Pod Insights ABC Rewind 03 Where the bloody hell were you! When TV marketing went mad About this episode The hunt is on for the winning TV ad — the one that keeps the client happy and the consumers consuming. What's the right method for making the perfect advertisement?
In 1970 a young bloke called John Singleton thought he had the answer.
Host Dee Madigan continues her adventures through the vaults of Australian advertising.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:08 Speaker 01 ABC Rewind.
0:10 Speaker 02 Go on Freddie, drink it.
0:13 Speaker 02 This man is a dentist.
0:15 Speaker 03 Straight from rubbish pit to you.
0:18 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Dee Madigan, continuing RN's adventures through the golden age of Australian advertising.
0:24 Speaker 05 You know, you're saying, you know.
0:25 Speaker 04 Sick of wrecks. Today, marketing madness. How we came up with that winning formula for the perfect ad. It was fun, it was fun.
0:35 Speaker 01 And then the fun went out of it, drained out of it by research.
0:40 Speaker 01 Research bullshit that wouldn't have worked.
0:45 Speaker 06 All marketing is, is finding out what people want. If people want eternal life, then marketing is translating that want into a product called religion and promoting it through a presenter called God.
1:09 Speaker 04 Back to the young John Singleton in a minute.
1:18 Speaker 04 We begin today at the end of the 1960s, when creatives such as Bruce Jarrett pretty well had carte blanche when it came to making their ads. And they usually delivered.
1:32 Speaker 02 They asked us to do a commercial that just left a nice feeling about the bank to people, giving the bank a personality.
1:44 Speaker 02 I got a group of writers around us and it started, well, what do we do? And then one of the writers started to sing, "Hey, big spender." And I said, That's it. But we'll use a little boy for the big spender. And so we had this tiny little boy walk into this massive bank, walking through as though he was general manager of the bank. And he walked into the elevator, went up the elevator, went into the managing directors' thing, and put his little money box down on the desk. And it was just fabulous, absolutely wonderful. They loved it, of course they loved it.
2:33 Speaker 07 In the 1960s, a lot of the creative work was actually done on gut feeling.
2:39 Speaker 04 Robert Crawford, professor of advertising and media history.
2:42 Speaker 07 One of the big developments over the 60s, 70s, clients increasingly begin to understand marketing and begin to understand the importance of research. They are starting to ask the agencies for proof of what they're doing.
3:01 Speaker 07 The relationship goes from the clients being led by the advertising professionals to the advertising professionals following the client's marketing lead. Advertising starts to be seen as part of a broader marketing strategy, whereas in the 50s, 60s, advertising is the marketing strategy.
3:20 Speaker 03 Excitement. Pure excitement. All yours in a new 64 Falcon V8.
3:28 Speaker 03 You had clients who were willing to punt on an idea. They said, "That's a great idea, we'll go with it", you know, very decisive. Other clients subjected your ideas to this rigorous and often fraudulent form of research.
3:43 Speaker 04 Leo Schofield had just flown the transnational coop to form Schofield Sherburn Baker, preferring to work for clients who trusted them. The young John Singleton had the same idea, but wanted his agency to stand out.
3:58 Speaker 06 The consumer, in fact, manipulates advertising.
4:01 Speaker 04 In 1968, he teamed with Rob Palmer, Mike Strauss, and Duncan Macallan to form a new agency with the memorable name Spasm. S.P.A.S.M.
4:13 Speaker 05 Good morning, Singleton, Palmer and Strauss McKellen.
4:15 Speaker 04 The industry was intrigued. And in 1970, an ABC TV crew went behind the scenes to check out the hotshot agency.
4:25 Speaker 03 His name is John Singleton. He's 29 years of age. People in the business have described him variously as a young tycoon of Australian advertising, one of the top two creative minds in the business, or a racketeering pirate with downright questionable ethics. I'm John Beavens. I remember John Singleton as a young creative director. I went to see him and he was wearing long socks and Bermuda shorts and that was so cool.
4:58 Speaker 03 In 1968, he was the driving force in setting up a group of companies called The Communications Supermarket.
