n 1889 Missouri newspapermen Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood purchased the Pearl Milling Company. Milling was a tough, competitive business, but the two entrepreneurs had an edge. They’d invented a new product for time-stressed nineteenth-century housewives: ready-mixed, self-rising pancake flour. Add some water, some milk, and—Bob’s your uncle—you’d have pancakes on the grill.
What Rutt and Underwood lacked was a marketing device worthy of their innovation. But one night, when Rutt was attending a vaudeville show, he found inspiration in the form of a blackface minstrel performer who wowed the audience with the popular ditty “Aunt Jemima.” Ping! That was it. They had their product and their marketing angle, but just as destiny began to knock, the two went broke. So they sold their mill, their formula, and their marketing idea to fellow miller R.T. Davis, who made some clever additions of his own. He included powdered milk in the pancake mix, which meant all housewives had to do was add water. He also threw in some rice and corn sugar to tweak the flavour.
That’s when Davis demonstrated some marketing genius of his own. He found a woman to personify the brand: fifty-nine-year-old Nancy Green, who assumed the identity of Aunt Jemima. Green, born a Kentucky slave, was “discovered” while working as a domestic servant for a Chicago judge. She was the ideal spokesperson: pleasant, outgoing, and confident. And so it was that Green and the new pancake mix came to be launched with considerable fanfare on one of the greatest stages in the world.
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 introduced the world to George Ferris’ enormous wheel, on which people were lifted eighty metres above the ground. Eadweard Muybridge thrilled the crowds by showing moving pictures on his zoopraxiscope, and John Philip Sousa’s band gave daily concerts, as did ragtime legend Scott Joplin. It was also at this fair that the term midway was introduced. And then there were the new brands which first appeared that year in Chicago—great, lasting ones, including Juicy Fruit gum, Shredded Wheat, and Quaker Oats. At one point Milton Hershey came to the fair and was sufficiently impressed by a European chocolate maker’s display to buy his equipment, allowing the confectioner to add chocolate to his line of caramel treats.
CHICAGO, OZ, AND DISNEYLAND
The Chicago World’s Fair was formally known as “The World’s Columbian Exhibition,” a moniker that marked four centuries and a year from the time Columbus had stumbled upon the Americas in search of a trade route to Asia. The look and feel of the fair’s architecture gave it the nickname “the white city,” and this (some say) inspired the look of the Emerald City in L. Frank Baum’s classic, The Wizard of Oz. Among the labourers who helped construct the fair’s buildings was Canadian-born Elias Disney, whose son Walt would reflect their look and feel in his iconic theme parks.
Against this backdrop, R.T. Davis introduced the world to Aunt Jemima. Dressed in a costume inspired by the slave era, Nancy Green made pancakes for hours on end, regaling passersby with songs, conversation, and tales of plantation life. The predominantly white audience (many African-Americans were prohibited from attending) literally and figuratively ate it up. Green was a favourite at the fair, receiving a medal and certificate for her appearance, and from that one event, Davis received fifty thousand orders for his pancake mix.
The abstract idea of an easy-to-use pancake mix satisfies one hemisphere of the brain but inspires little emotional connection between the shopper and the brand. The true secret ingredient of Aunt Jemima and of so many other brands is the human element: Aunt Jemima herself—a personality with an engaging story who can easily find a cushy place in the consumer’s imagination. But like so many other brands, Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix also succeeded because of luck and timing: the marketing power of the Chicago World’s Fair, creative innovations in brand marketing, and a growing excitement about new consumer brands.
“Advertising,” wrote the legendary adman Fairfax Cone, “is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.” Advertising, then, is not a selling tool; it’s a surrogate salesperson, representing the genuine article to a wide audience. It doesn’t sell shoes, but it tweaks people’s curiosity enough to send them to a shoe store where they’ll meet a human being. And there the selling begins.
This is why, as “Aunt Jemima” was charming thousands at fairs and exhibitions, Alfred C. Fuller chose to zig, where the marketing world zagged. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Nova Scotia–born entrepreneur plunked down $375 to start a brush-manufacturing company and immediately parted company with the deep thinkers of marketing. Even in those days, marketing was about “big.” A company made as much product as possible, advertised on a grand scale, and operated in volume. Fuller chose a different route. In 1906 he advertised all right—but for salespeople, to take his product door to door, literally into people’s homes. He believed that a one-on-one sales pitch was the most effective way of convincing people of the merits of his brushes. Rather than spending money on mass media, Fuller invested in people—good old-fashioned, commission-driven sales reps, running on road food and shoe leather. It was a gold mine. By 1919 the Fuller Brush Company was making a million dollars a year. By 1960 it was making $109 million a year.
