Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor by Jerry Della Femina The last of the Madison Avenue mavericks of . He could be any of the Mad Men characters. Peggy Olson? He's a working-class Brooklynite who rose from a lowly admin role to become one of the most respected names in advertising. Don Draper? He's a door-to-door salesman who went from obscurity to being one of the biggest names in New York adland. Or Bert Cooper? He's the old man running the firm, arguing with people about . Over the years he's been all of them but right now Madison Avenue legend Jerry Della Femina might well be the last Mad Man standing. In 1970, Della Femina, the then 34-year-old chairman of his own ad agency, wrote one of the defining books about advertising, the cult bestseller From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Taking its title from a suggestion Jerry made to colleagues about how they could sell TVs, its anecdotes about 60s ad land made it a key source for Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner when building the world of Sterling Cooper. Now that he's a doyen of the industry, Della Femina's book is being reissued to sate our hunger for stories from the 1960s ad world. Della Femina worked with the team from the show on its launch, telling TV critics at a New York restaurant: "We made Mad Men look like [Shirley Temple musical] Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm. We were much wilder, we drank more, we carried on more." Having struggled for years to break into the business – after been told by venerable agency James Walter Thompson that it didn't want "your kind" [ie an Italian] – he finally made it in in 1961. Eight years later, when New York Times journalist Charles Sopkin trawled Madison Avenue looking for the new creatives, only one didn't care about being quoted. When the article, headlined What A Tough Young Kid With Fegataccio Can Do On Madison Avenue, was published, Della Femina's star rose beyond the gossipy ad world. It led to Sopkin ghosting Della Femina's adland tales for the book which became From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. The sea-change that Della Femina was part of is portrayed in series two of Mad Men when Sterling Cooper hires two brash young creative types, Kurt and Smitty, who make the Ivy League old guard nervous. Doors for the likes of him were opened by the success of the brilliant Jewish firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, whose elegantly counterintuitive VW Lemon ads ("We pluck the lemons, you get the plums"), baffled Don and co in series one. "If you look at Mad Men, it's set in the wrong decade," Della Femina explains. "The style of Mad Men is really the 1950s, not the 1960s. By the 60s there was a creative revolution and it was the most wonderful time, and that's what I talk about in my book. It was really based on people who thought that they'd never have a proper job suddenly finding themselves earning 40, 50, 60, 70,000 dollars." 'In advertising, you're paid more but you die younger. Like sports stars, you're in it during your better years then you're out looking for work' Among the choice tales in the book are Della Femina attacking the head of his firm over an unused ad; taking a whole creative department out on strike until he got an ad running in magazine; and spending his original agency's last few thousand dollars on a blowout designed to make them look successful. It earned him three new accounts. Most of the original Mad Men are long gone, but now in his mid-70s, Della Femina is still holding forth. "Let's face it: in advertising, you are paid more but you die younger," he says. "It's not very forgiving. Like sports stars, you're in it during your better years and then you're out looking for work." And Della Femina was often looking for work. Having dashed between agencies in the 60s, he decided to set up his own company "because I was going to be one of those people who would become hardcore unemployable". Does he see himself, 40 years on, as a sage head like Bert Cooper? "Oh no, I always will be Don Draper. I gotta be involved; I still write ads, I still run around and rally the creative people. When it's too quiet, I'm the one who turns the music up loud. I just can't wait until they make [the book] into a movie," he laughs. "I see Meryl Streep in my role!" AD STAR JERRY DELLA FEMINA TALKS US THROUGH SOME CLASSIC MAD MEN PITCHES FROM THAT KODAK MOMENT TO PEGGY OLSON'S LIPSTICK BREAKTHROUGH. Lucky Strike: 'It's toasted!' It's episode one and Don Draper is struggling to sell a new campaign to Lucky Strike. Just as the client gets up to leave, Sterling Cooper's finest pulls a line out of the bag. "This is based on one of the great killers of advertising, a man named George Washington Hill, who ran Lucky Strike cigarettes. He destroyed advertising agencies; he was a terrible man. I've seen people do this, where they just catch on to something. Look at the drama. He doesn't just talk about cigarette smoke, there's an emotional point. You gotta reach out and be an actor. He [Jon Hamm] is an actor playing an actor. These people are like evangelists when they talk, when he says 'It's Toasted!' "I once had to make up