Creative Campaigns : Gag Radio: Sales Pitch With Humor

For many radio listeners, the onset of a string of commercials means it’s time to scoot the needle across the dial. But heavyweight advertisers once known more for stodginess than style have discovered that the way to a customer’s heart is often through the belly laugh. The old hard sell is giving way to laugh lines, offering relief from ads that drone on with hyperbole about this soap or that deodorant.

Although the notion of using humor is hardly new, the airwaves are more crowded than ever with what advertising mavens call “comedy radio.”

Consider a spot for AT&T;’s small-business phone connection. A worker named Winkler hardly bats an eye at such assignments as traveling to Paya Poo Poo, where a volcano is threatening one of his company’s clients, but he goes berserk when the boss tells him he has to change the office phone system.

Focus of Campaigns

Or for Globe Tires, with Fred and Ed, the wayward tire promoters, bumbling their way through Southern California, mistaking Venice beach for its namesake city in Italy, the golden arches of a well-known fast-food franchise for St. Louis’ Gateway Arch and the freeway to La Canada for the route to the United States’ northern neighbor.

“Humor is in the forefront of an awful lot of successful radio campaigns, simply because it makes us laugh and remember things,” says Ray Padden, the Radio Advertising Bureau’s vice president and West Coast manager.

It wasn’t always that way. After World War II, advertising was largely controlled by sponsors who insisted on figuratively taking customers by the lapels and shaking them until they bought the appropriate product. By the late 1950s, commercials were taking on a decidedly friendlier cast, but that attitude fell victim to the economic turmoil of the 1970s, when advertising became downright grim.

Straight-Line Copy

With an occasional peppy exception, such as Blue Nun Wine’s campaign by Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, clients selling everything from soft drinks to autos reverted to straight-line Madison Avenue copy. Now, with consumers more confident, humor is once again thriving.

Part of what makes humorous advertising popular is that listeners can participate in this “theater of the mind.” They identify with Winkler’s telecommunications nightmare. They picture Fred and Ed poking around Venice and wondering why it doesn’t have more canals.

Much--but by no means all--of the light-touch advertising heard these days emanates from a coterie of independent West Coast studios hired by clients or agencies to create, find the talent for and produce a campaign. Although industry observers cannot support this impression with numbers, they agree that Los Angeles--not Chicago or New York, the other hotbeds of advertising--is the home of most zany commercials, in large part because of the emphasis Southern California commuters put on radio.

One driving force is Dick Orkin’s Radio Ranch and Home for Wayward Cowboys, a small studio on N. La Brea Avenue that hatches some of radio’s hottest advertising, for such heavyweights as AT&T;, Ace Hardware, Adweek magazine and John Deere. (Orkin’s voice is ubiquitous. For AT&T;, he plays Winkler’s boss as well as the father of a little boy with a lucrative dog-walking business. In ads for John Deere lawn products, he is a hen-pecked brain surgeon whose mother still treats him like a not-to-be-trusted child.)

And speaking of hens, Orkin acknowledges that he owes a lot of his success to chickens and to small-town radio.

Graduate of Yale

A product of Yale’s Graduate School of Drama, Orkin got his start as poultry editor for a radio station in Lancaster, Pa. Later, in the 1960s, he moved to a Chicago station, where he created a serialized parody of Batman that featured Chickenman, “the wonderful, white-winged warrior.” It is now in syndication. (Is it any wonder that, to this day, Orkin bawks like a chicken to clear his throat before recording a commercial?)

“It was my dabbling in humor via ‘Chickenman’ that introduced me to the notion of doing humor in advertising,” Orkin recalled. (His studio, filled with warm oak, brass and dark green, scarcely resembles a ranch, but there used to be one on the site, and that was enough for Orkin when it came to picking a name.)

In 1973, Orkin launched a radio advertising career in Chicago with Bert Berdis. As Dick and Bert, they won acclaim for man-on-the-street commercials for Time magazine, among others. Five years later, Hollywood’s creative playground beckoned. Later, after a stretch as writers and performers on television’s “The Tim Conway Show,” they parted company.

Unlike the other studios, Orkin tends to use performers whose voices are familiar to television and film audiences. The regular Ranchers include Miriam Flynn, an actress who spent several years with the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago and appeared in a recent episode of a television comedy, “Cheers”; Lorenzo Music, who starred as Carlton, the doorman who was heard but not seen, on TV’s “Rhoda,” and Florence Halop, who played Mrs. Hufnagle on “St. Elsewhere” before replacing the late Selma Diamond in “Night Court.”

