[1]	WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA? (That Sell!) [2]author: George Lois rating: asin: 0385414862 binding: Hardcover list price: $22.50 USD amazon price: $22.50

'You'd be paranoic too if people were out to get you!'
by George Lois.
From the book; What's the big idea?

Revisionism is a hazard of the advertising life. Credit for the big
idea and disputes about who said or wrote what when can drive you
up the wall if you let that kind of backbiting get to you. Advertising
attracts intense personalities who thrive on the heat of confrontation,
the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Advertising also attracts
many untalented personalaties who pretend to creative ingenuity, who
take credit for work they could never have athoured. Several times
a year I receive portfolios from creative people that include som
of my work. I shrug and go about my business.

More than in most professions, the ego factor is a rampant force in advertising,
and I don't say this in a negative sense. All our great innovators
(in and out of advertising) have been men and women of towering
egos. The ego is the furnace of great work, but you can't let it's
steam scald you. Everything I do is a collaboration with other people,
all extremly conscious of who did what or who originated what great
theme or who suggested what great visual. I can understand these
concerns, but I won't get sucked into that zoo.

I also have to live with the 'factoid factor' - the conversion
of anything that appears in print, however wrong or untrue, as fact,
which Norman Mailer aptly labeled a factiod. Factoids are
abound in advertising. Trade journals employ many writers who are
not only untutored in advertising but are also not very experinced
reporters or researchers. they rewrite advertising history based
on imperfect information and commit their 'facts' to print, thus
creating a factoid, which becomes an established source for other
writers. In a recent book I came upon the subject of Xerox, which
contains this outstanding claim;

For decades the cheif impetus for sales and rentals was simply seeing
the near-miracle of the 914 in action. Only in the early 1980s,
when the competitors finally became a threat, did Xerox really begin
to advertise, and their All-Time Greatest campaign was the devout
monk reminding us what a miracle the original invention had been.

A new factoid has been created and a new generation of students scholars
and trade press reporters will use this factoid again and again.
For the rest of my life I could send letters to publishers and editors
pointing out that I used a monkey to sell Xerox 914 on telivision
at least twenty years earlier, and because of that advertising
and our telivision campaigns that followed in a series of classic
CBS specials (" Death of a salesman", "The Kremlin", "Mark Twain
Tonight") - "Xerox Culture" became an integral aspect of American
business life and made anyone who bought Xerox stock rich.

© © © © ©

I can shake off creative applicants who include my work in their
portfolios and I can laugh at those silly awards, but I can't forgive
phony claims to authorships of a genuinly big idea. New York magazine
was such an idea.

© © © © ©

From the chapter "Don't take the big idea for granted"

"......and I retrieved from my mental dossier of triumphs and tragicomedies
the memory of my first big sale when I was an upstart art director
at Doyle Dane Bernbach many years before. In that formative year
(1959), I had designed a dramatic poster for New York's most important
maker of matzohs, A. Goodman & Sons in Long Island City. My work
was a huge, gorgeous, realer-than-real color blowup of a matzoh
with the headline "Kosher for Passover" lettered in Hebrew. It was
scheduled to run in New York's subways just before Passover. In
multi-ethnic New York, my Hebrew lettering communicated with the
clarity of a shamrock in a Queens saloon. But, alas, the account
supervisor of Doyle Dane Bernbach presented it to the owner of Goodman,
who turned it down. I appealed to Bill Bernbach, and he grudgingly
made a date with the client so that I could make a last attempt
to pitch him personally. It wasn't easy. The Goodman boss was an
Oid Testament patriarch with a forbidding manner, and his vocabulary
was limited to "I dun like it" and "no." After what seemed like
hours of fruitless persuasion, the old man folded his arms across
his chest, slumped back in his chair, and shook his head at me sadly.

"There must be some way I can sell you on this," I said. I rolled up the poster
and climbed out the window. I stood on the outer ledge, high above
the pavement, gripping the raised sash with my left hand while I
waved the poster with my free hand as I screamed from the ledge
at the top of my lungs, loud enough to be heard in all of Long Island
City: "You make the matzoh, I'll make the ads!"
"Stop, stop,"
cried the old man. "Ve'll run it, ve'll run it. You made your point
already. Come in, come in, please!" I climbed back into the room
and thanked the patriarch for the nice way he had reviewed my work.
As I was leaving, he called out after me, "If you ever kvit edvertising,
young man, you got yourself ah job as ah matzoh salesman." "

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