FAMOUS FULLER BRUSH MEN
Red Skelton’s film The Fuller Brush Man helped ingrain Fuller’s business in popular culture, and he was not the only high-profile personality to connect with the enterprise. Over the years, real-life Fuller Brush men included New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio, American Bandstand’s Dick Clark, and actor Dennis Quaid. In 1952, Time magazine reported that evangelist-to-be Billy Graham had sold the highest number of Fuller brushes in his area of North Carolina because “he was convinced that there are no finer brushes than Fuller brushes, and his conviction was contagious.”
This lesson isn’t entirely lost on twenty-first-century marketers. Even today’s high-tech online marketing incorporates the low-tech human touch. One major computer company, for example, has streamlined its Internet shopping portal, allowing its thousands of customers to build a custom computer with all its cyber bells and cyber whistles, right to the point where the order is ready to package and ship.
Ah, but there’s one more step: before the deal is completed, the customer is to call a number and speak to a customer service rep. The procedure is presented as a safeguard, a final check to make sure the customer is ordering exactly what she wants. And so it probably is, though it serves a vital marketing function as well. The customer service reps are part of a “Profit Recovery Team,” whose mission it is to up-sell the consumer, pointing out peripherals, and other extras that might add a few more dollars to the transaction. Automated selling might be easy, convenient, and cost efficient, but in the end, it’s the human touch that persuades the most.
The rise of radio in the 1920s altered the business of persuasion because of its reach, immediacy, and popularity, but it also exposed the advertiser-customer relationship to the tone, personality, and nuance of the human voice. Ads were no longer just flat words passively printed in newspapers and magazines; they were presented by human beings in a conversation—albeit one way—in a tone and manner a visitor might use if they were sitting right there at your kitchen table. Many advertisers and their products became household fixtures: Don Wilson for Jell-O desserts, Ernest Chappell for Campbell’s Soup, Harlow Wilcox for Autolite, and Pierre André for Ovaltine.
So many top producers have said that 90 percent of directing is casting and in radio, where I live, it’s true that casting makes or breaks a commercial. Period. When an actor is right—absolutely right—for a part, you could hear that spot read by a thousand others, and I promise that like a homing pigeon, a boomerang, or a house cat in a Disney picture, you’d return to that one person. Every time. It’s more than a question of “voice;” it’s about personality, and impressing a particular personality against a script is a defining feature of great radio. Above all, top radio writers come to understand that everyone has a unique sound.
Me, I’m obsessed with the human voice. I am in awe of its ability to soothe, to distress, to lead, and to break your heart. It’s magical, it’s compelling, it’s mysterious, and every human being has been blessed with a sound they can call their own.
Even Stephen Hawking. Well, actually, especially Stephen Hawking. The renowned physicist and mathematician is actually British, yet his voice synthesizer has an American accent. Asked why he continues to use it, Hawking said he hasn’t yet found a voice he likes better.
BETTY CROCKER, AUNT JEMIMA, AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Brand icon Betty Crocker was invented in 1921 by the Washburn Crosby Company, to give the enterprise a human face and to answer the company’s mail. In the early 1920s Betty had her own radio show, The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air, and by 1945 she was voted the second most famous woman in America—second only to Eleanor Roosevelt. Like Aunt Jemima’s, the face of Betty Crocker has been updated over the years; today’s version is a computerized amalgam of seventy-five women’s faces.
It was broadcast that breached the psychological wall between marketers and children, and broadcasters who created characters—including Snap, Crackle, and Pop—as brand ambassadors to young listeners. And by the time television had plucked a new generation of young viewers away from radio, cartoon brand icons were flooding the airwaves, most conspicuously in the breakfast cereal category. The Trix Rabbit (“Silly Rabbit. Trix are for kids!”) and Tony the Tiger were products of the 1950s. In the 1960s came Lucky the Leprechaun for Lucky Charms, The Honeycomb Kid, and Captain Crunch. Post launched its TV-stars-cum-cereal icons Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted (whom we met in Chapter 4), and the Flintstones introduced their own cereal line. By then kids were already on a first-name basis with Popsicle Pete and Bazooka Joe, and took safety advice from Smokey the Bear.