‘Same Things Over Again’

Berdis is now a partner in another Los Angeles studio, Bert, Barz & Kirby, with Alan Barzman and Jim Kirby. “Dick and I wrote the book on humor advertising, but after 10 years (as partners), it was just the two of us doing the same things over again,” Berdis said in explaining why the industry’s favored team dissolved itself.

Now, in addition to steering Fred and Ed wrong for Globe Tires, Bert, Barz & Kirby handles radio advertising for Paine Webber, Business Week and Bud Light. In one spot, a father tries to make up for lost time with his son, Gary, by buying him his first beer to celebrate his 21st birthday. It turns out that the son knows his beer--a lot better than his oblivious father might have suspected. It also turns out that the son is 31 and that his name is, um, Larry. Way to go, Dad.

A third Los Angeles team, Chuck Blore & Don Richman Inc., is known for its use of children in ads. In one for K mart photo processing, 8-year-old Jeffrey and his little sister, Chrissie, sneak in to get a picture of their newborn brother, just back from the hospital. Chrissie looks down into the crib and whispers, “Look, Jeffie, we got a bald one.”

Such ads, which focus on funny situations rather than punch lines, strike a popular chord and rack up scores of industry kudos, such as Clios, Addys and International Broadcasting Awards.

‘I’ve Been There’

“What I attempt to do is create ‘moments’ that reach out and connect with the human condition,” Orkin said. “People say, ‘I know this guy. It’s me. I’ve been there.’ There’s something about our people that’s very credible.”

There is also a new kid on the block in New York who’s definitely a contender. Joy Golden’s efforts to tell the world that Laughing Cow is a cheese, not a beast, pushed her one-woman studio, Joy Radio Inc., into the spotlight and prompted sales of the product in New York to jump 70%.

Golden’s shtick is accents. In one spot, Enid, a fast-talking housewife with a heavy Long Island accent, offers to get a “little round laughing cow in a red-net bag” for her hungry husband. “I don’t care if she’s in lace with high heels,” he complains. “It isn’t what I had in mind.”

Then there’s the Valley Girl doing her best Moon Zappa imitation and freaking out the “totally gorgeoso” highway patrolman who stops her for speeding by explaining that she was rushing home to get the Laughing Cow that’s in her trunk into the refrigerator.

Orkin, Golden, Berdis and their compatriots freely acknowledge a debt to a pioneer--the outrageous Stan Freberg, who was the first independent producer to successfully create advertising for agencies and clients.

Tomatoes in a Can

Freberg made his radio advertising debut in 1956 for Contadina, a small San Jose-based tomato paste maker whose niche was being challenged by the giant Hunt’s (now part of Hunt-Wesson Foods). Contadina’s San Francisco-based agency, Cunningham & Walsh, hired Freberg to devise a David-vs.-Goliath strategy. The result was the long-lived jingle, “Who puts eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?” Within three months, Hunt’s was cutting its prices.

Later, Freberg brought humor with a cutting edge to a campaign for Kaiser aluminum foil, which grocers were refusing to stock in favor of Reynolds Wrap. In a series of commercials called “Clark Smathers: A Kaiser Aluminum Foil Salesman Faces Life,” Freberg painted a grim picture of a man who couldn’t afford to clothe or feed his family, pay for an operation for his wife or buy his daughter any shoes “because the mean old grocer wouldn’t stock Mr. Kaiser’s foil.” Soon, Kaiser had added 43,000 new outlets.

“Those ads were controversial,” Freberg acknowledged. But they worked.

Until Freberg came along, many agencies and clients considered radio only as an afterthought to television and print. In the last few years, however, humorous radio ads have come into their own. The Radio Advertising Bureau, an industry group, projects that radio advertising revenues will be $6.5 billion in 1985, up from $5.9 billion in 1984, with humor a leading category. (In revenues, radio still pales by comparison with TV, which will have an estimated $21.6 billion in advertising this year, and newspapers, with a projected $25.4 billion.)

Big Money Business

To be sure, independent studios are not the only ones cranking out successful radio ads in a lighter vein. In Los Angeles, Keye/Donna/Pearlstein, an agency with $70 million in annual billings, has a long-running campaign for Del Taco, the Mexican fast-food chain that advertises itself as “not the same place, not the same thing.”

