The year 1984. Agencies were recruiting from top management schools. Rediffusion was blazing new trails, Trikaya was in the limelight, and advertising was riding the wave of creativity. Nargis Wadia, Tara Sinha, Usha Bhandarkar, Kamlesh Panday, Arun Kale, Kiran Nagarkar, Arun Kolatkar, Viru Hiremath et al were the icons everyone wanted to emulate. That was the time I did a stint in an advertising agency in Mumbai as copywriter.
During those days, to an outsider, advertising was a glamorous profession. But let me assure you that the closest I came to glamour was the free copy of Stardust, the famous film magazine edited by Shobhaa De, which used to come to the agency. In our agency there was a visualizer by the name Rane who used to reminisce wistfully about his days at Stardust. He held Shobhaa De in high esteem.
I had heard people talk about the supposed promiscuity prevalent in ad agencies. During my tenure with the agency, however, nobody hit on me. More importantly, the guys were very careful about the language they used in my presence. Of course, the odd double entendre would happen.
At the agency I got to work on a variety of projects. One was for a company that manufactured different kinds of glues. The brief we got, I remember, was to create a print ad for the company’s range of glues.
We were briefed in the morning and were supposed to present our ideas by evening. I kept scratching my head (literally and figuratively) and chewing my pen. But to no avail. I went for a walk to clear my head. Nothing doing. I ate my lunch desultorily. No go. Then, as the deadline approached, I started getting fidgety and nervous. But the muse seemed to have deserted me.
In my mind’s eye I can see myself looking through one of the artists who was applying rubber solution to stick typesetting on an art board. And then out of nowhere I got it: Ideas that stick!
Only a copywriter will understand the joy of cracking a brief.
The copy chief loved it. It went into layout and when we presented it to the client, they were thrilled too. The ad was released in some trade magazines.
So, how is advertising created? What are some great and memorable headlines?
In the beginning, in ad agencies, advertising used to be created in silos. Meaning, the art and copy guys inhabited their own worlds. In the 1960s, there came this man by the name of Bill Bernbach. He was an innovative and divergent thinker — a rebel by the standards of his time. Bernbach had worked for big, prestigious agencies before breaking away and starting his own — Doyle Dane Bernbach, DDB. Bill integrated the process of creating advertising. He started the concept of the creative team. The art director and copywriter sat in the same room and ideated together.
This may not sound earth-shattering, but it was. It led to a more collaborative approach which in turn led to great ads. The upshot: the creative revolution.
One of the main changes that the creative revolution wrought was that the creative guys started using pictures as words, words as pictures, and pictures and words together. The communication piece aimed at engaging the reader with wit, brevity, and cheekiness (in some instance).
“The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!)," said John Caples.
Since the headline is one of the most important parts of an advertisement what exactly makes for a great headline? Which are the most famous headlines written?
Well, there is considerable debate as to whether this is the best headline written; however there is no argument that it is one of the most memorable:
“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”
Even so many years after it was written by the great agency head/copywriter David Ogilvy for the Rolls-Royce, there is still an essential lesson in there for marketers and copywriters:
There is visual movement (“At 60 miles an hour”).
It relates to the sense of hearing (“The loudest noise… comes from the electric clock”).
Most importantly, there is a twist in the tale.
As a result, the ad succeeds in putting you in the driver’s seat.
In an aside, David Ogilvy describes how the chief engineer at the Rolls-Royce factory shook his head sadly and said, “It is time we did something about that damned clock.”
Now, take the ads for Chivas Regal. Perhaps the most famous is the one that depicts a half-full bottle of Chivas Regal with the headline: To the host it’s half empty. To the guest it’s half full.
Another famous campaign from the DDB stable was for Avis car rentals. At that point of time Hertz was the number one car rental in the US. DDB created its famous:
Avis is only No. 2 in rent a cars. So why go with us?
The ad went on to talk about how ‘We try harder’ by paying attention to details. Taking the thought further, Avis did an ad with a big-fish eating small-fish minimalistic illustration for Avis:
When you are only No. 2 you try harder. Or else.
Could there be a more boring subject than advertising a library? DDB did a great creative for the National Library Week (April 16-22). The visual was the 26 letters of the English alphabet in lower case. The headline said: At the public library they’ve got these arranged in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder and understand.