When you realize that many famous cartoons—from the Warner Bros./Bugs Bunny classics to The Flintstones—were actually created for adult audiences, it’s easier to understand why cartoon icons can be used to appeal to adults in advertising. Alka-Seltzer created Speedy, in the shape of one of its tablets, to introduce the famous phrase “Plop, plop, fizz fizz. (Oh, what a relief it is.),” and a White Knight rescued homemakers with Ajax detergent if he could get his horse past the muscle-bound Mr. Clean. The Jolly Green Giant provided the veggies once the Michelin Man got you home.
Cartoon icons are especially useful to advertisers because they can be created to personify the benefit of a brand in a way that few live spokespeople can. When Michelin wanted to convey the idea of “safety” in their tires, they created the Michelin Man to embody that virtue. Over the years, you are trained to make that association automatically, and a shorthand is created: see the chubby Michelin guy; think safe. Animated characters are non-threatening, they hark back to our childhoods, they give us warm feelings, and as imagery, they are infinitely controlled by the advertiser. This is the other necessary element: animated characters make no outrageous contract demands or get their mug shots, front and profile, on the covers of supermarket tabloids. And sometimes animated characters are chosen simply for the creative opportunities they offer. Two wisecracking lizards (Frank and Louis, for Budweiser) give copywriters lots of comic opportunities.
REAL OR NOT REAL?
We know that Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker are not real, but the advertising world is filled with non-existent brand icons. Here are a few famous ones:
Mrs. Olson (Folgers coffee). Actress Virginia Christine was no more Scandinavian than Fernando Lamas. The Los Angeles-born actress was a classically trained pianist and soprano and had appeared in such big-screen and TV classics as High Noon, Judgment at Nuremberg, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Adventures of Superman.
Madge the Manicurist (Palmolive dishwashing liquid). Shakespearean actress Jan Miner played Madge, the wise-cracking manicurist who presoaked her client’s fingers in dish soap. She also performed the ads in French, German, Danish, and Italian. Miner’s association with her alter ego left her virtually uncastable in TV and film (though she did play the mother of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Bob Fosse’s Lenny), but she relished the freedom her ad income gave her to pick and choose stage roles.
Cora the Coffee Lady (Maxwell House coffee) was a late-career role for Wicked Witch of the West actress Margaret Hamilton.
Frank Bartles and Ed Jaymes (Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers). Ever on the front porch, actors David Joseph Rufkahr and Dick Maugg spent six years thanking you “for your support.”
Meanwhile an impressive group of major brands were built on the images of real people:
Duncan Hines was an American food critic who sold the rights to his name. The brand was subsequently licensed to Nebraska Consolidated Mills, and in the mid-fifties, Duncan Hines cake mixes were launched.
Chef Boyardee was the late, great, and very real Hector Boiardi. Italian born, he was later a short-order cook in Cleveland. As a restaurateur, he bottled and sold his spaghetti sauce to grateful customers. When he died in the 1980s, Chef Boyardee products were grossing a reported half-billion dollars a year.
“Wendy” of Wendy’s Restaurants was a nickname for Melinda Thomas, daughter of Wendy’s co-founder Dave Thomas.
Sara Lee was the daughter of Charles Lubin, owner of a chain of bakeries. He named his first product—a cream cheesecake—in her honour. As his company expanded, it adopted her name.
One problem with living, breathing brand icons is that they’re mortal. The death of Wendy’s boss Dave Thomas in 2002 shook the company in two ways. The fast-food giant lost both its corporate leader and its public face. Thomas’s onscreen image of non-actor rigidity and aw-shucks likeability, combined with his off-screen reputation as a philanthropist, brought an instant, positive association with the Wendy’s brand. But his death brought the long, successful campaign to an abrupt halt.
Other brand icons move on. Victor Kiam enjoyed instant fame in his Remington commercials, telling the story of his wife buying him a shaver: “I was so impressed,” he said in many an ad, “I bought the company!” In 1992 Kiam semi-retired, and so ended a highly resonant campaign. By the time Lee Iacocca left Chrysler in the early 1990s, he was seen as the man who almost single-handedly rescued the automaker from ruin. His absence deprived the brand of the warmth and personality it knew in the eighties.
