twenty years of my advertising career, I never told anyone who my father was. 

My father, a prominent advertising person, and my mother, a prominent witch, were dead-set against me going into the ad business and did everything they could to discourage me. They did everything they could to discourage me from anything but law school.

As Maimonides once said, "that didn't work out."

In the first half of my career I kept mum about my father because I didn't want people to think I was a "Nepo-baby." That he had used his connections and lifted a finger to help me. He didn't. So I built a Maginot Line between his successful career and my career--which was a struggle to get started.

In the second half of my career I kept mum about my father because his career had blossomed so long ago it would be like a Homo Sapiens praising his Australopithecus ancestors. Or like Aaron Judge, the Yankee Slugger of today, praising Frank "Home Run" Baker, who led the American League in homers  with 11 in 1911, 10 in 1912, and a whopping 12 in 1913. By today's judgments, those numbers are almost comical. It's better off cosigning people like Baker, and maybe my father, too, to Comrade Nikita's "ash heap of history."

To say I had a fractured relationship with my father would be like saying j.d. vance has charisma issues. As the grey-eyed, owl-holding goddess Athena said to Odysseus, "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” Suffice to say, I saw the fist-side of my father more than I had wished, and never quite adjusted to the taste of full-frontal linoleum. I fell short in that. And so many other ways.

Now and again, I run across an old old-timer. As opposed to me, a mere old-timer. About once a year one of these people will ask me about my dad. It's been almost a quarter of a century since he died, and he and I have found more peace than we ever before shared when he wasn't dead, drunk or en-coma-'d.

Just yesterday my scheduled Friday post was pre-empted.

From out of the blue, I got a note from ad legend Tom Yobage on LinkedIn. I had heard of Tom. In ad circles he was well-known. However, though we had 18 connections in common (a full 25% of his total connections) we had not LinkedIn. 

I dunno what prompted Tom to write to me. But he did. And I bring you his note in toto, and a lesson he learned from my father without changing a single poignant word.

Thanks, Tom.

tomyobage@xxxxxx.com <tomyobage@aol.com>	10:32 AM (6 hours ago)
to me

George –

Many years ago, when I was a young copywriter working at Doyle Dane Bernbach on the Volkswagen account, late one night my TV producer Jim de Barros and I were flying west when we met your father on the plane.

Those were the glory days in advertising.  Full 15% commissions.  We flew first class.

Your father, Jim, and I were the only ones sitting upfront.  We quickly learned we all worked in advertising.

Jim and I were heading west to meet up with DDB art director Charlie Piccirillo. We were over-the-top with enthusiasm.  We were about to shoot a network TV spot.  A full :60.  Big budget.  Famous name director.

Your father said he was Chairman of Kenyon & Eckhardt. Said he was on his way to a big Lincoln Mercury dealer meeting/convention.

“Oh, are you going to present a new campaign?” asked Jim.

“No. Something more important,” said your father.  His goal, he said, was to have the Lincoln Mercury dealers stay with their current campaign -- and not ask for a new one.

Your father said the current Lincoln Mercury campaign was a rarity.  Something really special: The client loved it. The agency was proud of it.  And it was working with car buyers.

He said conventional wisdom in Detroit was:  new model year = new advertising campaign. 

But, he said, before you throw out a campaign that’s pleasing the client, pleasing the agency, and working with consumers --- you should look very carefully at what you have that’s working so well for you before you replace it with something new, something you’re doing just for the sake of doing something new.

A few years later, I moved on from VW --- and created campaigns for cameras, copiers, breath fresheners, antiperspirants, frozen entrees, gasoline, motor oil,  airlines, typewriters, computers, and tater tots. (I stayed at Doyle Dane Bernbach forever.)

Not often, but every once in awhile, I’d hear a client say:  “Great campaign, Tommy.  What are you going to do for us next year?”

But why change a campaign that both client and agency like and that’s working?  I always thought of your father and used the arguments he outlined that night on the plane. They always made perfect sense to me. Sometimes I’d win. Sometimes I’d lose.  But I always used your father’s thinking.

That night on the plane, your father taught me one of the most important lessons in advertising.

-

Thanks, Tommy.

For teaching me something I didn't know about my father.

 

Decisions.

The article above from last week's Wall Street Journal really gave me pause. And I'll tell you why.