In the 80s/90s the advertising agency Fallon Mcelligott created some advertising that has stood the test of time. In one of the ads for The Episcopal Church there is a picture of six men carrying a coffin into a church. The headline says: Will it take six strong men to bring you back into the church?
I recollect another ad by the same agency. This was for the Minnesota Zoo. It showed a silhouetted figure of a kid on an elephant with the line: A ride your child will never forget (Of course, neither will the elephant).
One of the most talked about campaigns for a publication was for The Economist. Created by Abbott Mead and Vickers, a London–based ad agency, it was typographical. The ads just had a headline set in white font against a red background.
A headline read: Not all mind-expanding substances are illegal.
Another one said: A gymnasium for the mind.
And then there was this one:
I never read the economist.
--Management Trainee, Aged 42
In these days when the attention span of readers is limited to reading tweets, take a look at this one, again for The Economist: A poster should contain not more than eight words, which is the maximum the average reader can take at a single glance. This, however, is for Economist readers.
India has its own creative masterpieces. Kersy Katrak of the erstwhile MCM is one of the pioneers of the creative revolution in advertising in India. The more visible creative ads were done by Rediffusion, Trikaya and others in the late 70s and 80s.
One of the most famous ads was done by Trikaya in 1993.
NUDE MODELS WANTED
“Figure: Chubby; Hair: Preferably; Chin: Double; Eyes: Brown; Skin: Peachy; Age: 8-12 months. Candidates should be carried to Trikaya Advertising on Sunday, 12th September, 10 am to 2 pm.”
Of course, Enterprise, under the maverick Mohammed Khan, did this one for the open top Mahindra Classic (a ‘jeep’):
Admit it. You have always been crazy about topless models.
I wonder if it would have made the cut today. Or would it have been labelled sexist?
Then there were the headlines for Mauritius Tourism by Alok Nanda of Trikaya.
The Mauritius Natural History Handbook lists 174 rare species; last summer, a visitor spotted Brigitte Bardot.
Or take this one:
Political assassins, ruthless mercenaries, ex Nazis.
Frederick Forsyth found them all in Mauritius.
Strange as it appears in today's era of cricketers as fitness-and-health-conscious athletes, there was a time when they actually drank sugary sodas during the drinks breaks.
Coca-Cola had paid Rs 10 crore for the rights to be called the official sponsors of the 1996 Cricket World Cup tournament. Its television commercial for the campaign, sung by the legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and featuring the street scenes of India, was classy and evocative.
Pepsi’s agency, Hindustan Thompson Associates (HTA), came up with a campaign that was both combative and creative in equal measure and turned the tables on Coca-Cola –- a classic example of converting a disadvantage into an advantage. The ads showed cricketers and even officials rejecting the official drink in favour of Pepsi -- the unofficial one. One of the television commercials even featured the charismatic umpire, Dicky Bird, going bonkers. Its theme line: Nothing Official About it.
This turned the apparent disadvantage of losing the battle for the sponsorship to Coca-Cola into a massive win for Pepsi. The ad was the talk of the town.
Enterprise’s ‘Charms is the spirit of freedom. Charms is the way you are.’ found favour with the youth. Today, of course, cigarette advertising is banned –- and rightly so.
No account of great headlines would be complete without a mention of the delightful Amul ads. While the ‘Utterly Butterly Delicious’ Amul ads are terrific and topical, my favourite is from the days when the run machine of the Pakistan cricket team, Zaheer Abbas, went on a rampage against India. The cheeky Amul hoarding said: Zaheer, ab bas!
Newspapers have got into spats over circulation and readership numbers. My choice is the fight between the venerable The Hindu and the Old Lady of BoriBunder, The Times of India. One of the ads for The Hindu carried the headline:
Also has pages 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7…
The Hindu—Stay ahead of the Times.
The Rolex ads of yore are timeless. All of them had headlines that a copywriter would have killed to write. My personal favourite:
In 1953 they used Rolex Oysters and oxygen on Everest.
In 1978 they managed without the oxygen.
The reference is to Reinhold Messner scaling Everest without oxygen.
