Famous, but not in a good way
I had an advertising blast from the past today and discovered I’m famous, but not necessarily in a good way. In any industry other than advertising, you’d probably call it “infamous” or “infamy” but, being that the ad jungle is all about getting noticed at any cost, I’m sticking with my original assessment of famous-ness.
Several years ago—it’s been five or six—I was called in to work on a general market (English language) campaign, on the side, for what would later become my current employer, Dieste Harmel & Partners.
The campaign was for a new beer that one of Dieste’s clients, Anheuser-Busch, was launching. It was a new concept: flavoring beer with outside ingredients, and the launch was intended to compete with the hundreds of “flavored malt beverages” that were flooding the market at the time.
The beer was to be called “Tequiza,” and the product was going to combine the flavors of beer, tequila and lime. I’m sure some marketing wiz at A-B was in a bar one day, saw people chasing their tequila with beer, and had the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup-brainstorm moment of simply combining the two (“Your tequila is in my beer!” “Yeah, well your beer is in my tequila!”).
The campaign we developed played up the “liberating,” in vino veritas qualities of tequila, and the copy line, “Speak your mind, drink your beer” was born along with the tagline, “Beer Without Borders.”
The campaign was all about being bold, as in, “Did I just say that!? Fuck it. I’ve been drinking tequila—I’m excused,” and it received a ton of press when it broke, getting written up in AdWeek– by Barbara Lippert, no less– and in other publications of the sort that get read by exactly four people outside our industry.
We broke a slew of print with the campaign—subway posters, bathroom signage, outdoor, magazine—and some pretty good radio spots, one of which I still have on my reel:
(The radio is showing some age, being written during the early stages of the dot com bust, but I still like it too much to take it out of my book.)
It was a fantastically fun assignment to work on and it sold me on DHP being a shop that had the balls to do provocative, breakthrough work.
Today, the Art Director/Creative Director who brought me in on the project, Jesse Diaz (with whom I worked at the ill-fated shop, Berry*Brown Advertising), dropped by my office to show me an excerpt from a book written by someone named Koren Zailckas.
In the book, “Smashed,” she mentioned our campaign. Our campaign!
Jesse handed me the photocopied sheets (pages 191 and 192 from the book) and there, in New York Times Best Seller-set type, was this quote:
“What does sell [alcohol], especially to women, is sex as an idea. Even more than men, we buy the concept that sex is a tricky proceeding. We understand that interacting on the coed level is a struggle for dominance, one that involves a million fouls and false starts, where the playing field is never level, and where one player almost always has the advantage. That’s why Anheuser-Busch advertises Tequiza using the brazen taglines ‘Actually, size does matter’ and ‘They’re not real, so what?’”
Wow! Is that cool or what?
I guess I should have researched the book before I had that “I’m an Ad God” moment, though, because, roughly ten minutes later, I found this review on Amazon:
This isn’t just one girl’s story of sneaking drinks in junior high, creeping out for night-long keg parties in high school and binge-drinking weeknights and weekends through college—it’s also a valuable cautionary tale. At 24 (her present age), Zailckas gave up drinking after a decade of getting drunk, having blackouts and experiencing brushes with comas, date rape and suicide. […] Zailckas had alcohol poisoning at 16 after a night of downing shots at a party with friends, but having her stomach pumped in the emergency room and enduring a month of being grounded didn’t check her desire to drink. […] Alcohol defined Zailckas’s adolescence and college years to such an extent that, as she tells it, she lacks the tools to be an adult: she’s unsure how to maintain relationships and unclear about sex without an alcohol buzz.
Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.
So now my work is being held up as contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A young girl who, at the time the campaign ran, was eighteen. (And a young girl (now, a young woman) who has a blog.)
And not just eighteen; eighteen and lured into a hazy, beer-goggled world of binge drinking, drunken sex and alcohol-induced coma by– wait for it– advertising.
My advertising. My wonderful, breakthrough, attention-grabbing advertising.
Fan-tastic.
So now you see why I said infamy might be a better word.
I’m so proud.
Of course, I think it’s much, much more complicated than that– advertising is incapable of holding a gun to someone’s head and ordering them to chug a beer bong. There’s the whole matter of upbringing, intelligence and, of course, Free Will to contend with, none of which– certainly– is meant to disparage Ms. Zailckas. Rather, it is to say a reduction of such things down to an algebra of advertising equaling the x factor is overly simplistic.
And I’m not saying she blames me specifically– hell, I’ve only read two photocopied pages from her book and a couple thousand words of reviews. Within its pages she might fault Martians or an overactive thyroid gland or even David Hasselhoff.
What do I know?
Still, reading it was a cold-water chaser to my high-proof day in the ad jungle.
Email Article Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 04:58pm Mack Simpson
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Technorati Tags: Advertising, Koren Zailckas, Smashed, Tequiza, Beer
9 Comments Add your own
1. Dabitch | August 7th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Wow.
2. Mack Simpson | August 7th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Yeah. Wow.
3. Memartin | August 8th, 2006 at 4:04 am
that’s right!