some body copy on the spot or risk losing a job for Bolex cameras. I picked up a blank piece of paper and proceeded to read that it was 'about your children and how they grow up and you miss those moments …' I must say it was beautiful copy. I looked across and the guy was starting to tear up. I put it down and he says, 'I love it, we're sold!' We get out and my partner says, 'Do remember what you just said?' I couldn't remember a word. We never came close to my copy. That's what happens in these meetings, they are wonderful." Kodak: 'It's not a wheel, it's a carousel' Pictures of his family inspire Don to conjure a pitch that's so good a colleague leaves in tears. "This pitch is magic, when he says, 'It's not a wheel, it's a carousel', look at the way he does it. He's thinking as he's talking, just measuring his words and going for the greatest dramatic effect. And this is how you do it, because when they leave your company at a new-business meeting, they're going to go to another company. It's one performance against another performance. Don's good, he's really good. I've seen people like him. People who can present and literally bring tears to people's eyes. It's an art. Don thinks on his feet and he grasps on to something. There's nothing like playing a client's thoughts right back to them in a different way with different words. There's something that goes on in a new-business meeting that's wonderful to watch. It's like showtime. There are people who are nervous and there are people who are jittery and there's so much drama and so much at stake. You can't believe how nervous people can be. And then the lights go down and you've got an hour or two to make the presentation and you better be good because the competition is like the theatre; there's a lot of other shows." Belle Jolie: 'Mark your man' Don is pitching Peggy Olson's first copy to a lipstick company who won't take his advice. So he stops the presentation. "I have turned away clients almost under the same circumstances. When we were first starting out and really needed the money, I had a man come in to see me from Singer sewing machines. He sat down and said: 'Your job is to get the chumps to come in for the $90 machine and then we'll bring them up to the $200 machine.' I stopped the meeting right there. "The lipstick guy here learns, though. I love the part when he says, 'Sit down', and Don says, 'No'. You should respect your clients, but there are times when you just have to tell them, 'I don't think you should advertise.' "When I first came into the business, there were one or two female copywriters [like Peggy]. They wore hats to the office, they were seen as different, and got to work on things like lipstick. But as the world grew up women took on a bigger role. At one point I hired more women vice- presidents than any agency including J Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, which were much bigger. I liked the idea of having women there because they're smarter and they make men better. And in the agency there was sexual tension, so I found that people came to work earlier, stayed later, dressed better and everyone performed better." THE RACIST ROOTS OF JAPAN-BASHING. Not surprisingly, it was never used. His worried publisher even tried unsuccessfully to stop Della Femina from using the line as the title for a famous 1970 book. Times apparently have changed. Today`s ad wisdom says, ''If you can`t beat `em, beat `em up with attack ads,'' and sensitivity toward the Japanese has eased a bit. Consider the following: An announcer in a television commercial for Pontiac dealers in the New York metropolitan area says, ''Imagine a few years from now. It`s December, and the whole family`s going to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center.'' ''Go on,'' he says. ''Keep buying Japanese cars.'' The commercial concludes with the words ''Enough already'' in stark white letters on a black background. Another New York-area commercial for the Tri-State Oldsmobile Dealers compares the average height of American men with that of Japanese men and concludes, ''That`s why our car is built for our size families, not theirs.'' A newspaper ad placed last spring by a consortium of Bell telephone operating companies brought protests from Japan`s embassy and it was later pulled. It featured a photograph of a stern samurai fighter, crouched and ready to pounce, over the headline: ''First it was consumer electronics. Then it was the automobile industry. Is our telecommunications industry next?'' The New York Times says the ads described above have appeared mainly in the seemingly sophisticated Northeast, mostly at the behest of regional automobile dealers` associations. If popular advertising offers a window into the public mind, these particular ads show an attitude toward Japan that is particularly nasty, not just toward Japan`s industries or its trade policies but also toward its people and culture. The agencies who produce the ads say they mean no harm. They say they`re only trying to be funny, they`re only trying to sell products, they`re only tapping into the uncertainties Americans already feel about Japanese competition, aggressive investment practices and unfair trading