5:04 Speaker 05 Good morning, Singleton, Palmer, Strauss, McKellen. Sorry, he's in a meeting. Can I have a message for him?
5:11 Speaker 01 I'm Jacqueline Hui and I remember very well when John Singleton came on the scene. Spasm were new and different. It brought PR and sales promotion and merchandising, which were all considered separate things. And what he did in that was bring it all together.
5:29 Speaker 03 And he wanted it to be the biggest. An advertising agency with a branch in both Sydney and Melbourne. A research company in each city, brought together with a basic concept. Research-based communication.
5:44 Speaker 04 The key figure in that process was Peter Kenny. Had a PhD in psychology from Sydney University. He linked up with John Singleton and the whole Spasm Agency business. Kenny had previously headed the ABC's research division. ABC, always a step ahead. And Hugh Mackay knew him well. But what John Singleton liked about Peter Kenny was his down-to-earth explanations.
6:10 Speaker 06 We know that no-one trusts discount stores, that everyone thinks discount stores are a total con, then that is an opportunity. Now, a traditional agency would then turn around if they used research and come out and say, "You can trust the offers of Joe Bloggs Discount Store, we would not do this commercial if it wasn't genuine", and it just wouldn't work.
6:31 Speaker 07 Spasm's employment of Dr Kenny as the psychologist was a real attempt to engage with the whole marketing shift, tapping into the client's need for professional insights into the consumer's mind.
6:44 Speaker 06 Use an extraordinary tool to get over the fact that your offers are believable, and that's when you use a minister like we with Reverend Barry Howard.
6:51 Speaker 03 The offers of Norman Ross Discount are honest. Betty Archdale and I wouldn't do their commercials if they were.
6:56 Speaker 07 What John Singleton quite liked was that Peter Kenny was able to cut through the academic ease and really explain what was going on in the consumer's mind in a way that both Singleton could understand and indeed the consumer could understand.
7:21 Speaker 04 Having a resident psychologist on staff seemed to get Spasm off to a good start. So, when the agency was awarded its first government contract, they stepped up the science to guarantee results.
7:35 Speaker 03 Fourteenth of August, nineteen seventy. The Dairy Industry Authority appoints Spasm.
7:42 Speaker 03 Research commences immediately, and Peter Kenny briefs some members of his research team. The milkmen wanted to promote milk, not powdered milk, not cheese, not ice cream, not yogurt, milk, just plain white milk.
7:56 Speaker 06 We've got twelve months to see if we can find a way to sell more milk. Now, we want to have a very close look at the milk situation. Want to look at everything. We've got to try and understand exactly how people feel about milk. We want to understand what part milk plays in their lives. We want to talk to the vendors. We want to understand its market situation and whether there are any opportunities to sell more. Some of the things we should do...
8:24 Speaker 05 We obviously need groups with children, with teenagers, with parents.
8:31 Speaker 07 As part of that effort to get into the consumer's mind, there was this realisation that focus groups can provide an opportunity to discuss products, to see the ways in which people talk and think about products and brands and advertising. I like fruit juices. I like fruit juices. I'll make a cup of tea any time of the day. We don't drink cordial. I like Dutch Jack.
8:54 Speaker 05 How are you? I drink it with some quick and sometimes minor too. I like it mixed with cocoa. We've got to look at milk till our eyeballs hurt. We must fully understand what milk is and whether there are any openings of any kind. Follow any clues you find anywhere.
9:14 Speaker 01 The questions were just as stupid as the answers. So what is the term bullshit in bullshit out, I think. Research says that this is going to be great.
9:25 Speaker 07 Look, there's always a tension with the research. At what point do you stop?
9:29 Speaker 02 Groups of people would be ushered into a room and then effectively psychoanalysed to see what was going on between the ears.
9:37 Speaker 07 You actually had a room built which had the one-way mirror and they could actively watch. And one of the key things with this is being able to identify that insight that you wouldn't have gotten by just asking questions and getting their answers.
9:53 Speaker 02 It was like trying to perform brain surgery with a claw hammer. Its methodology was superficial and its findings were predictable. The researchers came up with what they thought the clients wanted. I think they still do that.