It's about mechanizing decision-making. 

Which I think is impossible.

Because I think calculating the calculus of decisions is the hardest thing on earth and no one quite understands why people do what they do and when they do it and so on.

No one understands how decisions are made. Though everyone claims they do. As Matthew Cobb wrote in his book, The Idea of the Brain," "As to the human brain, with its 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future."

Yet, we have whole agencies spieling their clients silly saying they can use data to great effect. (How come I can't think of one instance where it's worked on me? Or one time when I've seen it work?)

Advertising and marketing have tried to make sciences out of decision making and understanding the motivations and the complex processes of why someone chooses to buy something or try something or like something or switch to something. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to formalize our understanding of such complexity, but I'm not sure that anyone actually takes the time to understand the very complexity of the complexity they're trying to understand. 

In breaking down how people make decisions, we reduce the variables to a size we can understand, decrease our understanding along the way. It's hubris to think we can understand anything. The human brain consists of something like one-hundred-trillion synapses. Do we really know which leads to which and why we like one thing over another?

Can we ever?

Right now, I'm about three-quarters of the way through Ian Frazier's new book, "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough". Wall Street Journal review here. 
New York Times review here.

If you grew up when and where I did--born in the late 1950s in the fourth largest city in New York, Yonkers, abutting the Bronx, the near death of the Bronx was a big story, maybe the biggest.

A million decisions led to the devastation of the borough. Not one of them was intentional. In most cases, decisions were made without people even realizing they were making decisions--or that decisions can have vast and unpredictable unintended consequences.

Many attribute the devastation of the borough to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The decision to build that road was made in the hopes of speeding traffic to white suburbia.

Instead, it displaced upwards of 40,000 families. The road bisected the borough and wound up being most expensive road ever built anywhere. The 6.5-mile highway cost almost $2 billion to build, that's $4,800 an inch or about $58,000 a foot. The consequent loss of Bronx population was jaw-dropping in magnitude. During the 1970s, south of the Expressway, the borough lost 47-percent of its population.

Frazier writes, "People left the Bronx and so did jobs. The radio and the phonograph had put the piano factories out of business. Consumers stopped buying iceboxes when gas and electric refrigerators took over, so the icebox factories had closed... The garment industry began to leave, and what had been 354,000 garment center jobs in New York in 1948 declined to 150,000 jobs by 1984.... Moving the main port facilities to New Jersey erased thousands of longshoremen’s jobs in New York...

"...The Regional Plan’s recommendation that New York City get rid of its factories proved all too achievable. Just in the Bronx, the number of factories went from 2,000 to 1,350 between 1958 and 1974...

"How many jobs left New York City in the 1960s and ’70s is hard to say. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City lost 660,000 jobs in just seven years in the sixties. Other sources estimate the loss at half a million jobs between the late forties and the mid-seventies....

"...Between 1934 and 1962, 98 percent of government-backed homeowners’ loans went to borrowers who were white."

Again, decisions set these events in motion. Ostensibly benign decisions. No one "decided" to destroy millions of lives and cause tens of thousands of fires and destroy billions in property. Those things happened based on decisions that had nothing to do with consequent occurrences.

I think most decisions unfold that way. Not that they're all disastrous. Just that they're all unpredictable. 

You make a decision.

You think and plan.

Then stuff happens.

Often unpredictable and uncontrollable.

We can pretend we know which way the wind blows. You don't need a weatherman for that.

But we're probably wrong.

That's life.

 

Advantage.

Many years ago when I was barely into my first year of my twelve years on the IBM account, when I was just beginning to understand what IBM did and what they offered, I was working closely with the most senior art director on the account.

S, I'll call her, was very intimidating.

She was fully in the club with the people at the very top of the IBM/Ogilvy creative heap, and I was a newcomer, pushed off into the deep-end with very little guidance other than "sink or swim."

If you're a ball-player and you move up a notch, to a level of competition sterner than you ever faced before, you have to find a way not to think too much. You have to find a way to redouble your efforts and trust in what got you in that position in the first place. If it's your hitting ability, as it usually is, you have to use your eye, your brain and your swing and try to, as much as possible, set how intimidated you feel aside. You have to wait for your pitch and swing.