policies. Maybe so, but I cannot help but wonder why I never see similar ads aimed at the British or the Dutch, both of whom have more investments in the greater than do the Japanese. When it comes to landmarks, British and Canadian companies have bought several major American department stores, among their other sizeable investments here. And Japanese automobiles are come-latelies compared to the competition America`s auto industry has received from German cars. Yet, you don`t see any ads sounding alarms over a second invasion by the Redcoats or an invasion from the frigid North by people who end their sentences with ''eh?'' Nor do we ever see full-page newspaper ads featuring photos of storm troopers and headlines that shout: ''One Blitzkrieg was enough!'' Nor do we see televison commercials making fun of wooden shoes or issuing a call for Americans to ''Stick your finger in the dike of Dutch investment.'' No, when competition came from Europeans, it made us stronger. When it comes from the Japanese, it makes us behave like yokels. And, while advertisers may not say it in public, their ads probably reflect another popular American sentiment, one that says: So what? The Japanese are bigots, too, aren`t they? They should complain? True. Japanese culture is notoriously xenophobic, particularly in regard to its own ethnic minorities. But Japan has no monopoly on racism. Besides, we Americans are supposed to be better than that, aren`t we? In our multiracial society, it is by no means a trivial pursuit for us to ask ourselves how far humor about other people can go before it steps over the line that separates acceptable wit from racist cheap shots. The joke may be on us. Foreign investment from Japan and elsewhere has helped fuel our economy during the roaring deficits of the Reagan `80s, and the Japanese are responding to American pressure by easing the restrictions that make it harder for Americans to buy and sell there than it is for Japanese to buy and sell there. Japan-bashing does not help that process, nor does it make us look good. It is inappropriate for the citizens of a great power, perhaps the world`s best example of how well free enterprise can work, to behave as though competition makes us come unglued. Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca has the right idea with his recent ad campaign that dramatizes his company`s efforts to meet the Japanese challenge. Americans should not tremble at challenges. We should meet them and beat them. In his 1986 book ''War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War,'' University of California at San Diego historian John W. Dower wrote how portrayals of the Japanese as something subhuman permeated American media during World War II and ''remain latent, capable of being revived by both sides in times of crisis and tension.'' The Agency Review. Reviews, interviews and more of works relevant to advertising, marketing and branding. In other words, everything. Follow Blog via Email. The Agency Review. Pages. Twitter Updates. What does a #leader need more than determination, a goal, priorities and focus? A leader needs followers.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…8 hours ago RT @martinbihl: Isaac Mizrahi debuted his first collection when he was 15. Since then he’s gone on to become a major fashion icon, design o… 8 hours ago How @simonmainwaring wants to mobilize #businesses to help solve what he sees as the big problems facing the planet… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…8 hours ago RT @martinbihl: Without #process, nothing gets done. & sometimes WITH process nothing gets done too. My thoughts: martinbihl.com/business-think…8 hours ago Did anyone explore the question of what it means to be famous in America better than #RichardAvedon? Or more relent… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…8 hours ago. Blogroll. Recent Posts. Archives. Categories. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. There are a lot of controversial people in advertising. Ogilvy because of his “rules”. Hopkins because of his anti-intellectualism. Reeves because of his USP, Lois because of his outrageousness, Wells because of her sexuality. And then there’s Jerry Della Femina, creative director and chairman at the agency he founded in 1967 (Della Femina Travisano & Partners), and survivor of a litany of shops that weren’t so lucky – like Ruthruff and Ryan, Daniel & Charles, Delahanty, Kurnit & Geller, and Ted Bates – and whose 1970 memoir “From those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor” is famous even among those not in the industry as the book everyone knows the title of, but that no one has read. With the exception, it should be noted, of “Mad Men” creator and Executive Producer Matthew Weiner. Like Weiner, Della Femina knows that advertising is – or at least, was – perceived to be a hotbed of drinking, sex, drugs and other deviant behaviour. And the way he addresses that topic delivers an insight into what makes Della Femina, well, great. For starters, the most salacious sections – in which he describes a variety of ostensibly degraded escapades that are beyond your most titillating fantasies of what agency life is like – are