Funny Tv Commercials

What makes a commercial great? Whimsy. Unconventional thinking. A touching tale. And sometimes, as these eight ads show, CEO involvement.

By one estimate, the average American watches some 24,000 commercials a year and advertisers plow some $200 billion into airtime running them. That makes for a crowded adscape. Ads included in The 100 Best TV Commercials and Why They Worked (Times Books, July 1999) recognized fresh concepts that were superbly executed, cut through clutter, and snagged viewers' attention, all the while raising the bar on what advertising could be.

These ads represent various times and techniques and provide proof that there are many ways to tell a story and coax a smile. Some were whimsically seductive, others uproariously funny. Some broke the rules and overturned conventions. Still others played by the rules, albeit ingeniously.

Although many sold the goods, they were honored for the aesthetic way they took a strong selling proposition and enhanced it, serving it to customers in a fresh, engaging, surprising, and unusually persuasive way. They reached out and touched us.

Sometimes CEOs were directly involved with the advertising or the process; sometimes they put their careers on the line to run it. And sometimes, winners ran despite them - or got pulled because CEOs got cold feet. Here are eight top spots where CEOs called the shots.

Federal Express

Abaldish, mustachioed actor named John Moschitta conducts a work day in fast forward - spewing into the intercom at 450 words-a-minute, hiring a job seeker in a nanosecond, and gushing travel plans at roughly three times the normal speed of speech to demonstrate that when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight, FedEx is the way to send it.

The "Fast-Paced World" ticker, as well as the client-agency relationship that produced it, almost didn't happen. In the early 1970s, Federal Express invited agency Ally & Gargano to Memphis to hear about a scheme for a fleet of jets that would fly in the dead of night, take little packages from around the country to a central hub, and dispatch them again on outbound planes. The company had only $150,000 to spend on advertising, and the idea hadn't even gotten off the ground yet, so Carl Ally was set to turn the assignment down. But a mutual friend persuaded him to reconsider. Ally and Emil Gargano met FedEx's founder and CEO, Fred Smith, talked to him for 15 minutes, and accepted the assignment.

Initially, ads aimed at middle and senior management, not at mailroom supervisors or back office workers who could change suppliers but were limited in their powers to initiate drastic changes. Then the target expanded to workers in every department, including secretaries, mailroom personnel, and trainees. Smith heard the agency describe an intense, splenetic character who strings together dialogue at a racy clip to demonstrate the urgency of package delivery and gave thumbs up. "Absolutely, Positively" was more than a gimmick. It was a slogan that made anxious people wonder what's a little money next to peace of mind, that built the company, and that made us all believe that nothing is certain except death, taxes, and FedEx deliveries.

Nike

Since Philip Knight, a one-time University of Oregon track star, abandoned his accounting career 30 years ago to form a company that imported running shoes to the U.S., he's been associated with marketing campaigns built around popular sports heroes. Under his microscopic scrutiny, legendary ads painted Nike as the brand of athletic performance and redefined the notion of celebrity.

By 1976, Nike was outpacing even the frenzied jogging craze, as demand for glitzy, pricey "sneakers" soared. By 1980, when it went public, Nike was the top selling athletic shoe in the U.S., with revenues of $270 million. But seven years later, with jogging fever subsiding, Nike had stumbled, overtaken by Reebok.

Knight, working with agency Wieden & Kennedy, regrouped by refocusing on his core audience with the equivalent of their national anthem. The Beatles song "Revolution" set the mood and pace for a 90-second commercial, which had the look and feel of a '60s news documentary but was really more of an ennobling celebration of athleticism, shrinking the distance between super athletes and everyday duffers.

Nike's carbo-loaded marketing machine paid an estimated $500,000 for rights to the Beatles' song. But while that got people out of their chairs and into Nike's shoes, it also got Nike sued by Apple Corp., the jilted division of Capitol Records, which charged Nike with trading wrongfully on the Beatles' goodwill. That suit, along with rising boomer resentment against what many saw as a blatant misappropriation of a sacred piece of postwar culture, prompted Nike to drop the advertising.

In 1989, Knight ordered up another blockbuster from Wieden & Kennedy. In cameos, well-known athletes sound off about multitalented dual pro-sport athlete Bo Jackson's versatility, intercut with shots of one-time King of Cool, guitarist Bo Diddley and his band. When the spot was previewed at a sales meeting, more than 1,000 agents jumped to their feet, roaring approval. Without testing it, Knight scrapped all running-shoe advertising and put that money behind "Bo Knows," doubling its intended media budget.