Ogilvy & Mather, a New York advertising agency that last year billed $1.8 billion to its clients in the United States, does ads for the American Express card featuring Garrett Brown and Ann Winn, a flirtatious couple who also appear in Dancer Fitzgerald Sample’s spots for Molson Golden beer.

Improvising as they go, Brown and Winn have appeared in about 30 commercials together. For Molson, Brown has portrayed a beer truck driver with Winn as a Canadian border guard. In an ad for American Express, Winn orders a jacket with outrageous proportions from salesman Brown; it turns out to be for a chimpanzee. (The team approach has been a favorite device for radio humor; Bob and Ray blazed a trail for Stiller and Meara.)

But there is a big difference between studios and agencies. Clients go to Orkin, Berdis and Blore with the idea of injecting humor into their ads. An agency, on the other hand, might pick humor out of several possible approaches.

“I don’t think any good agency starts out saying, ‘Let’s do funny advertising,’ ” said Paul Keye (pronounced Kigh), chairman of Keye/Donna/Pearlstein. “We’re propagandists. Our job is to get and hold your attention and leave you with an idea. Humor is simply one vehicle for that.

Need to Stand Out

“This agency has gotten to humor because, when you have an entrepreneurial client who isn’t the biggest in the market, you need some mechanism” for standing out, Keye said.

Globe Tires is a case in point. Ten years ago, the Los Angeles company hired Bert, Barz & Kirby to roll out some ads that would distinguish the small company in its heavily competitive market. It has since grown to 18 from seven stores.

“Globe was one of the first tire stores to go into radio, and now almost all of them are using it,” said a spokesman for Stan Sperling, the tire retailer’s president. “We try to get a point across by being a little different.” The company now devotes half its advertising budget to radio.

However, humorous advertising can have a down side. “You may leave listeners with no knowledge (of the product) if they have too many custard pies thrown at them,” Keye said.

Freberg, who is writing a book for Random House about his advertising experiences in between producing radio and TV commercials from his Sunset Boulevard studio, still has strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t in humor. He finds the Molson Golden couple too “cutesy-pie,” for example. “That’s no real-life situation,” he said. “I was a bachelor once.”

Styles Are Copied

Martin Puris, of the Ammirati & Puris agency in New York, noted another problem. “Every commercial seems to have the same style of humor now,” he said. “Somebody was successful, so somebody else does it. Anytime that happens, then everybody’s the same again.” His agency rarely finds humor appropriate for its clients, which include BMW.

Forest Lawn Mortuary in Glendale learned the hard way that humor does not always work. In 1974, Forest Lawn and its advertising agency, DJMC (Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto) of Los Angeles, enlisted Mal Sharpe, a well-known radio advertising talent, to do man-on-the-street interviews. In one, Sharpe buttonholed a man to tell him about Forest Lawn’s affordable funeral services.

“Why would I care about that?” the man asks. “I’m from Detroit. I came out here to live a little.” In another spot, the interviewer suggested that a bystander could take a mortician to lunch and listen to a pricing spiel.

“Some of the executives at Forest Lawn became kind of embarrassed by the ads,” said Robert Wheeler, a Forest Lawn vice president. “Maybe the humor wasn’t appropriate.”

Over the years, Freberg said he has turned down several requests from Forest Lawn to do humorous ads. He also has balked at being funny for a bra manufacturer and for cigarette companies.

Fear of Offending

Even when comedy seems perfectly appropriate, however, it is not always easy to win clients over. Orkin said some advertisers shy away from humor for fear of offending or simply because they have never tried it.

“Most of our clients have no sense of humor. If they did, they wouldn’t come to us,” Orkin said. He recalled a savings and loan that wanted to change its image. “It was a big step for them, trying to demonstrate that they were human beings instead of serious and grim. They kept saying, ‘Dick, we understand that creative freedom is important to you. We don’t want to inhibit you.’ ”

A couple of days later, the S&L;’s advertising director called to say that he had just briefed the board about the pending campaign. “He said, ‘Dick, we just have one thing for you to remember. Whatever you do in the way of humor, just be sure it’s serious humor.’ ”

Joy Golden is certainly serious about humor. “Why should commercials make us miserable?” she wrote in a recent piece for Sound Management magazine. “As long as you don’t lose your product inside the humor, all that can happen is that you stir up some good nice warm feelings for whatever it is you’re selling when your spots cause a chuckle or two.”