in the book’s first fifty pages. Just so you can’t miss them. And after each one he always says “But no, really, stuff like that doesn’t happen in Advertising. Maybe at some places, but I’ve never seen it. Or at least it’s not anything that isn’t happening in other industries at the same rate.” It’s a clever boy who can have his cake and eat it too. And that’s the thing about Della Femina; he’s very smart about how he mixes myth and fact. About using peoples’ perceptions to his advantage. Were things that wild and crazy at the shops he worked at? Was everyone drunk by noon? Did he really pitch a Japanese company’s business with the headline that graces the cover of this book? Or does the idea of him doing it just make him and his agency much more memorable, much more distinctive, than anything he really did do? Now if that was all that was going on in this book, I would say – as many others have said before me – that Jerry Della Femina is not really in the advertising business: Jerry Della Femina is in the Jerry Della Femina business. But the fact is, he really knows advertising. Sure, he’s crass and rude and talks about people in ways that would give even Roger Sterling pause, but the guy knows his stuff. And if you can wade through the bluster and bravado and braggadiccio (and through language that sounds like it was penned by Lorenzo St. Dubois), there’s some really smart writing about what makes advertising work, and what makes it not work. Like this insight into the success of DDB: “Doyle Dane’s advertising has that feeling that the consumer is bright enough to understand what the advertising is saying, that the consumer isn’t a lunkhead who has to be treated like a 12-year-old.” (p. 31) Or this, about what makes great work: “The average copywriter and art director never stop learning. You have to know your product so well you could go out and be a salesman for the company pushing the product. What you’re trying to do in all of this is to isolate the problem of the company – naturally they wouldn’t have switched their advertising to your agency if everything was going along fine. What you’re trying to do is to crystallize the problem. Once you arrive at the problem, then your job is really almost over, because the solving of the problem is nothing. The headache is finding out what the problem is.” (p. 166) Or this, which is probably the most succinct, clear-eyed and honest appraisals of what makes a good advertising person I’ve ever read: “It doesn’t really matter what you did before you got into advertising. David Ogilvy worked in a restaurant kitchen and he’s done quite nicely since. The key thing is, how much do you learn after you get into the business and then how well do you tell the consumer what you’ve learned? This is what it’s all about.” (p.175) Because it’s never been about the drinking or the sex or the newest app or electronic gizmo du jour. It’s about how well you can communicate with the consumer. And I’ll bet it always will be. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War by Jerry Della Femina was published by Simon & Schuster on 07/20/10 (and originally by on 06/08/70) – order it from Amazon here or from Barnes & Noble here – or pick it up at your local bookseller ( find one here). Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. In the early 1960's there was revolution in advertising. They've had them before. In fact whenever somebody gets a new idea on Madison Avenue, it's called a revolution. Exaggeration may be as much principle of writing about the ad game as of the ads. Jerry Della Femina (rhymes with hyena) is the John Reed of this latest revolution. He has chronicled the rise of the downtrodden class —the workers, or creative people‐and the toppling from power of the parasites—the account men and other noncreative types who formerly ran the business. The revolution, Della Femina suggests, has opened the doors on Madison Avenue to the ethnic, far‐out kids who take dope, wear outlandish costumes and are crazed with the desire to write honest advertising. They have replaced the gray‐flannel, hard‐drink ing, older Wasp‐ types, whose thing must have been false advertising. Della Femina, who has his own agency—of the creative type, needless to say—and his literary partner, Charles Sopkin, have written of the upheaval in the language Della Femina knows best: the one‐liner. People outside the advertising business probably don't realize how hard it is to write a single line, often consisting of 25 words or less, but the one‐liner is the soul of the business today. It not only has to be mildly amusing (if it is too funny, somebody won't get it), but it also has to contain the major thrust of a campaign —“the concept,” as it is known. Millions of dollars are then spent in the media to make these one‐lines memorable. My favorite one‐liner produced during this revolutionary period in American advertising history is: “It's the Real Thing.” What I like most about the new Coke slogan is the daring of the open‐ended comparative. The real thing compared to what—Pepsi, drugs, sex, life itself? The simplicity of the writing makes it sound like some copywriter's first thought; yet it may have been the 247th thought of