10:07 Speaker 06 G'day, you can get warm by riding or running and rugged.
10:12 Speaker 02 Drinking eggs on toast. Drinking eggs on toast? Yeah. Monahan-Damon Adams was the hot shop in Melbourne at the time, heavily influenced by Philip Adams himself. Before you go for the wide-open spaces, you have to be equipped for anything. With air conditioning.
10:30 Speaker 07 People talk about different strategic approaches and more imaginative use of research and so on. Usually, the thing that propels a small agency into the limelight is the quality of their advertising. So the price you pay is a lot more comfortable.
10:54 Speaker 07 The creatives, of course, inevitably dismiss the research and say when an amazing ad comes out of inspiration. But the perspiration that comes from the research is actually quite important.
11:07 Speaker 04 And while Philip Adams was creating in Melbourne and John Singleton was perspiring in Sydney and making money, an unassuming guy arrived from Adelaide looking for work.
11:20 Speaker 04 Alan Johnston, later to form Mojo. I arrived in Sydney in 1968. You know, I had a demo reel and I wasn't even working with Mo then. An agency called Advertising and Marketing, which later became Hertz Woolpole. And they were known as the Surrey Hills Grocers because they handled a lot of retail stuff for Woolworths and all that. And they were just starting out. They were a brand new agency and they didn't know a lot about it, frankly. One of the guys was a biscuit salesman. I think the first big impressive thing I did there was Harris Coffee and Tea.
11:59 Speaker 04 They'd done some stuff with people around swimming pools drinking cups of tea and all that sort of stuff. And done a little sign-off jingle that sort of went, "Since 1883, E.H. Harris and Company for quality coffee and tea." It was just a little sign-off jingle.
12:21 Speaker 07 And for some reason, I said, "Why don't we stretch this into a saga?"
12:35 Speaker 07 And I think it was one of the very few 90s seconders that were made in those days.
12:44 Speaker 07 And we used a lot of stock footage. We dummed some of it up. We made the whole thing for £12,000, which was the client's entire year's budget or something. But he was very brave, David Bachman.
12:59 Speaker 07 He loved it. He was very brave in doing it, by the way. Put the agency even further on the map.
13:19 Speaker 07 There were some brave clients out there who were willing to go to an ad agency and say, "Look, make us an ad that really works." And the ad agency would go off, be creative, come back to the client and show something that the client would never expect. But the brave clients would say, "Look, I trust you. I trust that you understand what you're doing. Let's run with it."
13:40 Speaker 03 You had a lot of leeway if your clients were interested in a fresh idea. But if they were covering their asses, as it were, they were wanting an assurance that the product would work, so therefore they went to research. Well, I've often thought the research industry is a really hokey industry and a bit sus at times. Moods change so quickly and patterns of purchase change so quickly. You can't predict what's going to happen tomorrow. You're not in the prophecy business. And if one were, there would be no such thing as a failed product. And of course, about 90% of every product that's launched goes down the tube.
14:18 Speaker 01 It's not just what people think, it's which people are thinking what. And so segmentation became my big deal.
14:46 Speaker 07 For advertisers, the teenage market was really important. The biggest issue is that as an advertising agency, none of them were teenagers themselves.
15:02 Speaker 07 So it's always been quite a difficult and elusive market to reach. But of course, one that if you do get it right, is highly lucrative.
15:13 Speaker 04 And Spasm, still working on their milk campaign, thought they'd cracked it.
15:17 Speaker 06 Teenagers. Now teenagers reject milk altogether. There's almost a total non-usage between leaving school and getting married. If you could find an addictive food that needed milk, that had to be made with milk or mixed with milk, and because the food was addictive, if it was successful, then it could carry more milk consumption along with it.
15:37 Speaker 07 Speed shakes. The stimulant implications that gets milk out of its goody-goody image, that suggests the enticingly evil world beyond the parent's control.
15:47 Speaker 02 The Singleton-Spasm-Peter Kenny approach probably made an overpromise at the time that by their rigorous use of research, they were going to make sure that everything was going to work. Well, not everything did work, of course.