191-192 sounds great, even in that kinda book
4. makehelogobigger | August 8th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Enjoy your glory. You earned it. Why should people who didn’t have fucked-up childhoods be made to feel guilty about it?
I am so tired of ‘my parents didn’t love me’ or ‘I had a rough childhood’, so I need to blame something for it. And oh, btw, let me profit off of it. Well, that’s bullshit.
Know what? Way it goes. Your ad work has zilch to do with her life’s problems. Because if that’s the case, then I’d counter by saying she only has success because she drank all those years.
Kind of ironical, aint it.
5. Mack Simpson | August 8th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Good point.
6. Kate | August 9th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Hrm. I don’t think she’s blaming your work. I think she’s talking about the general culture we live in. I guess it surprises me that it never occurred to you that advertising does get people to do things that they wouldn’t do on their own. In fact, that’s its purpose — no one NEEDS a fancy car, a pack of smokes, a better drink — but we live in a culture where we are taught constantly through the power of advertising that our lives will be better with that newer shinier product. When that thing happens to be an addictive mind altering substance, you’re kind of playing with the devil. I’m no puritan, I’m just pointing out that advertising is a pretty sticky profession to be in.
7. Mack Simpson | August 9th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Limiting my conjecture to the words actually written on the page, I believe she was speaking to the Tequiza work targeting women in a way she feels actually works on them: using a hint of sex as if it were perfume on a wrist. By extension, she—being a woman and, specifically, a woman prone to binge drinking—went looking for a boogey man and used the campaign to buttress her case.
I have several problems with this. The first, as should be evident to people working in advertising from the background I provided on the campaign (and it was one of the reasons I provided the back story in the first place—since my blog is mainly read by others in the business), is the work wasn’t about sex; it was about boldness. Secondly, as should be evident from the radio example, the campaign didn’t target women; it targeted men.
Certainly, it didn’t target anyone who was underage. No sexy television, no raucous parties, no hard bodies thinking other hard bodies are cool simply because of the glint coming off the bottle in their hand. Just smart, adult copy lines appearing in smart, adult locations. To further adult-i-fy it, consumers needed to have prior experience with tequila to really understand what was going on within the campaign, anyway.
I would have been more clear on these points had I expected the post to gain extremely wide distribution through Gawker.
My presumption is she tried it at one of her (apparently many) keg parties, liked its boutique flavor profile and then backtracked for a reason why. She picked the two lines, out of the roughly twenty that ran, that were tangentially related to anything of a sexual nature and focused in on them, “because that’s what sells to women.” Magico-presto, it’s advertising’s fault.
Like I said in the post, advertising simply cannot hold a gun to someone’s head and order them to buy something. Advertising cannot make people do anything. The best of it provides a rationale for purchase that people can use within their own decision-making process. The worst of it creates a fallacy of rationale which thoughtful people are able to discern and discount. Advertising doesn’t mug people on the street. Only people who are willing to abdicate their own personal responsibilities—or those who feel they’re smarter than everyone else—seem to think otherwise. (I’m not throwing you in here; I’m simply making an observation on those who would damn advertising for every ill suffered by society.)
Why not blame advertising for my having eaten that quadruple-meat cheeseburger when it’s so much more painful to consider the fact I’m simply, and basely, a glutton?
Why not construct a boogey man out of advertising from which to lead the “sheeple,” prophet-like, when it’s so much more difficult to address the internal emotional and psychological inequalities that lead people to excessive consumption—of intoxicants, luxury goods, fast food, baseball cards, shoes, little black dresses, whatever—in the first place?
I haven’t deluded myself into believing advertising isn’t powerful; I know it is, just as I know that any mass media operation—music, film, the news—is. But I also haven’t deluded myself into thinking it’s more powerful than it really is because, if it were, every campaign that aired would result in 100% success and that’s simply not the case.
What gave me pause wasn’t the thought that my campaign was so powerful as to drive a young woman to drink—I know it wasn’t—but that someone would specifically call out my work as being not only a root cause of personal pain but also a deliberately sinister and premeditated source of harm to 50% of the population.
That’s something that, despite working in the evil, evil world of advertising, doesn’t happen every day.
8. James-H | August 10th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Look at the bright side, your work was memorable to someone who was otherwise prone to serious blackouts.
I disagree with Kate. I NEED a better car. And a drink.
9. Sloan | September 22nd, 2006 at 9:06 pm
She’s talking about seduction - the definition of advertising. She was influenced by a carefully crafted, massively resourced seduction. She had free will, but was very young, vulnerable, and at risk for alcohol abuse. If 18 year-old girls were not part of the campaign’s target, I wonder if the team was subconsciously seducing that demo out of their own hidden desires. The slogans hit a nerve with her.
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