When I transitioned from baseball to running, I learned much the same lesson. My bone structure is not like that of really good runners, but I was a really good runner--decent anyway. Even though at my thinnest I was never smaller than 6'2" and 185-pounds. Classic distance runner build for men is two-pounds per inch of height. So, at 6'2", I should have weighed 148 pounds.

When I was racing I couldn't keep up with those sylphs. Even to try to made no sense. But when one of them would run by me I'd just decide to go along with them as if we were tied together with elastic bands. I'd hold on as long as I could--usually to the finish line by doing what I do, that is running, and not thinking.

The same held true for me when I was working with S. I was in way over my head but tried to do what I do and keep pace. I relied on my swing, my stubbornness and my years of practice that had gotten me to this point.

Early when I was working with S, I wrote a line of copy--not a headline, a line of body copy. One of hundreds of lines I had written. It read "Technology is a business advantage."

S immediately called me from her office in Paris. "That's fucking great." I didn't even realize it when I wrote it. S forced me to think about it and eventually I saw the saliency of what I had writ. The reason you buy something in the first place--that something does something for you that makes it worth it.

Two decades later when I got shit-canned by Ogilvy though no one there could write like I do and they decided they didn't need writers, I was already 62.

The ad industry isn't clamoring for cranky 62-year-old copywriters with arrogant appraisals of their own value. I therefore said to myself, "If I am ever going to work again, I have to find a way to position myself. I have to make myself "lust-after-able."

I didn't have far to go. 

I went to that phone call with S from back in the year 2000. And I wrote on my LinkedIn, my Twitter and my website, "Good writing is a business advantage.™"

In terms of great lines and the "fearful symmetry" great lines often possess (apologies to William Blake) my line didn't measure up to my favorite tagline of all-time, Ammirati's line for UPS: "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business." It was not as good as Federal Express' line penned by Patrick Kelly at Ally & Gargano, "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." And it was nowhere nearly as good as Chiat\Day's line for Apple in all its distinct and ungrammatical splendor, "Think different."

But "Good writing is a business advantage™" is better than 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of taglines written by other copywriters ever since the world began, simply because roughly  99.999009999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999-percent of all copywriters (and creative people in general, and agencies, too, and certainly holding companies) don't bother to position themselves in a memorable or distinctive way.

Last week I went out to dinner with a bunch of advertising creatives of my vintage. Chinese.

I still couldn't shake something I had written about two weeks ago. That BBDO's office in New York employs just 300 people. I asked the people I was with how many people they thought BBDO employed.

Predictions ranged from 1000 to 2,500.

But it's 300. At least according to "Advertising Age," the erstwhile trade journal.

My guess is that in getting to 300 employees from a high of 2,000, about 200 creatives have been fired along the way. If you're reading this and you're a freelancer, that means you have more competition than you ever imagined. And virtually everyone of those competitors will cut his or her price to get the job, which will force you to do the same.

That sucks. To be at the mercy of others for your own sanctity. Whatever sanctity means.

I don't know what happened to our industry. 

Why we no longer think in terms of what makes a Nissan different from a Mazda or a Whopper different from a Big Mac or Jamaica different from the Bahamas.

Alex Murrell not long ago wrote a great essay called "The Age of Average."  About the sameification of everything. I shared it with two dozen friends and four dozen clients.

Everyone tsks and shakes their heads. 

No one says, "I'm doing that to myself."

Not marketers. Not creatives. Not agencies. Not holding companies. 

No one's made the effort to do what third-graders do when their choosing sides for a kick-ball game. 

Make themselves stand out so they get picked.

In other words, standing out is a business advantage.™

A Guest Post by Andrew Joliffe. The Eminent Andrew Joliffe.

Andrew Jolliffe and I have been friends from afar for a couple of decades now. Though we never worked together while we were at Ogilvy together (Andrew in Paris, me in New York) Andrew was something of a legend.

Often when the Paris office did something special, you'd later find out that Andrew's name was attached. I admired Andrew like everyone else did. He was regarded by many as one of the best--if not the best--of all of the very good Ogilvy manifesto-izers. (Back when Ogilvy was still guiding brands, not doing stunts, the agency used manifestos to set a course for clients. To guide them for years, if not decades. The purpose of a manifesto wasn't pomposity or ego, it was defining a platform that could last for years)

I asked Andrew some weeks ago if he had any inclination to write in this space. Late last week he came across with this gem of a piece.