16:03 Speaker 04 Unsurprisingly, the word "speed" did not go down well with the milk board.
16:11 Speaker 06 Good morning, gentlemen.
16:13 Speaker 04 Morning.
16:13 Speaker 06 Nice to see you all here with us. I would query the use of the word "speed shake". To me, this has some pretty drastic connotations, whether it be in relation to road safety or even drugs.
16:27 Speaker 01 I think the term "speed shake" is an unfortunate one.
16:31 Speaker 06 If it's teenagers, then it's got to be put in the... The Spasm campaign will be a quickie aimed at the teenagers. The product is to be called a Surf Shake. Double flavour, double milk, double ice cream, double price, double profit.
16:44 Speaker 04 The customer is always right. The word "speed" became "surf".
16:53 Speaker 07 The easiest way to respond to the client's demands is simply give them what they're asking for. That doesn't necessarily make for good advertising, but it makes for good business because your client's going to come back.
17:10 Speaker 06 It's just a matter of looking at the opportunity that you've got from research and thinking about it and realising that you'd better do something extraordinary to get their attention and then tell people that you've given them what they've asked for all along.
17:39 Speaker 04 Spasms ad was broadcast during the long, wet summer of 71.
17:45 Speaker 04 It was a short run.
17:56 Speaker 04 Three years later, the Australian Milk Board struck gold. Hi, where have you been all my life? For the first half of it, I wasn't even born. That was the day Alan Johnson decided to make a fresh start.
18:17 Speaker 04 That New You built on protein, so exercise, eat right, and drink milk because milk's got protein like you get in meat. High-quality bodybuilding protein at a price that's still a bargain.
18:37 Speaker 04 And Alan arrives at the next party looking pretty hot and at least a decade younger.
18:52 Speaker 02 Really successful advertising people have always known that human beings are ruled more by the heart than the head, that the rational argument is never going to win the day unless it's strongly supported by some kind of emotional connection.
19:12 Speaker 02 With the consumer. The critical point always is the creative genius who comes up with an idea.
19:28 Speaker 06 Bruce Jarrett was one of the great creative people in Australia. And I would say vastly underestimated. I'm Geoff Carson, so I was at George Patterson for 27 years.
19:41 Speaker 02 Well, late 60s, early 70s. Telephone calls were very expensive in those days. There was a market for the, what we called in those days, the new Australians.
19:52 Speaker 00 An emotional component always seemed to work.
19:56 Speaker 06 Well, OTC, the Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission, was one of the great campaigns.
20:05 Speaker 02 Each commercial would talk to a different ethnic group. My memory is my husband struggling with a bunch of suitcases. My little child on my hands and all of us being pushed up the stairway. And I remember always looking back and seeing. At the end, there's a phone call.
20:25 Speaker 06 When you're thinking of home, go home on the telephone.
20:33 Speaker 02 It was an emotional experience that we were selling.
20:41 Speaker 02 And they were incredibly successful.
20:44 Speaker 06 We had to notify OTC when it was running because the traffic to Greece would go up exponentially and they'd have to have extra resources in order to deal with it. So it means don't forget where you come from.
20:59 Speaker 02 Bruce Jarrett's genius with that campaign was to realise that an overseas telephone call is all about the magic of making an emotional connection with family or friends on the other side of the world.
21:20 Speaker 04 Bruce Jarrett's OTC ad continued for the rest of the decade. This man has worked a long, hard day and he's got a lot of money to show for it. Other people's money.
21:35 Speaker 04 And as the 1970s was nearing its end, one of the few women in the business, Jenny Nusunov, returned from London. She was taken on by the Sydney office of Ogilvy and Mather to find a winning ad for a new client. A rather dowdy chain of women's clothing called Suzanne.
21:56 Speaker 01 David Ogilvy had written all these bibles on how to advertise. The usual routine was research, research.
22:05 Speaker 07 The Ogilvy Agency was one of those agencies that really ran to a formula. Research would try to identify what that unique aspect was that you could tailor a whole campaign around.
22:21 Speaker 01 The method usually used to construct an ad was turned on its head. That was the opportunity we all wanted.
