It's a Tough Life

An adman named Jerry Delia Femina was sitting around with some colleagues trying to dream up a campaign for Panasonic, a Japanese electronics account. "I've got it," he chortled. "I see a headline. Yes, I see this headline

FROM THOSE WONDERFUL FOLKS

WHO GAVE YOU PEARL HARBOR." The line never made it into the campaign, but Delia Femina revived it as the title of his new book, and it is now raising nervous laughs in the twitchy precincts of Madison Avenue. First recorded on tape, then edited by Sometime Author Charles Sopkin and published last week by Simon and Schuster, the book is an earnest effort by Delia Femina to buttress his reputation as the Peck's Bad Boy of advertising. At 33, he heads his own agency and is one of the more abrasive of the young "creatives" who have risen fast in a mercurial business.

More than One. Much advertising today has a numbing sameness, says Delia Femina, but the adman is to be pitied, not blamed. He often finds it impossible to create individual selling pitches for the rising number of nearly identical products. "Some poor son of a bitch is sitting in his office at Compton right this minute," says the author, "trying to figure out what to say about Ivory Soap that hasn't been said may be 20,000 times before. If you're doing an ad for Tide, what do you say? What do you do about Axion?"

Gasoline is another difficult product to sell. In Delia Femina's view, Mobil's "We want you to live" campaign is smarter than most because it says that the company really cares about its customers. Beer campaigns are tough. Delia Femina contends that Stan Freberg's "Ballantine's Complaint" campaign, a takeoff on Portnoy's Complaint, was based on the wrong premise. "How many beer drinkers can read?" Delia Femina asks. By his reckoning, Schaefer, a Brooklyn-based brewer, has the best advertising theme: "The one beer to have when you're having more than one." That message means something to a beer drinker, says Delia Femina. "Here I am, having more than one. As a matter of fact, I'm having 17 at one sitting. And Schaefer is the only beer that will make me feel great when this binge is all over."

Tomorrow the World. As Delia Femina tells it, there seems to be no end to the resourcefulness of agencies and their clients. Promotion reached a new level with the development of the increasingly controversial feminine-hygiene deodorants. "Businessmen ran out of parts of the body," Delia Femina explains. "We had headaches for a while, but we took care of them. The armpit had its moment of glory, and the toes, with their athlete's foot. We went through wrinkles, we went through diets. We conquered hemorrhoids. So the businessman sat back and said, 'What's left?' And some smart guy said 'The vagina.' Today the vagina, tomorrow the world."

An adman is only as good as his latest ideas, and when he runs out of them, he walks the plank. Usually the agency boss does not like to do the firing himself, so he appoints a "killer" for the job. Of the killers, Delia Femina says: "In a lot of ways they're very much like the hit guys in the Mafia." At the big Ted Bates agency recently, "the retirement party for the killer was marvelous. Practically the whole agency showed up for it."

One financially troubled agency had an area known as the "Floor of Forgotten Men," to which it assigned high-salaried managers who were working out their contracts before being let go. "None of them ever admitted that he was one of the fired people," writes Delia Femina, "but they never had a secretary or anything. They were walking around, but they were zombies."

As for creative stars, "it's really not unlike baseball. You've got about seven, eight, or maybe nine years when you're hot and everything you do works and they're calling you for a job and the headhunters are crying for you, and then there's that long downhill slide." Delia Femina is still at the top of his form, but if he should ever get that sinking feeling, the royalties from his gossipy book might provide a retirement fund.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.