a three‐man creative task force competing against four or five other teams of talent. Some of the finest minds money could buy have burned themselves out during the revolution thinking of similar great one‐liners. Della Femina wasn't the author of “It's the Real Thing,” but he is so fluid with one‐liners that he's obviously a good ad man. The title of his book is one of his claims to fame in the business. Unfortunately, bombed; the Japanese client (Panasonic) didn't buy it. Who will ever forget Della Femina's one‐liner for product called “Pretty Feet“: “What's the ugliest part of your body?” Or what he wrote for Feminique, the vaginal spray. For the moment, escapes me. Still, Della Femina's book is the real thing about advertising. It has a fragmented, nonlinear quality that may puzzle readers used to linear exposés of the business, like David Ogilvy's “Confessions of an Advertising Man.” The mystery is cleared up when you realize that the authors have strung together a series of anecdotal vignettes, or commercials. Reading these “Front‐Line Dispatches From the Advertising War” is like watching a television set for a night. His experiences in the world of advertising are a lot funnier than Darren's (in television's “Bewitched”) but not up to Putney Swope's. As it is on television, the situation comedy is continually being interrupted for 60‐second discussions of the products handled by Jerry Della Femina & Partners (his agency's name), his friends in the smaller “boutique” agencies and his enemies in the bigger noncreative shops. The stuff in between the commer cials seems to wander all over the field of advertising, as if the author sat down with a tape recorder and talked out everything he knew on that particular day. He indiscriminately mixes Della Femina's laws (“If you got it, don't flaunt it”), advice on how to get a job, pop psychology, advice on how to keep a job, defense of the boutiques, problems with the network censors (he makes his continuing battles for Ferninique sound like one of the great civil‐rights causes of our time), advice on how to find a new job, the importance of being a Machiavelli, trade gossip, thumbnail sketches of scoundrels, four‐flushers, cowards and parasites. There are no heroes in this book, except possibly Della Femina. Least convincing to me, however, is Mr. Della Femina's explanation of the ideological underpinning of the revolution. Telling the truth in ads was a breathtaking idea when Doyle Dane Bernbach did pioneering work in this approach in 1959 with the Volkswagen campaign. Bill Bernbach made advertising history when he admitted that all cars weren't perfect. But how far can Madison Avenue go with that stuff? Can agencies begin telling the people not to buy too much of things they don't need in the first place, the basic principle of advertising since the Industrial Revolution? Whether a copywriter is obsessed or not obsessed with the truth, commercials still have to be limited to 60 seconds. With time restrictions like that, there is a tendency to tell half the truth. The major revelation in Della Femina's ripping the lid off one of the most public of professions is that men on Madison Avenue grovel with fear. An agency president once told Della Femina, “I start worrying about losing an account the minute I get it. The minute I sign the contract, I'm one step closer toward losing it.” In one of his best one‐liners, Della Femina describes a colleague as “The Mt. Everest of Fear.” Every chapter. no matter what its heading, reeks with fear, which should come as no surprise. The secret of success in advertising writing is repetition. If Della Femina wants to make fun of these fear‐ridden wretches, earning Their $50,000 a year plus $5,000 expense accounts, smoking their joints, not making it with their models and secretaries contrary to what outsiders assume, running to their shrinks on Wednesday afternoon (“The day is going to come,” he predicts, “when a bunch of shrinks decide they ought to start an agency”) —well, that's his business. But somebody should say a good word about fear as the cornerstone of advertising. Fear itself drives the best creative people into advertising. Without the fear of not being able to earn living doing their thing in fiction, art or music, why else would all of Della Femina's. The New York Times Book Review friends—who usually turn out to be the most gifted in any agency he's worked at — have gone into the field? Front‐Line Dispatches From the Advertising War. By Jerry Della Femina. Edited by Charles Sopkin. 253 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $6.50. Every creative person I've ever met on Madison Avenue for some reason seems to de spise his work. They all dream of doing the great American novel, the great American offBroadway play or the great American junk sculpture. Yet when they write the great American one‐liner for an ad campaign, they never are fulfilled. Not even writing the script for the great American 60‐second commercial fills them with lasting pride. In the end, as Della Femina reports, all the creative people wind up fearing they are going to lose what they feel is a mini‐talent. Madison Avenue is a great place to work if you're a masochist.