He threw the dice again: on the day of the baseball All-Star game, Nike ran a full page ad in USA Today announcing the stars who'd be joining Bo at the top of the fourth inning of the game - even though spots in sporting events often get shuffled. Luck was with Nike that night. The spots ran as planned - following a home run Bo slammed his first time at bat that night and a single in the same inning.

News and talk shows and Entertainment Tonight gave the spot what Nike estimated was close to $20 million in free exposure. Within months Nike had captured 80 percent of the new cross-training market. The category, whose sales stood around $40 million pre-Bo, topped $400 million. But the tongue-in-cheek commercials played better than Bo did on the field - and within a year they stopped running.

Mates Condoms

Mates was the brainchild of Virgin Group founder and CEO Richard Branson, who determined that even with all the publicity about AIDS. neither the government nor market leader Durex was doing enough to stem its spread - particularly targeting young people. Branson asked Ansell, a leading condom manufacturer, to create a condom for him, and in November 1987, the Mates brand launched.

Branson insisted on offering Mates for less money than Durex to get more young people to use condoms, and he engineered the distribution of the line, making them more readily accessible where young people shop. Branson planned to donate any profit on Mates to charity - and wanted retailers to join him on this mission. Most balked.

Branson also dictated the strategy and style of the ads, scrapped several approaches suggested by the now-defunct agency, Still Price-Count Twivy D'Souza, and ultimately approved six approaches he thought would put youngsters at ease. Within six months, Mates captured 25 percent of the condom market.

The spots ran for a year, after which Mates' share started to slip. By then, the government had stepped up its anti-AIDS effort and portrayed the disease as affecting the overall population, competitors had cut their prices, and consumers discounted the cheaper Mates as lower quality. After Branson pulled "Chemist Shop," Virgin began more literal treatments of safe sex.

Dannon Yogurt

The world's top selling yogurt, founded in Spain in 1917, didn't arrive in the New World until 1942, and even then was little known until the '60s. It didn't make a dent in America's consciousness until chairman Juan Metzger began marketing yogurt as a food rather than a medicine. At first Dannon tried to lecture America that "no artificial anything yogurt" was "the right thing to eat." When that didn't work, Metzger opted to build Dannon's image as a health food in keeping with the hip, flower-power times. The spots featuring centenarians in Soviet Georgia - where an 89-year-old happily spoons up the yogurt to his doting mother's approval - did that and strongly implied that the secret to the centenarians' good health and long life was Dannon. The spots helped push up yogurt consumption more than 120 percent between 1975 and 1990 - when consumers balked at price hikes.

Apple Computer

In 1983, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs handed marketing director Michael Murray a newspaper clip about how George Lucas had marketed Star Wars. He'd made it seem like an instant and spontaneous hit, though it was a marketing event meticulously orchestrated months before. Jobs pushed for the same strategy. He got something equally memorable.

"1984," Apple's gritty vision of the future, featured blue-tinted, zombie-like, mindless, hollow-eyed people listening to Big Brother (shades of IBM) spew rhetoric from the huge TV screen, which was then shattered by a young, athletic, blonde woman wielding a sledgehammer. The year 1984, said the ad, wouldn't be like George Orwell's 1949 book of the same name.

Apple paid $1 million to run the 60-second spot just once, but it was shown repeatedly on news programs. Launching the genre of advertising as an event, it transformed the Super Bowl forever from a football game to an ad showcase and made the agency Chiat/Day a formidable national creative force. The day after it ran, according to Apple, 200,000 consumers flocked to dealers to view the Mac, and 72,000 bought the computers in the first 100 days, exceeding Apple's goals by 50 percent.

Before the Macintosh was introduced, Apple's future was shaky. IBM had swept past it to take the lead in the PC market in 1983; Apple's two most recent introductions had bombed; its stock was depressed. Macintosh could change both Apple's fortune and the way the world worked. "Computing had been in the hands of a close-knit elite, and we were going to bust up that cabal and give the power to the people," says copywriter Steve Hayden. Macintosh was leading a revolution, he says, taking power way from big business and big government and putting it in the hands of the people.

Initial plans were to run "1984" during college football games on New Year's Day. Air date was pushed back to the Super Bowl to be closer to the Macintosh's official introduction at Apple's annual shareholders' meeting. Jobs, not a football fan, worried whether computer buyers actually watched the game - and whether they'd get this. Almost 100 million viewers - 46 percent of U. S. households - did.