It might be more poetry than post. A higher standard.

Andrew is a rare bird, and a prized one. He's about the most erudite--and funniest--ad guy around. And maybe the nicest.

Enjoy his:

 

GUT FEELINGS.

 

A million thanks, George. Hope this makes the mark.  

 

Around us, political factions shift towards the brink of self-annihilation. And yet the sun is shining. So far, this year has been a year and a half.   I’ve written from the heart and for the wallet. Cartoons of Normandy lobsters toasting freedom with vintage champagne and adolescent mermaids experimenting with their first makeup. Films starring trembling, multicoloured dragons, talking figs and swirling watercolours of Robin Hood. Essays on the collective power of a thousand human minds. Stories of Victorian gem-hunters, and our mental awareness at temperatures of minus forty degrees.  Poems about how morning train rides make happy minds, and the unbreakable bond between pearls and tears. Rhymes adorned with wild flowers and iridescent bees.

 

Better still, this isn’t some sort of martini-induced fantasy. I’ll leave you to imagine what happens in those. This is real work. It’s for brands. And it got bought. And made. Yet the great world at large will never see the faintest scintilla of it. Never. And no, I can tell you no more.

 

That’s the thing about internal work. It’s a bit like watching kitten videos on TikTok or playing the lottery, more people do it than admit to. Unappealing to some because it’s not bragging fodder.  Bound in secrecy under the silver lock and key of the NDA, its mysterious subclauses and inexplicable codicils. Thanks, Evelyn Waugh.

 

And yet in a thousand ways, it’s the plasma, bedrock and vitamin B12 of all our livings. Movement, change, revolution, moments of enlightenment start from within. Fun and provoking internal things are the golden keys to any of us selling and running stuff of worth. I have this itchy feeling that many of us forget that those who pay us thrive on wonder, intrigue and  gorgeousness like we do. Sitting in offices very often drabber, browner and a tad more utilitarian than our own iced-cake havens and in a daily smog of power-points, bullet-points and action points, intelligent folk are paid to grow brands.

 

Buying lovely brand-raising  stuff while living in a daily grey is like ordering dinner in your dream Parisian brasserie - if you don’t know of one, I’d be happy to help - while not having a small intestine. It doesn’t happen. If we sat for eight hours a day in a white cube with a rubber plant and a year planner for company, what would we come up with? Maybe an image of a rubber plant checking a year planner. And we’d believe there was nothing more to say.

 

As Terence Conran said to me once, centuries ago before I was a copywriter after working on the fireworks to open the Design Museum in London, “brighten up a day, and you illuminate an outlook”. Bit dry, but I loved what he meant.

 

Sell a thought or attitude internally, and the rest will sell itself.

 

I believe that lovely internal work feeds situations that let movements  and briefs become lovely things. Like just the right amount of water, sun and wind that lets a tiny egg become a larva become a chrysalis become an iridescent blue Brazilian butterfly in a rainforest. An ecosystem so gorgeously integrated as we’re all supposed to be.

 

There again, I would say that. I do lots of it.

 

Thanks again, George.

 

Elbow Grease.

Every neighborhood has a worst house. 
It's usually mine.

When I was a boy, living under the leaky roof of my mother and father's tilted little house in Yonkers, New York, abutting the Bronx border, it was a very different world.

If someone wanted to watch TV, you had to warm up the black-and-white set. If they wanted to change channels, they had to leave their seat to turn the dial. Or yell at me to do it. And there were only seven channels, counting Channel 13 which was public television and no one watched.

No one reads John O'Hara today. 
They should.

Likewise the phone. 

We had phone exchanges then, like John O'Hara's "Butterfield 8," or "University 7," or "Yonkers 4." And we dialed the phone. And the phone was attached to the wall. And people used it to talk to other people. Not at all like we use phones today.

Most people don't know this anymore, but dialing was time-consuming. In fact, the original area codes were assigned to American cities based on their populations. New York, then as now was the biggest city. So it was easiest to dial. 2-1-2, five clicks. LA and Chicago were next, so, six clicks, 2-1-3 or 3-1-2.  Dallas, 2-1-4, seven clicks. Detroit 3-1-3, also seven clicks.
That's how it worked.

An early picture of my mother.
She carried a big stick. She didn't speak softly.