Tougher still for Chrysler, after Iacocca supported a failed hostile takeover of Chrysler in 1995, a court order prohibited him from speaking publicly about the company.
Some brands have even attempted to exhume famous icons. Kentucky Fried Chicken has twice tried to resurrect its long-deceased founder, Colonel Harland Sanders—first with a look-alike actor then as a cartoon character (voiced by veteran character actor Randy Quaid). Both attempts fell flat and were quickly shelved. In 1997 two years after popcorn icon Orville Redenbacher drowned in his condo hot tub, he was resurrected in a live-action TV spot through computer-generated imaging (CGI) and a sound-alike actor was chosen from an audition pool of hundreds. Early reviews ranked the ad “creepy” or “eerie” before someone coined the phrase “Deadenbacher.” The campaign was quietly laid to rest.
Actors who portray brand icons present unique perils. One American actor who played Ronald McDonald in Canada during the 1980s later denounced the burger chain and its marketing practices. Thornier still was the story of former Marlboro Man actors Wayne McLaren and David McLean. McLaren, a pack-and-a-half-per-day man, was a professional rodeo rider and actor who took modelling jobs between gigs. In the late 1980s, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and launched a public service campaign, trading on his Marlboro connection, smacking tobacco companies for their lifestyle advertising. David McLean appeared in print and television ads as the Marlboro Man during the 1960s and 1970s. A smoker from the age of twelve, he died of cancer in 1995. His widow and son filed a wrongful death suit against Philip Morris.
TOP AD ICONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In 2000 Advertising Age magazine had ranked the Marlboro Man as the top advertising icon of the twentieth century. Ronald McDonald placed second on the list. Also among the top ten were Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima.
When the marketing clicks, brand personalities come to feel like old friends or at least old acquaintances. The longer, the better. Jan Miner played Madge the Manicurist for twenty-seven years. The Budweiser Clydesdales have been hauling wagons since the thirties. The Coppertone girl has bared her tan line since 1944. And that pleased-looking chap in the black hat has been selling Quaker Oats since 1877.
But changes in social attitudes create no end of problems for marketers whose brand icons fall out of step with the times. By the 1950s Aunt Jemima, still portrayed in slave-era headgear, became a symbol of racial injustice. So began a series of brand makeovers. By 1968 she had been emancipated. She became thinner and her skin became lighter—a far cry from the coal-black cartoonish caricature of the early twentieth century. The kerchief disappeared, and a white blouse replaced the nineteenth-century print dress. She was given a modern hairstyle and pearl earrings. By the twenty-first century, she would look more like a younger, working grandmother than matronly kitchen help.
It took almost as long for Uncle Ben to make his way from the kitchen to the penthouse. In the spring of 2007, Masterfoods, the division of the Mars empire that had taken over the Uncle Ben’s Rice brand, announced that Uncle Ben was changing. A new portrait was revealed, and an Uncle Ben website launched. The man has done all right for himself: he’s been transformed from “Uncle Ben” to “Ben” and now chairs the board of Uncle Ben’s Rice. Mind you, it’s a fictitious title for a semi-fictional character in a nonexistent corporation. The ceremonial gesture didn’t cost the company a dime.
Traditionally, “Uncle” and “Aunt” were honorific titles given older African-Americans by white Southerners, in place of the more formal and more respectful “Mr.” and “Mrs.”
BRAND ANACHRONISMS
It’s often the case that changing tastes and sensibilities drive brand icons off the cultural landscape:
Another product from a similar mindset, “Nigger Hair Tobacco,” was sold in North America in the early twentieth century. Though long since discontinued, its empty tins still surface at auctions and flea markets.
For more than sixty years, “Darkie” brand toothpaste was among the category leaders in Southeast Asia. Their trademark logo was a bulging-eyed, blackface minstrel. Though Colgate Palmolive bought a 50 percent share of the brand’s parent company in 1985, it was three years before the name was changed to “Darlie” and the logo altered to look racially ambiguous.
In 1967 the Frito Bandito ran afoul of consumers in a campaign designed to sell Fritos Corn Chips. The cartoon character—voiced by the great Mel Blanc—showed the dishevelled, six-gun-packing, greedy, covetous stereotypical Mexican outlaw. After protests by a group called the Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee, the Bandito was cleaned up: his hair was shaved and his teeth were straightened. Only when the Bandito was called out by a U.S. congressional committee investigating ethnic stereotyping on TV was the character retired.
