Management liked the piece. So I did about 1,200 more.
Art of selling
From the beginning, AdReview was quite different from Lippert's approach, which tended to look at ads more as artifacts of the culture than as selling tools. I figured my job was first and foremost to divine whether the TV commercial in question was going to build the brand. Yes, over the years I've considered almost every criterion of business strategy, production, ethics and culture, but my singular focus has always been whether the ads in question will sell anything -- an approach that has for 25 years put me at odds with a broad swath of the agency universe.
From the beginning, AdReview was quite different from Lippert's approach, which tended to look at ads more as artifacts of the culture than as selling tools. I figured my job was first and foremost to divine whether the TV commercial in question was going to build the brand. Yes, over the years I've considered almost every criterion of business strategy, production, ethics and culture, but my singular focus has always been whether the ads in question will sell anything -- an approach that has for 25 years put me at odds with a broad swath of the agency universe.
This, I believe, reveals a lot more about the agency universe than about me.
Anyway, it wasn't long before AdReview got noticed. It's one thing for the brash and cheeky insurgent to criticize an ad campaign, and another thing altogether when the source is the industry bible. Verily, the Israelites quaked. Take, for instance, "Burger Bungle." That was the copydesk's headline above my 1988 front-page review of a new Burger King campaign from NW Ayer, which was making its debut having been the winner of, to that time, the biggest account change in history. The too-clever-by-95% slogan was "We do it the way you'd do it, when we do it like we do it at Burger King" and the ads were all over the place, bereft of thematic consistency or any sign of strategic thinking. They were also painfully unfunny.
Very soon thereafter, Ayer lost the business, an event then Ayer CEO Jerry Siano publicly blamed on me. The New York Times seemed to agree, but I still doubt it; I was merely articulating the obvious. But if you wish to blame the messenger, over the years there were many such episodes of lost business or abruptly vanishing campaigns or simply editing fixes on the heels of a review. Perpetual bank (1986), Rally's hamburgers (1996), First Union Bank (1998), Hasbro's "Nemesis Factor" (2001), KFC (2003), Orville Redenbacher's spokeszombie (2007) and Chili's (2009) leap to mind.
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