Pharmacraft Laboratories, which was partially owned by the Bronfman
family, and was hungrily looking for a new project with which to launch his
agency and reputation. “It hit me like a shot,” Lois recalled, “Smirnoff said
it had no taste, so I simply said Wolfschmidt did have taste. Smirnoff ’s was
aimed at the lunch crowd, I aimed Wolfschmidt at the party crowd.”
Lois boasted that in one day he devised the entire campaign. He
paired a life-size Wolfschmidt bottle (to both satisfy and satirize
conventional wisdom) with an assortment of fruits and vegetables—
oranges, tomatoes, celery, etc.—in comic banter. The first ad, however, was
a photograph of a bunch of indistinguishable shot glasses with a headline
that asked which one was the Wolfschmidt? The answer was “the one with
taste,” of course. But the now famous second ad that really launched the
campaign showed a bottle saying to a ripe tomato, “You’re some tomato....
We could make a difference... .” in a kind of playboy cadence that might
seem sexist today but by early 1960 s standards was racy, erotic, and unheard
of in national advertising. The ad premiered in Lifemagazine and
subsequently in other key outlets. And just one week later a third ad was
released with the bottle saying: “You sweet doll, I appreciate you. I’ve got
taste. I’ll bring out the real orange in you. I’ll make you famous. Kiss me.”
And the orange responded: “Who was that tomato I saw you with last
week?” This was the first time that an ad referred back to a previous ad, and
it set the serial tone for all future ads. “It was an underground thing to do,”
continued Lois. “It couldn’t be more direct, but it had real style.”
The Wolfschmidt campaign was also what Lois called “a purist
piece of design.” It was not only minimalist layout and typography in the
modern tradition, but also, and at the time more importantly, it was
storyboarded entirely by Lois himself, which was unheard of in advertising
circles. Before the Creative Revolution took hold in the mid- 1950 s most
advertising—with the exception of Paul Rand’s work at Weintraub Agency
throughout 1940 s—was devised by copywriters, who gave precise roughs to
art directors, who then supervised the final sketches. Even in the early years
of the Creative Revolution, when copywriters and art directors worked
more or less together, ads were roughed out by art directors and then
precisely painted or comped by bullpen sketch artists. Clients were used to
seeing finished paintings. But in one fell swoop Lois changed all that by
doing the entire presentation on his own, from sketches to comp. The brash
young Lois also broke another taboo: he sold his ideas directly to the client
without going through an account executive.
Yet history would be different if young Bronfman had showed his
father the first couple of ads before they ran. Lois thinks that “old Sam”
probably would have balked or killed them entirely. Luckily, the action in
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1