In the 1970s public pressure forced America’s “Sambo Restaurants” to change its name, which conjured up the racist imagery of the English children’s book Little Black Sambo. Unlike the images in the book (which a century after publication remained on the American Library Association’s list of Top 100 challenged books), the restaurant’s cartoon icon was a light-skinned child. In 1981 the chain changed the name of its stores in America’s Northeast to “No Place Like Sam’s.” A year later all but the original store in California were closed.
Pillsbury once marketed a line of “Funny Face” powdered kids’ drink mixes using cartoon icons “Injun Orange”—complete with feathers and paint—and “Chinese Cherry,” who had slit eyes and buckteeth.
The jury is still out on the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins.
Some of the most valuable faces in marketing belong to heroes, and nowhere are heroes more ready-made than in the world of sport. Today it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when sports and marketing slept in separate beds: when owners informed players of their salaries, when endorsement money really was chump change, and when Nike was a half-remembered answer on a Grade 12 Greek mythology exam. That would all begin to change in the 1920s, at the same time that radio began to revolutionize mass marketing.
It wasn’t advertisers—but an athlete—who came a-courtin’. In 1925 American football was agog over one Harold Edward “Red” Grange of Forksville, Pennsylvania. An All-American running back at Illinois State, Grange had led his college team to an undefeated season two years earlier. He achieved the status of legend during a game in October 1924, when he returned the opening kick-off 95 yards for a touchdown, then scored three more touchdowns within the first twelve minutes. When the gun sounded, Grange had scored five touchdowns and covered 402 yards. A nickname was inevitable: his was “The Galloping Ghost.”
Among his admirers was entrepreneur C.C. “Cash & Carry” Pyle, a theatre owner and promoter from Champaign, Illinois. While Grange attracted large crowds and almost single-handedly revived the game, Pyle made them pay. In 1925 Grange signed with the Chicago Bears for a minimum $100,000 per season—seventy-five times the average American salary that year. And for Grange and his manager, it was just the beginning. Pyle arranged starring roles for the football player in Hollywood “B” pictures and set up tours of exhibition games, earning him hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond his pro football salary. Pyle became the great alchemist: transforming fan adoration into money. He created a new climate for sports superstars, where showers of adoration mixed with showers of cash and where Babe Ruth could make $80,0000 a year. (When told he made more than the president of the United States, Ruth scoffed: “I had a better year.”) But Pyle’s formula didn’t tap the full potential of the star athlete as an advertising front man. That game would play out on a different pitch a few decades later.
By late 1960 Arnold Palmer was on top of the golf world. He had won the U.S. Open and had twice won the Masters. Given that millions studied his grip, it’s remarkable that so few seemed to notice the handshake he offered Mark McCormack, who was about to pick up where C.C. Pyle had left off. When McCormack found him, Palmer had a $5,000-a-year deal with a sporting goods firm. Within four decades, with McCormack’s help, Palmer’s fortune would be estimated at upwards of $200 million. From clothing lines, corporate holdings, branded merchandising, and TV endorsements.
Two years before his famous handshake, Mark McCormack was a promising golfer himself. He’d qualified for the 1958 U.S. Open, but unlike Arnold Palmer, he didn’t make the cut. As the very model of a modern sports agent, he pioneered the tactic of refusing to speak first in negotiations. His silence, of course, intimidated others into talking, and the more they talked, the more money they’d shovel into the pockets of McCormack’s clients. “Mark the Shark” founded International Management Group (IMG) and, as S.L. Price wrote in Sports Illustrated, this king of the eighteen-hour day scheduled playtime with his children and planned casual phone calls months in advance.
By the 1970s Sports Illustrated had crowned McCormack the most powerful man in golf. By the 1980s he was known as the most powerful man in tennis. By the turn of the century, they gave up on pigeonholing and declared him simply “the most powerful man in sports.” McCormack, more than anyone, built a bridge linking pro athletes to major brand marketers.
