The goal of all liquor advertising was to get the consumer to identify with
the label and, therefore, order the brand by name.
Advertising conventions were ostensibly the same for vodka and
the darker liquors, but there was one essential difference: vodka has very
little taste. So the advertising challenge was how to distinguish one
flavorless drink from another. The solution boiled down to concept, which
was also the key distinction between conventional and Creative Revolution
advertisements. The latter introduced the so-called Big Idea, which
dispelled the notion that advertising was simply hucksterism. The new
theory went that advertising was best when it was also entertaining. And
one of the earliest campaigns to prove this hypothesis was created in the
mid 1950 s for Smirnoff vodka, which on the strength of its creative
advertising owned seventy percent of the market for almost a decade, far
surpassing Wolfschmidt’s meager 8 - to 10 -percent share.
Smirnoff ’s clever catch-line “Leaves You Breathless” signaled that
it was okay for noontime drinkers to guiltlessly imbibe. Smirnoff vodka,
unlike scotch and gin, which caused tell-tale whiskey breath, was touted as
tasteless and, therefore, undetectable. Sales soared on the strength of the
claim alone, but to further get the message across, the advertising employed
smartly elegant, conceptual photography by Irving Penn and Ben Somoroff,
who photographed the campaign at different times. Each was typically shot
against a white seamless backdrop, adding a modern aura, in which both
celebrities and fantasy characters—including Marcel Marceau in one ad
and a Minotaur in another—enticed the reader to stop, look, and read the
minimal copy below. The requisite Smirnoff bottle was, however, reduced
and placed unobtrusively next to the text as a mnemonic device.
Smirnoff ’s advertising went unsurpassed for many years. Despite
the campaign’s success, other leading distillers remained conservative in
their own advertising. Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., one of America’s
foremost distilleries, was resigned to the fact that its own brand, Wolf-
schmidt vodka, would forever trail behind. But in 1960 Samuel Bronfman,
Seagrams’ hard-nosed founder and chief executive, turned the failing brand
over to his twenty-eight-year-old son, Edgar, as a test of his ability—or one
might say, a rite of passage. The younger Bronfman was left on his own to
sink or swim. But as fate would have it, he met George Lois, a twenty-
eight-year-old former Doyle Dane and Bernbach art director who, confi-
dently, had just opened his own agency, Papert Koenig Lois ( Julian Koenig
was the writer on the team that conceived the Volkswagen “Think Small”
campaign) in the Seagrams building on Park Avenue in New York.
When Bronfman approached him, Lois (with Koenig) had just
developed the Allerest brand name and print advertising campaign for
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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