Though Jobs left Apple in 1985, and Chiat/Day lost the account in 1986, Jobs rejoined in 1997. One of his first orders of business: bringing back the agency that had put Mac on the map, 13 years before.

Wendy's

With just $8 million to spend on media - less than a tenth of what rivals McDonald's and Burger King were shelling out - Wendy's created a national anthem with "Where's the Beef?" The commercial implanted a slogan in people's minds and communicated clearly and directly a key sales message - that those who demand quality and search for it, will find it at Wendy's. Its unlikely heroine, Clara Peller, an 83-year-old with an Ethel Merman voice, reflected the disappointment and anger we all feel when we don't get what we want. Without naming the competition itself (just their "biggest" products), "Beef" landed a solid punch, implying you don't get enough meat at other fast-food places.

This strategy was conceived by Wendy's chairman Dave Thomas, who'd founded the company because he was "tired of going into fast-service restaurants where the pickle was bigger than the hamburger. I wanted to know where the beef was."

Ultimately, Wendy's went a more traditional route using Thomas as spokesperson, framing him in humorous situations in more than 500 commercials. Initially ridiculed as "a steer in half sleeves," Thomas has cut through, and the ads resulted in record-setting gains because of his seeming genuineness and honesty.

Quaker Oats

Life cereal debuted nationally in 1961, but after 10 years had only roughly one share point of the cereal market. In 1969, Quaker president Robert Stuart Jr. testified before a U.S. Senate committee on nutrition that the company had spent $15 million in seven years advertising the nutritional value of this high-protein, oat-based cereal - but found only 9 percent of consumers got the message. Stuart then pressed for advertising that downplayed nutrition and played up good taste. When DDB presented the ad solution - Mikey, a chubby-cheeked three-year-old who showed great confidence and independence in the face of two pushy brothers; watching him put spoonful after spoonful into his mouth, his astonished brothers cry, "He likes it!" - Stuart approved the ad without testing it: a Quaker first. Within a year, Life sales went up 20 percent, and within three years the brand had grown 2.5 times what it was pre-Mikey.

MCI

In 1981, AT&T reached out and touched America with its memorable, heart-tugging vignette of an aging mother moved to tears by her grown son calling "just because I love you." The spot also inspired Bill McCowan, the late MCI chairman, to retaliate. When his agency proposed a parody where the woman holds up the bill and cries because the "greedy, blood-sucking monopoly had drained the family resources, McCowan thought a moment, then asked for a stronger word than blood-sucking," recalls copywriter Tom Messner.

Going for the jugular catapulted MCI's annual sales from $95 million to $2.5 billion by 1983 and changed its competitive image from mild-mannered to venomous. It introduced the first new long distance phone company since the invention of the telephone to a public that had grown up on AT&T and positioned MCI as a David vs. Goliath.

Think Different

When should CEOs roll up their sleeves and get creative?

Dan Amos CEO AFLAC Columbus, GA

"Marketing is the foundation of any business. We have used advertising to 'warm the doorknob' so that when one of our salespeople goes to a business owner or benefits manager to discuss offering AFLAC supplemental products, the person they're meeting with has already heard of AFLAC.

"First and foremost, I am a marketer. Over a 10-year period, through marketing, we've taken AFLAC from a single-product company to a truly full-range supplemental insurer in both its markets: the U.S. and Japan. In addition, in a niche of an industry and in a company that had seen little or no advertising, we've introduced national advertising. In fact, to free up resources for advertising, I decided to close some of the company's unprofitable or marginal overseas operations.

"There have been two reasons for this focus on advertising: to build name recognition for the company, and to help with sales force recruitment. Because the insurance market has advertised so little, I felt this was a way to distinguish AFLAC from its competitors. Beyond that, I knew that sales people would prefer working for a company that supported their efforts with an advertising program. We've been running national advertising since the fall of 1991 - when we placed spots on CNN and, the following spring, became a broadcast sponsor of the Atlanta Braves. By any measure, the advertising program has been an overwhelming success - and we have increased our expenditures and presence every year."

Larry Weinbach Chairman and CEO Unisys Corp. Blue Bell, PA

"When I joined Unisys, I said we needed to focus on three things to be successful: our customers, our employees, and our reputation. All three had been weakened by the tough times of the last decade - our customers were concerned about whether we were viable; our employees were demoralized from years of downsizing and takeaways, and our reputation - our brand - was tarnished from financial and operational weakness. We immediately launched a working group, which I stayed strongly involved with over its nine months of effort, to develop a new positioning for the Unisys brand based on rigorous global research.