There’s a good reason why star athletes are so attractive to marketers compared to, say, actors, writers, and artists. Sport is the last great unscripted entertainment left on the planet. It provides realtime spontaneity long since pasteurized out of television (even reality TV); long since removed from popular music, film, and the Internet; and long, long gone from politics. Sport writes its own stories on its own schedule, culminating in moments even the greatest creative mind couldn’t conceive. It has a unique ability to produce those “Where were you and what were you doing when … ?” events. It drew Canadians together on occasions known simply as “the Henderson goal” and “the Carter homer.” Others were wowed by the Fog Bowl, the “Immaculate Reception,” Joe Louis defeating Max Schmeling, and the Rocket on—well, any night. Sport offers the chance of failure, elation, and the unexpected, including once-in-a-l ifetime plays that can elevate an athlete from “good” to “god.” For marketers, these moments can’t be manufactured or bought.
But they can be rented.
McCormack was instrumental in helping define different classes of athletes. Those who perform amazingly make the news. Those with celebrity appeal make People magazine. The rare few who combine those qualities appear in both. They are the superstars, many of them prepared to reign in their chosen sport but not always prepared for life as a sports celebrity. “It’s just amazing,” mused Wayne Gretzky, “how many companies suddenly want you to hold up their product after you’ve held up the Stanley Cup.”
When Forbes magazine published its 2007 list of the twenty-five best-paid athletes, no one was surprised that one Eldrick “Tiger” Woods topped the list. Granted, he has never hoisted the Stanley Cup, though it might require three elite athletes to lift his bank book. According to Forbes, Woods made $100 million, just $13 million of which was earned playing golf. The balance came from endorsements and appearance fees, and most of that was from Nike, so personifying Nike Golf has been far more lucrative for Woods than the game itself. And Woods’ value to Nike isn’t hard to quantify: the shoe company had also signed a contract to pay the golfer some $25 million a year. Forbes, meanwhile, puts Nike Golf’s annual revenue at $600 million.
Soon after renewing his vows with Nike, Woods signed a deal with PepsiCo to endorse Gatorade, reportedly worth more than $25 million a year. Note the symbiosis: rival sponsors dream of having Tiger Woods endorse their brands; rival golfers dream of attracting such high-end sponsors—especially when that sponsor falls within the coveted “big four” product categories: shoes, cars, a clothing line, or a major soft drink. On the other end, athletes who find themselves hawking kitchen gadgets or endorsing a local plumbing firm might be seen as riding the buses in the bush leagues of persuasion.
Sports superstars—in the marketing sense of the word—are themselves powerful brands, whose influence lasts well beyond their playing careers. Four years after his retirement from basketball (after being gracelessly dumped by the Washington Wizards), Michael Jordan still ranked among the top ten highest-paid athletes, with an income that year topping $31 million. Forbes reported that Jordan’s Nike brand brought in a half-billion dollars in annual sales. And what of Arnold Palmer, the dean of modern sports marketers? He appeared in the “Top 25” list, with an income of $25 million, none of it from tournaments—he’d retired the year before—but rather from sponsors such as Callaway golf equipment, Rayovac batteries, and Rolex watches.
Marketers have come to understand the bond between star athletes and adoring fans, and they know that attaching themselves to a sports hero can help buy them a place in people’s hearts. As for the athletes, whose unscripted, near-superhuman skills help them dominate their game, they must learn to read the script and adopt the role created for them by agents, advertisers, and ultimately the fans if they ever hope to graduate from stardom to nobility.
For their part marketers learn the hard way about the dangers of pinning their brand to dynamic, fragile, and often volatile human beings. The journey from hero to zero is as short as the press conference announcing the positive doping test of soon-to-be-ex-gold medallist Ben Johnson. In an instant an injury might deflate the marketability of a superstar, as it did with Bo Jackson in 1991. And a fast track to the Hall of Fame might be blocked by a betting scandal, as it was with baseball’s Pete “Charlie Hustle” Rose.
They, and a long list of others, prove that it’s the people who giveth celebrity and the people who taketh it away.
