Europe's Creative New Breed

Phillippe Hautefeuille, head of the tiny Pans advertising agency that bears his name, had long been delighted to promote the wares of Airborne, a French furniture manufacturer. It came as a shock when he learned that the company could afford only a skimpy $50,000 for its 1969 campaign. "Mon dieu," recalls Hautefeuille, "a major impact was just not possible. But then I got to thinking. Whatever we did had to be audacious."

On the theory that a chair should be sold for its anatomical comfort, Hautefeuille devised a callipygous montage. He commissioned some 2,000 'photographs of bare buttocks, those of his employees, their children and friends. "We cropped the pictures right down to the buttocks itself," says the adman. "It was more abstract--not obscene, not vulgar, not ugly." The resulting two-page layout of 50 men's, women's and children's bottoms became the talk of Europe. After its publication in major French, German and Belgian magazines, delighted readers pinned the ad to office walls all over the Continent and Airborne enjoyed a 40% sales increase.

Such startling showmanship is part of a creative uprising that is transforming the once stodgy European ad scene and bringing a rapid end to the Old World bias against advertising. The U.S. still leads the world in ad expenditures (1969: $19.5 billion, up 7% from 1968), but ad outlays in Europe are rising faster. In the countries that make most use of advertising--West Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and The Netherlands--expenditures last year totaled $6.3 billion, up 12.5% from $5.6 billion in 1968.

Trouble in the Middle. An important share of the big accounts are still held by American giants, notably J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, which have dominated European advertising for years. But the long creative hegemony of U.S. agencies is being broken by a new breed of mostly young, Europe-trained admen who have formed their own small firms. Advertising executives expect some agencies to become victims of the change. "The old-established middle-sized agencies are in the most trouble," says Jeremy Bullmore a director of J. Walter Thompson in London. "The ones that will prosper are the international full-service agencies and the small nimble ones that can generate excitement."

Despite slender budgets, the new agencies produce eye-catching graphics and pungent copy. For example, a recent ad for Alfa Romeo by the French subsidiary of London's Colman, Prentis & Varley shows an ignition key stuck in a succulent red apple under the single word "Temptation." A breezy approach to sex and nudity is another hallmark of the New Wave. A lingerie ad in Elle, the French magazine, shows a couple in bed. "How was I?" she asks, slipping on her brassiere. "I love you," he replies, "and your Aubade bra."

A Fancy for Feathers. John Pearce, chairman of London's largest creative shop, Collett, Dickinson, Pearce, contends that the new freshness is now rated highly by mass-market clients. C.D.P.'s reputation for aggressive copy has helped the firm to treble its billings to $24 million in the past three years. "Would you let your daughter marry a Ford owner?" asks the headline in an ad for Ford Motor Co. To plug pubs run by Whitbread Beer, the agency tried a slapstick pun: "If your wife's not happy in The Baker's Arms, maybe The Feathers will tickle her fancy."

West Germany, where advertising outlays rose 15% last year to $2.4 billion, has become Europe's largest and fastest-growing advertising market. The pace is set by a Duesseldorf agency with the unusual name of Team. The agency made its mark when a distiller gambled $60,000 to try to move several thousand cases of unsold vodka out of his warehouse. Team came up with a series of ads showing a stalwart adventurer and a bear paddling through Finnish lakes or going on African safari. The punch line: "Puschkin Vodka for tough guys." For the next three years, the distillery could not make enough vodka to meet the demand. So successful was Team's small German campaign for French-made Vittel Mineral Water ("The water that rejuvenates your cells") that the producer switched the entire account to Team from Publicis, France's No. 2 agency. Wolfgang Vorwerk, Team's general manager, boasts: "We Germans are good enough to gain a foothold on Madison Avenue before long."

Rationed Space. Charles Wilp, 37, a Duesseldorf photographer turned adman, occupies a niche of his own in Europe's new advertising era. A bachelor, Wilp looks like a tired paparazzo and invariably dresses in canary-yellow astronaut overalls, but his flair for converting unknown products into household names is legendary. To popularize a soft drink called Afri-Cola, for example, he photographed four nude black girls through a sheet of ice. Isenbeck-Pils, a virtually unknown Ruhr beer, increased its sales by 29% after Wilp's campaign treated it as the "in" brand.

Little of Europe's new advertising creativity is to be seen on television. Government-owned stations generally allot commercial time sparingly and subject messages to rigorous regulation. Accordingly, magazines and newspapers share two-thirds of Europe's advertising billings. Some major publications, among them the Sunday Times, Paris-Match and Stern, have achieved the position of rationing space among a long list of waiting advertisers.

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