"What came back was that, despite all the problems, our people were seen as our strongest asset. Further, customers uniformly said our people were creative in devising solutions to business problems, technically excellent in applying the technology involved, and tenacious in sticking with the problem until it was solved. Our people positioning emerged from that research, and our 'monitorhead' campaign - depicting Unisys people as thinking about solutions to customer problems even when they are enjoying leisure activities away from the office - was the result. I think it takes 20 years off the age of Unisys, and, whether people like the advertising or not, it gets us noticed, and that's what we needed."

Ted Weise CEO Federal Express Corp. Memphis, TN

"Over the past 25 years at FedEx, we have built one of the leading brands by providing our customers with a superior value proposition and communicating it effectively via advertising and other channels. As CEO, I am constantly looking for the sweet spot - the intersection between the company's current and future capabilities with our customers' unexpressed or latent needs. We gather information about these needs by listening to numerous customers throughout the year, both one-on-one and at customer events. For example, two years ago, no customer said 'Please integrate my supply chain.' However they did say 'I can't keep track of all the products I source, store, and distribute around the world.' We saw that FedEx could manage their supply chain, taking time and inventory out of their distribution system. We helped our customers visualize these very real time and cost savings via our advertising, and now, some of the world's most innovative businesses rely on FedEx for supply chain management solutions.

"Our marketing strategy crystallizes the voices of our many types of customers. Crucial to this strategy is our compelling advertising that validates our reliable service. One of my responsibilities is to align all divisions to keep the company focused on our customers' needs. Our advertising communicates this customer-first focus. We don't just say that we have great customer solutions, we show them in action using real life situations and often a humorous tone."

Ed Crutchfield Chairman and CEO First Union Corp. Charlotte, NC

"I don't come out of a marketing background or claim to have special knowledge of it. I became involved in our company's advertising because I was convinced that No. 1, First Union needed to focus on our brand name, and No. 2, to do that required a dramatically different approach. In doing that, I knew I couldn't ask someone else in the company to take the risk of trying something new and provocative. I even had some input into the copy we used, saying to the people at [agency Hal] Riney: 'Let's use terms like derivatives, high-yield, foreign exchange, as opposed to showing Grandpa walking down to the stream saying 'Don't worry son, we'll save for your college education.'

"We tried to make the copy real for the sophisticated audience we are targeting in the consumer and corporate worlds. Things like S&Ls and deposit slips speak to a different audience. I don't want to pontificate, but I think more CEOs should be involved in their company's marketing. I know a lot of CEOs are unhappy with their advertising, and they don't get involved - and this is why I never got involved - because they feel there's some kind of magic to making it happen. They should get themselves the best agency pros out there, and then let them do what they do best."

Scott Kurnit Chairman and CEO About.com New York

"MiningCo.com started on my kitchen table just shy of three years ago. It's grown to become one of the top 25 Internet sites, with six million people visiting last month. We have 700 expert guide sites each dedicated to a simple topic and managed by a human guide. We have the most original content on the Internet. The key reason we just changed our name is that as we looked out over the next 10 years - or one year in Internet time - we questioned whether MiningCo. com would be expansive enough in the future. We felt we had broader opportunities to say more about our company and its original content and community features. 'About' allows us to partner with others and build double brand equity. With our 'xyz' partner, for example, it becomes 'Aboutxyz,' or with others 'About sports,"About kids,"About computers.'

"Our new brand name is both incredibly descriptive today and wide open in the future. It has every attribute of a good Internet name: It's short, memorable; you don't have to spell it for people, and it's simple and an exact match to the URL. With our IPO on March 24, we raised twice as much as we planned - the stock went public at $13 and shot up to $25 - so we could put $80 million in the bank and feel we had enough cash to comfortably go out and advertise our new name. We started out with a significant guerilla campaign on the Web and in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles with a cryptic 'Hello, is anyone out there?' message. We have great partners in (ad agency) Margeotes/Fertitta & Partners, Eisnor Interactive, and Frankfurt Balkind Partners, and we have an excellent head of marketing, John Caplan. But when you have a brand in a fast-moving company with the kind of products, technologies, and investors we have, you need involvement from the company's chief executive."!

Bernice Kanner writes frequently about advertising and marketing. This article was adapted from her forthcoming book, The 100 Best TV Commercials and Why They Worked (Times Books, July 1999).

COPYRIGHT 1999 Chief Executive Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

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