King Edward VII was called many things, but “huckster” wasn’t prominent among them. This despite a print ad circulated in 1910 showing a large portrait of His Majesty, surrounded by an ornate border and the royal crest, beneath the headline “HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VII CHOOSES AN ANGELUS PLAYER-PIANO.” It reported with great excitement the contents of a telegram—a photo of which was imposed over the monarch’s feet. The copy dripped of self-congratulation: “Although this is by no means the first time a King, or member of royalty, has purchased an ANGELUS, nevertheless this most recent royal tribute is doubly impressive and particularly significant. In view of the fact that all the leading piano-players, both American and foreign, are sold in London.” It’s unlikely that the ad was run with the consent of His Highness. To the impudent rascals of Wilcox and White, makers of Angelus player pianos, it was an irresistible opportunity to cash in on the royal persona and an early-twentieth-century example of the power of the celebrity endorsement.
I tell my writers always to put the client’s name in UPPER CASE in scripts. At one quick glance, this automatically eliminates a client’s first question: How many times am I mentioned?
Among the emerging stars of music, film, and stage in the early part of the twentieth century, a caste system of sorts was forged. Low-and mid-level stars and—pshaw—radio celebrities might endorse products. But those at a higher level of celebrity—the biggest film stars (the so-called Hollywood Royalty)—placed themselves above the need to hawk products to the masses. Not needing to do endorsements was in itself a sign of prestige.
But that imaginary wall separating the “star” classes began to buckle in 1980, when legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa took a break from shooting his epic Kagemusha to shoot a series of art-house TV ads for Suntory whiskey. The commercials showed him at work behind the camera alongside another legendary director (and Kagemusha executive producer) Francis Ford Coppola. The two are then seen poring over production stills while cordially sipping glasses of Suntory. (The experience would, twenty-three years later, inspire Coppola’s daughter Sophia to make Lost in Translation.)
That campaign seemed to open a door through which Hollywood celebrities, most of whom wouldn’t be caught dead in a North American ad, crossed the Pacific to make Japanese ads.
MADE FOR JAPAN: HOLLYWOOD STARS GO ASIAN
In the eighties, at the height of his Rocky-dom, Sylvester Stallone appeared in a Japanese ad for ham. Arnold Schwarzenegger hawked instant noodles. This and other endorsements of products from the Asian archipelago were part of an underground ripple spread through North American culture: it was cool for major film stars to make Japanese commercials. The trend declined some in the nineties, though even the commercially aloof Harrison Ford made ads for Kirin beer and Madonna endorsed Shochu liquor. And in the past few years, big names have returned to Japan, among them Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and Kiefer Sutherland.
Oddly enough, throughout the eighties, some high-ranking celebrities were already working on ads in North America—anonymously, doing uncredited radio ads and TV voiceovers in radio ads and off-camera work on TV commercials. Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of thousands heard but didn’t see—and probably didn’t recognize—the voices of Demi Moore (for Oscar Mayer or Keds), Lauren Bacall (for Spray ’n’ Wash or Fancy Feast cat food), and Michael Douglas or Donald Sutherland selling cars. Ben Kingsley’s and Sam Waterston’s voices were also for sale. Advertisers who in the 1970s might have sought an actor who sounded “a little like” Gene Hackman could suddenly hire … Gene Hackman.
Stars are protective of their own brands. They know what enhances it and what doesn’t. That’s why stars will refuse to do anything that’s not in their brand character. Bob Newhart, for one, has often said, “My character wouldn’t do that,” and he knows whereof he speaks, with what may be one of the longest-running brands around. Some celebs even refer to their brands in the third person. Take Howie Mandel, for instance. When I was working with him on a car campaign, interviewing him about his career and using his responses as part of the commercial, his answers to my questions were hilariously bizarre. He could see it was throwing me. My first question was: “As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?” Howie’s answer: “A pair of pants.” He then leaned over and said to me, “You know, ‘Howie’ will never give you a straight answer.”
The lure of making Japanese ads helped major celebrities see opportunities to build their brands through advertising, and soon, this attitude spread to North America, where advertisers had come to regard Hollywood agents as the nabobs of “No.” I experienced this “thanks but no thanks” approach once, when on a lark, I called to see if Bob Newhart would be willing to voice a campaign I was writing. I could almost hear his agent hold the phone away from his ear, so as not to get advertising cooties. “Mr. Newhart,” he informed me, “does not do commercials. Thank you for calling.” As far as his agent was concerned, I might as well have been a vacuum cleaner salesman, or worse, a telemarketer.