The thing I remember most about the old days is the thing I still use. Sure as shootin', my mother the harridan, wasn't Dutch, but she kept a spic-and-span house thanks to her propensity to kick the crap out of me and my older brother, Fred. We waxed the floors, mopped the floors, scrubbed the floors on our hands and knees and then scrubbed clean the scrub brushes.

I spent hours buffing floors.
I was full-time with parquet.

I was particularly expert at doing the dishes. I worked as a professional dishwasher one summer, but they fired me for being too fast. I made everyone else look bad. 

The thing I was best at, still am, is what in commercials they might have called "stubborn, baked-in stains." I took the word stubborn as a throw down. I'm stubbornerer than anyone, with the possible exception of Rich Siegel, of Round Seventeen fame.

My mother under the sink had an array of pads and rags and cleaners. Some of those were elite. Reserved for a certain kind of pot or pan. Some were the infantry of her OCD kitchen, the cannon fodder of her cleansing arsenal. They'd sacrifice their lives to keep her at a distance.

The operative words in all this scouring were "elbow grease." You had to apply elbow grease. If after ten minutes of using a scouring steel pad the size of a studio apartment, a pad that could take the varnish off of a vault at Fort Knox, the stain was still there, guess what? You had to use more elbow grease. I remember as a 10-year-old having tennis elbow induced by Farberware.

All this has an advertising point.

I wonder if elbow grease has disappeared from advertising. 

If scrubbing the scrubbed parts has vanished. Of standing there over the guilty pot and working it until it gleams is a thing of the past. It ain't in scope. And we'll make 27 more of 'em tomorrow.

My mother grew up poor during the Depression. On more than one occasion she came home from school to find their furniture out on her West Philadelphia street. The Freedmans were evicted with no place to go.

Wandering Jews is not news.

Even when my father started making money, she never threw anything out. She darned socks. Patched blue jeans. Handed-down hand-me-downs. 92% of our glasses and dishes were from gas station give-aways. 

Once we let the bananas go bad and she served us banana sandwiches. On stale bread. She refused to throw anything out.

You can sure as hell bet she'd have thrown me out for not getting the pan clean quicker than she'd toss the pan. I was easier to replace, even if it meant sleeping with my father. So, I scrubbed.

I'm not sure that advertising is better off today when we regard it as disposable and transitory. Not as permanent as my mother's kitchen gear. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off working until the work was done. Until the puzzle was solved, until the stain was eradicated.

This post is not about my mother or pots and pans, of course. It's about elbow grease. An orientation to make things work and make things last. It's an old idea. Outdated. Foolish as a dinosaur and dumb. Especially when you can just get a new "anything" for 79-cents, less if you give them your cell-number. Then they'll give you 10% off your first ungratifying purchase.

These days, five years after being canned from Ogilvy for, in the asinine words of their ageist CEO Mark Read, harkening back to the 80s. I'm still harkening back. I'm busier than ever, probably making more money than all of Ogilvy because I harken back to my mother's kitchen. 

And I muster up my elbow grease.

And work.

Ouch.

Dock Ellis was a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960s and 1970s and a damn good one. 

You might know him for having pitched a no-hit game while tripping on LSD and publicly talking about it. A short documentary on the game made Dock's feat notorious.

But he won 138 games lifetime, which is a lot of games. In 1971, the year the Pirates won the World Serious, he won 19 games against only nine losses. He had a sparkling 3.06 ERA, made the All-Star team and finished fourth in Cy Young voting. 

On this particular day in 1974, Ellis was pissed. The Reds were the team of the Seventies and had a lot of swagger. They were bullies. The Pirates, though they won it all in 1971, lost their anchor, Roberto Clemente in 1972 in a plane crash and had started the season losing six straight. 

About a month into the year they were dead last in their division. Worse, according to Ellis, they were intimidated by the Reds, whose starting lineup had three Hall-of-Famers, and a fourth, Pete Rose, who would have made it had he not be banned in perpetuity for betting on games.

So Ellis decided to try to hit with a pitched ball every Red he could. He wanted to show his Pirates not to be cowed by the Reds. In horsehide parlance, he wanted to knock the shit out of them.

