Posts Tagged ‘new york’

On the 18th of this month, a vigil will be taking place to mark the memory of the two Suffragettes who died 100 years ago on that day whilst attempting to enter Parliament to demand a debate on the Conciliation Bill, a bill that would have given some women basic voting rights.

They were part of a group of 300 women who went to the House that day, only to be met by 6000 policemen. 200 women were arrested. It was a deeply extreme reaction on the part of the establishment, who were extravagant in their fear of the Suffragette movement.

By 1928, however, the establishment was a little more cautious – the Suffragette movement had become a large and vocal minority, well on the way to achieving universal suffrage. So instead of being arrested and killed, they were beginning to be seen as consumer targets. Read the rest of this entry »

Season four of Mad Men starts in America tomorrow night, but I managed to get a sneak preview thanks to a friend and, watching it, I realised that most of America just doesn’t know how far back the PR industry’s influence stretches. Of course, if you’ve read my book The Fame Formula, you’d know that the history PR is a far richer seam to mine than that of the history of advertising – but this is largely undiscovered and unrecognised in America.

It’s not the opportunity to win a walk-on part in the series that I’m talking about, either – although that is a fine stunt to grab attention (who wouldn’t want to get dressed up in Madison Avenue finery and appear on screen with the intensely glam Mad Men and Women?). It’s more the homage to the great publicist Jim Moran in the actual episode that piqued my interest.

In the episode, a couple of actors are hired to fight over a ham to garner attention and are then seen being bribed to blow the stunt – it’s a fairly knockabout scene, especially when the cast try to stop the actors blowing the stunt. In real life, Jim Moran staged a row between to New York barkeepers to launch Pimms in America – he had them end up in court, rowing about the perfect ingredients for a Pimms and garnered a great deal of attention for the drink.

If Moran’s elegantly twisted wit and genius is being plundered by Mad Men already, it just goes to prove my point about PR being a richer seam to mine – they’ve run out of real stories from advertising. Is it not time. then, for a truer drama looking at the heart of the American dream? One that looks at the lives of the PR men?

Ever heard of the beer Bavaria? Me neither, until FIFA made sure that absolutely everyone got to hear about it after Bavaria sent a team of pretty young female ambush marketeers to Holland’s opening match of the World Cup using tickets bought in the name of (now ex-) ITV pundit Robbie Earle.

One sacking, several arrests (ambush marketing being illegal in South Africa) and a barrel-full of free publicity for Bavaria later and the only clear winner is the beer company, although the attractive young ladies – already described as ‘blonde bombshells’ in tabloids and blogs – will probably enjoy their day in court. Read the rest of this entry »

I heard today that Howard Zieff had died – a name I’d not really encountered before, despite the fact that he’d directed a few breezy comedies like Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn – but the obituaries made me sit up and take notice. It turns out that, when he started out in advertising, he was very much in the Jim Moran mold; a man who used wit to get people talking and whose campaigns kick-started the more realistic advertising and promotion of brands that has become so commonplace and important to modern advertising and PR.

Raised in the Bronx, Zieff’s major breakthrough was to use real people in the adverts he created, real people whose faces told a story every bit as clearly as the adverts themselves. His most famous advert was for Levy’s rye bread, which ran with the tag line: ”You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

“’We wanted normal-looking people, not blond, perfectly proportioned models,’” he told the New York Times a few years ago. And normal for Zieff, who grew up in the Bronx, was a wide, multicultural mix. The Levy’s advertisements, therefore, featured an American Indian, a Chinese man and a black child.

“’I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central,” Zieff told the New York Times. “’The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my Midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.’”

Another of Zieff’s big, early campaigns was for The Daily News, which captured the spirit of Jim Moran on film; each advert featured a person reading the paper and becoming so engrossed that they accidentally did ridiculous things – a petrol pump attendant placing the petrol hose in his customer’s pocket rather than the car, for example.

He was also involved in bringing stars like Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman to the fore, thanks to his interest in strange and interesting faces rather than the perfection that was the norm of the time. Zieff, in the face of considerable opposition, created the template for a great deal of today’s advertising.

Modern advertising and PR, which has thrived on the witty, truthful and artfully homespun approach to promotion that Zieff instigated, often forgets one thing that he perpetuated, however; the determination to do something new and radical and his ability to get word of mouth out of it.

He created a buzz with his adverts using models from all cultures and walks of life, a stir that ran hand in hand with the mood of the times. He learned from the past and looked to the future, rightly assessing that in an era where Rosa Parks, JFK and Martin Luther King were changing the political landscape of America, brand promotion should not be far behind. He was always pushing at the boundaries to see where he could take his advertising next.

In an age of digital marketing and instant access to information, an age where that information is overwhelming, an age of recession, publicists and advertisers need to be taking the bold steps into new ideas that Zieff took or they are likely to be left behind.

It is no longer enough to rely on the ideas he created, which have become tropes and clichés thanks to their ubiquitous use. The past should be plundered, yes, but not for the ideas that have become stale with overuse. We should be looking at out of the box thinkers like Moran and Zieff and be inspired to think as hard, fast and wittily as they did, in the hope that we can create something new and exciting, something that will generate that holy grail of the publicity world; awed, surprised, astonished or even just amused word of mouth, something that people will talk about for years to come and that will, with any luck, become cliché in 40 years time.