MY CLOSE, PERSONAL FRIEND, BOB
A decade after being rejected by his agent, I had the joy of directing Bob Newhart in a series of radio ads for Bell Mobility. We used a voice patch—I was in our Toronto studio talking to Bob in a Los Angeles studio: we “met” many times, without ever making visual contact. When Bob appeared at a Toronto benefit, my wife and I were escorted backstage, where I introduced myself. He smiled that familiar smile and we shook hands, and while he was polite, I found him a little standoffish and it took me awhile to realize why. He had been a welcome guest in my living room for so many years, but I had never spent any time in his living room. It demonstrated to me, once again, that the “relationship” between a celebrity and an audience flows one way.
Nevertheless, there has been a real shift in the willingness of Hollywood icons to endorse products. To see it, you need simply flip through an edition of Vanity Fair magazine. In a single issue, you might find P. Diddy for “I Am King” fragrance, Sean Connery for Louis Vuitton, and Penelope Cruz for L’Oréal. This warming of major celebrities to advertising owes something to the wave of commercialism that swept through the culture during the Reagan years. Here, after all, was an actor who’d hosted Death Valley Days and who’d appeared in ads for soap and shirts. Film merchandising dollars were rolling in, and the siren call of advertisers’ dollars worked their magic on major celebrities, and perhaps more significantly, on their agents, who came to realize that the more exposure their clients got, the more popular they became.
A few years back, my wife and I spent a lovely day touring the Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery, owned by Francis Ford Coppola. Also on the tour were Maria Shriver and her yet-to-be-governor hubby, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Go figure: even celebrities are suckers for the celebrity brand.) Coppola’s winery is actually just one of many extensions of the Coppola brand. The name that has graced classic films, a Suntory ad, and several wine labels also appears on packaged pasta, jars of spaghetti sauce, and—wait for it—resorts in Belize and Guatemala.
And Coppola is but one example. Before she was eighteen, Hilary Duff had forged a brand empire, with a TV show, feature films, a recording contract, and her own clothing line. And she has plenty of A-list company: hundreds of celebrities have launched apparel lines of their own, from Wayne Gretzky to P. Diddy, to say nothing of Bono’s earth fashions and Janet Jackson’s lingerie. But if asked to choose a queen mother of extended celebrity brands, Martha Stewart would get my vote. The woman is a living, breathing brand if ever one existed. With or without its association with the ankle bracelet, her name resonates a feeling of home and hospitality.
Is there any limit to how far a celebrity brand might be leveraged? Former Mercury astronaut Frank Borman went on to the presidency of Eastern Airlines, and the list of celebrities-turned-politicians grows each year. Hockey Hall of Fame inductees Red Kelly and Ken Dryden ran successfully for Parliament, and their fellow inductee Frank Mahovlich was appointed to the Senate. South of the border and across the pond, celebrities have also gravitated to politics, including British actor Glenda Jackson, astronaut John Glenn, “B” movie actor Ronald Reagan, and my wine-tour buddy Arnold Schwarzenegger.
BREAKFAST WITH FRANK
During the mid-eighties, I was doing the advertising for Eastern Airlines, and once, while at the Miami head office, I noticed the company president, Frank Borman, having breakfast across from me in the cafeteria. There were two burly bodyguards on each side of him, watching the man eat his cereal. Later, I asked the director of marketing why Frank had bodyguards. “If you want to hijack a plane,” he said, “you take the plane. If you want to hijack the airline, you take Frank.”
The more titanic a brand becomes, the harder it is to steer, and the more it’s subject to the currents, eddies, and prevailing winds of public opinion. Celebrity brands are no different. Just as a national brand of spaghetti sauce might have a team to manage it, celebrities surround themselves with an entourage of lawyers, publicists, managers, stylists, astrologers, spiritual advisers, shrinks, bodyguards, and assistants, all charged with protecting, sculpting, maintaining, and repairing the brand. Add to that a threat unique to those in the realms of stardom: an army of reporters, photographers, and gossip press who stand to profit from their successes and especially from their failures.
I have often wondered if a fallen celebrity has more interest to the general public than a squeaky-clean one—like the way an undefeated heavyweight boxer is just boring but a champion who is avenging a loss is fascinating. Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight star in history to retire undefeated. Yawn. No biopic was ever made about him. But Muhammad Ali, after his loss to Joe Frazier, became a human-interest story of epic proportions.
In all facets of celebrity there lies a fascination, a magnetic drawing card that keeps us watching. That allure is powerful. And power is persuasive.