Elllis managed to hit Rose, Morgan and Driessen, and just miss Perez, who successfully contorted himself out of the way of the spheroid object. Ellis was yanked from the game after that, without retiring a single batter, and hitting three. One of the oddest pitching lines ever. By the way, for the entire 1974 season during which Ellis threw 176 innings, he hit only four more batters, totaling an unremarkable seven for the year. His major league high for hit-by-pitch was ten in 1970. Ellis never came close to Hall-of-Famer Don Drysdale in the guided-missile category. Drysdale led the National League in that ignominious category five times, including four years in a row from 1958 to 1961.

I bring up Ellis' escapade because of something I learned from another ballplayer, Ken "Hawk" Harrelson, a  pretty-good power-hitter for the Red Sox in the 1960s. Harrelson became an announcer for the White Sox, on and off, through 2018. 

Harrelson came up with the phrase TWTW or TW², which I've carried with me for twenty years. TWTW stands for The Will To Win.

TWTW, whether or not you're throwing a 90-mile-per-hour fastball at someone's head, is something everyone, every agency, every account, every client needs.

You have to do what it takes.

Get the job done.

Roll up your sleeves.

Raise your hand.

Work until you win.

That's how you win.

I don't actively try to be an asshole. But I have TWTW. I often joke that I work as hard as I do less for the money than for the thrill I get from winning. Money comes and goes. Winning matters more to me.

TWTW.

Everyone needs one.

--

I Hope This Isn't Stale. (A Repost.)

I've been stupidly busy for the last few months and I'm in blog post arrears. What's more, I was out with ad friends last night. Advertising people of roughly my vintage. Eating Chinese food and complaining (Job Number: OY 459-50394- VEY). Suffice to say, so I'm contentless this morning. No original Thursday post in sight. 

Please forgive me for recycling the post that follows. From way back in 2016.

The Case-Study Video.

One of the great deceptions of our age is something called “the case-study video.”

It seems that every day about a million 90-240- second blathers of stock footage are produced by American ad agencies. According to those videos, every business in America is growing exponentially and gaining new customers like sorority girls gain cold sores.

Everybody is getting everybody else to tweet, taste, dance, share, laugh and kvell about products and services that in real life elicit no such responses. I’ve seen videos where people go apeshit over a bank made with gingerbread, or who crochet entire billboards in Times’ Square.

Also these videos involve a lot of throwing paint and jumping in the air and doing a backflip. Also, spontaneous dancing, usually while wearing a fedora.

In short, according to these videos, America—and the world—exists in a sort of interactive Elysium where people can’t wait to get their hands on your product and fricken tweet about it.

In fact, I suppose with a nod to David Letterman and also Reality TV, the whole of the world—according to the case-study video—seems to be engaged in some version of “Stupid Human Tricks.” People replace their teeth with bottle-openers, cook sausages on the back of a flatbed truck while racing down a highway, or upload pictures of themselves to salutary effect.

Agencies, of course, follow this banality. And doing Stupid Agency Tricks becomes the Modus Operandi of every agency worth its CEO's $22,000,000 salary.

Years ago a client of mine was positively gushing. We had run a single ad and, according to him, sales were up 400%. I pushed him about his data—data that would have made a great case study. The single ad had upped sales from one unit to four.

Here’s a sample script—what these videos usually sound like:

VO:        Breakfast is changing.

People are fast-moving, hard-charging.

They no longer have time for a sit-down meal to start the day.

So our client “The House of Toast” was suffering.

Same store sales of toast had decreased by 3% a year for six years running.

Toast sales were plummeting.

White toast was down an aggregate 26%.

The situation was even worse for pumpernickel.

House of Toast came to us for answers.

We came up with a multi-channel campaign

designed to make toast a destination again.

A series of “twoasts,” targeted tweets to lapsed toast eaters.

A targeted campaign of stickers on toasters urging people to “toast toast!”

And wild postings that put toast on everyone’s lips.

And it worked!
Toast sales did more than just pop up.

They soared.

Rye up 19%

Whole wheat up 31%.

And sourdough up a staggering 49%.

But our toast renaissance didn’t stop there.

Knowing our market had changed,

that both moms and kids wanted a faster toast alternative,

we brainstormed “Tube Toast.”

Toast on the go for today’s on the go consumer.

Tube Toast became the fastest growing entry in the Fast Moving Toasted Goods (FMTG) category.

Redefining breakfast.

Redefining toast.
Redefining delicious.

So let’s do what all of America is doing once again.
LET’S MAKE A TOAST!