22:29 Speaker 07 You can have all these rules on what makes a good advertisement, but an amazing advertisement is often one that breaks all the rules.
22:38 Speaker 01 At the end of 1979, Ogilvy and Mather were asked to pitch what was known generally in public at that point as Sussens, which are a collection of small shops selling lingerie and sleepwear. They wanted a change of image, which was my particular thing. The client wanted to really do something spectacular and it was very difficult. So I said, well, we could have put the colours together, at least, and do something with that maybe, so that we put purple things there and yellow things there, whatever. Well, what do you do when you get up in the morning? You go to the cupboard and you say to yourself, this goes with that. And I wrote the jingle
23:22 Speaker 01 and I sent it to Les Gock, musician, in a taxi.
23:28 Speaker 01 So he wrote the jingle on a Sunday. We recorded it on the Monday and pitched it on the Tuesday and the rest is history.
23:40 Speaker 01 The reaction was fabulous. They loved it.
23:44 Speaker 07 She'll be sweet, sweet, sweet if you repeat, repeat, repeat.
23:50 Speaker 01 They said, all right, we're going to manufacture. So that we have things that go with. And therefore, the tracksuit was invented, I'm afraid. And Suzanne was full of tracksuits that were This Goes With That.
24:09 Speaker 00 With a jingle that leaves no room for uncertain shoppers.
24:17 Speaker 01 Suzanne was a sort of for the women. It was a jingle for the women, whereas the others had been great, but they'd been more or less, you know, beer jingles and jingles for the men, football songs and so on.
24:34 Speaker 01 There was change happening at that time. I think at the end of a decade, there always is change happening. And if you're lucky enough to be there at the time, then you're swept up in that and taken forward.
24:49 Speaker 04 And as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, new creatives arrived. Yet many clients continued to put their money on the two Allens of blokey jingle writing fame. One product that kept many agencies busy was petrol. The industry had the bucks, they just needed the big ideas and the right formula.
25:15 Speaker 06 I'm Alan Johnston, the Joe of Mojo. I did the vocals on Amaco.
25:24 Speaker 01 Those two chaps, Alan Morris and Alan Johnston, were very clever men. Mojo had a great formula. I don't know whether they thought it was a formula.
25:37 Speaker 07 Mojo definitely had a formula, the heavy use of jingles. These were not advertisements that tried to explain why the product was so good. They definitely aimed at the heartstrings.
25:50 Speaker 06 You can't really explain a lot of that stuff. People just liked it. We used the word feel in a heck of a lot of our campaigns. We didn't realise that till later.
26:01 Speaker 07 That sort of sense of freedom, that opportunity to be who you are.
26:10 Speaker 03 The best thing to have was a client who had a unique selling proposition, a USP.
26:17 Speaker 07 At the end of the day, advertising still tries to identify this one idea that is unique, because you're trying to make your brand stand out.
26:26 Speaker 03 But most products are all damn same. And so differences had to be invented. Suddenly, every second product claimed to have a miracle ingredient. Problem was, they all came from the same refineries. They're all delivered in the same trucks. It was all utter tosh, but people believed it. And they buy it from either this pump
26:48 Speaker 04 or this one.
26:52 Speaker 04 So, do we have a verdict on what makes great ads great? They were always ads driven by a big idea.
27:05 Speaker 07 The creatives will inevitably say that a great ad needs the great creative coming on board. The researchers will say, no, a great ad needs great research. Account service will say a great ad needs to understand the client.
27:25 Speaker 01 It remains an art. It could be just a smile that makes people love an ad.
27:32 Speaker 07 Good advertising is always advertising that breaks the rules.
27:35 Speaker 01 The smallest nuance, the smallest sentence.
27:39 Speaker 07 The secret is knowing which rules to break and when. There weren't that many brave clients out there.
27:45 Speaker 01 Advertising is ultimately unpredictable in its result.
27:57 Speaker 04 You've been listening to Where the Bloody Hell Were You? The sound engineer was Russell Stapleton, content advisor was Robert Crawford, and the programme was produced by Roz Blewett. I'm Dee Madigan. Catch you next time.
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