Seeking profit and soul

By DITA DE BONI

The first advertising campaign Stanley Becker ever sold was to Procter & Gamble, for the company's Scope mouthwash product.

It was the 1960s, and the 30-something ex-talent agent came up with the ingenious idea of having an ad that featured people gargling their favourite songs.

Procter & Gamble - even today a notoriously conservative client - was delighted with the campaign. And taking pride of place on their office walls thereafter was a comment from a viewer that the company had enlarged and framed: "Thank God you people don't sell laxatives."

Mr Becker produced work for Procter & Gamble - his company's biggest client - for several decades in his role heading Saatchi & Saatchi creative departments in Los Angeles, Toronto and New York.

"I love the volatile retail business," he enthuses.

"You know every week - every day even - if your ads are working, and the people in that industry will tell you either 'that's a piece of ****' or 'that's pretty good,' just like that. I like the way they do that."

Another thing the effervescent 66-year-old is big on is measuring the effectiveness of advertising. He has helped judge the "Effie" awards for effective advertising in the US for around 20 years, and has won more than 20 of them himself.

He is in New Zealand at the behest of the Association of New Zealand Advertisers to present case studies on how creative campaigns have helped "change, improve and profit" clients.

The Effies have been run for 32 years in the US and are presented annually by the New York American Marketing Association.

Campaigns are judged in two parts. In the first stage, an agency submits its brief and details the aims, challenges and strategies behind the campaign, and dollars spent. Most importantly, no creative is viewed at this stage.

"Creative is seen in the second phase," says Mr Becker. "The creative component accounts for about one-third of the final score."

The effect the ad has had on a company's business has to be proved and measured.

Research companies such as ACNielsen are used to give the measurement process veracity.

Quantifiable campaigns are becoming more and more important in the industry, says Mr Becker.

This observation applies equally to the New Zealand scene, where the Advertising Effectiveness Awards are also gaining in popularity. The possibility of introducing Effies to Australasia has also been raised. They are now awarded in 14 countries outside the United States.

Mr Becker says an ad may be funny, but if people don't remember what it is selling, it has not worked.

"In the end, you've got to create traffic. You've got to sell soap."

For someone who believes creative advertising must be judged by its effectiveness, Bronx-born Mr Becker seems also weary of the profit-driven mentality of several multinational advertising agencies.

"Bottom lines have become more important than the soul of an agency."

His opinion on the matter comes from an artistic point of view, as well as several from years of experience working with the old Saatchi & Saatchi. Although it has rallied under the leadership of go-getter Kevin Roberts, its recent purchase by French firm Publicis may return the network to a more profit-driven imperative, he believes.

But ultimately a "good creative person is always creative, and will be so with a $5000 budget or a $55,000 budget," he says.

And in a 30-year-plus career engineering the hawking of everything from cars to yoghurt to ham, briefs have been as many and varied as budgets.

"The most fascinating brief I've ever had was for an old US airline called Republic Airlines. Every time the company was mentioned in the press its name was prefixed with the words 'the financially troubled Republic Airlines ... '.

"What we worked out was that the airline should pitch itself at businesspeople because of its route system - we described the airline as passing through all the 'puddlehop' cities that middle management had to visit.

"Our question was 'what do [the airline's clients] want?' A seemingly stoned art director put it beautifully when he piped up from the corner of the room with the word 'perks!'."

The agency and airline-client took on the "airline of perks" mantle so successfully that the ailing business revived and was later sold to Northwest Airlines, who kept the tag line.

If an art director comes up with phrases, and a business strategist is essential for spread and execution, what is the contribution of a creative director?

"Intuition is vitally important, as is the understanding of people. I would say of myself that I am not an intellectual but I am intuitive, intelligent and fearless."

Mr Becker says the work of Kim Thorpe, who works at Saatchi Wellington, "blows me away."

And he likes the idea of a creative director as someone who mentors staff and "protects" the idea, from conception to execution.

"In the old days, I could look at a person and use my intuition to judge them. I've hired psychotic social workers, bartenders, I've turned account people into creative directors.

"But these days people go to school to learn the 'rules' of the job - there's a cookie-cutter-ness to it all and I hope it won't narrow the band of thinking."