Then there is public service advertising. “Advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest—it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.” So said Howard Gossage, referred to as The Socrates of San Francisco. Ad agencies have used it as a springboard to project their creativity and win awards.
The one that gives me the goose bumps even today has a bunch of people gathered outside a ring where a dogfight (Or is it a cock fight? I can’t remember) is in progress. The headline reads: The real animals are outside the ring.
Agencies leave no stone unturned when it comes to advertising themselves. This one for DDB says: I got a great gimmick. Let’s tell the truth. The quote was attributed to N.M. Ohrbach and lists the great and successful campaigns done by the agency for its clients in its inimitable style. Sounds almost like a throwback to George Bernard Shaw’s ‘My way of joking is to tell the truth; it’s the funniest joke in the world.’
Leo Burnett showed a hand dropping a crumpled piece of paper into a waste paper basket. The headline said: One of an advertising agency’s most effective tools. The ad talked about the need to be conversational rather than clever in advertising. And was also indicative of the quality control exercised by the agency—how so many not-so-great ideas get binned.
Today, most copywriters prefer the audio-visual medium to the print medium. No wonder, the television commercials (TVCs) for Fevicol score high on viewership. Ogilvy’s Mera Wala Blue and its ad for Cadbury -– the one with the girl dancing in gay abandon -- still reverberate in people’s minds.
Circa 2013 Samsung's new ad promoting its S Pen, came with a bunch of smartphones and tablets. It invited ridicule and went viral on social networks after what seems to be a typo/misspelling it made on a hoarding in France. Advertising the power of the S Pen, Samsung changed the original adage "The pen is mightier than the sword" to "The pen is mightier than the finger." But a small typo in a version of its billboard ad gave a phallic meaning to the communication. The ad in question read, "The penis, mightier than the finger."You have to be extremely mindful of dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s when in advertising. Proofreading should be done with extra care.
As we see from the above examples that headlines are pivotal to a successful print ad. Ad agencies use various tactics to grab the reader’s attention. To quote John Caples, again: “Remember that the reader's attention is yours for only a single instant. They will not use up their valuable time trying to figure out what you mean.”
Returning to the glamour aspect of advertising, in my experience, it is collateral. Advertising is, let me assure you, blood, sweat and tears (I know, David Ogilvy said ‘Blood Sweat and Beer’). This was my other brush with glamour.
In 1984, the vocal group Boney M was slated to come to India. XYZ Roadways (name changed), our client, had won the contract to look after the Group’s equipment transport logistics. Our agency was mandated to create an advert for XYZ Roadways announcing this.
At that time there was this belief that nobody read long headlines. The client, therefore, wanted a slogan of sorts as the headline. I spent half a day racking my brains trying to write a headline. Nothing came out of it.
Post-lunch I was pacing the room of the creative department trying to figure out a suitable headline. Desperate as the deadline approached, I saw the office boy serving tea. He was telling one of the artists how he had travelled in the luggage compartment of the local train that morning and how there were so many ‘luggage men’ in that compartment.
The moment I heard ‘luggage men’ something clicked in my head. I grabbed a pencil from the artist’s desk and took his tracing pad. I quickly wrote down on the thin paper in all-caps:
XYZ ROADWAYS.
BONEY M’S BAGGAGE MEN!
The art director was thrilled. We made a layout and presented it to the review committee. They okayed it. We presented to the client, who loved it. And I was looking forward to a free ticket to the concert.
The next day, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated. And the Boney M tour was cancelled.
Epilogue:
Let me hasten to add that this piece doesn’t purport to be a history of Indian or American or British advertising headlines. For sure there are other fantastic headlines. These are my subjective choices. But anyone who has been interested in advertising will concur that these are timeless classics.
I have not mentioned stalwarts of Indian advertising like Ivan Arthur, Frank Simoes, Pankaj Mullick, Alyque Padamsee,Bobby Sista, Jean Durante, Sheila Sista, June Valladares, Roda Mehta, Gerson da Cunha, Sylvester da Cunha, Bharat Dhabolkar, Piyush Pandey, Prasoon Joshi, Agnello Dias… phew, the list is endless. This is just an impressionistic view of advertising headlines…arising from the recesses of the memories of a person who was a copywriter once upon a time. I crave your indulgence.
The author is a freelance writer based in Mumbai.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
