Making Ads With A Legendary Cartoonist

One of the high points of my career was when Don Martin, “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist”, agreed to make a series of ads with me at Fred/Alan, Inc. You have to understand, I idolized Don Martin. I was that kid who snuck Mad Magazine into class and covered it with a Moby Dick book cover. And Don Martin was one of my favorites. With his geeky characters whose feet folded over the curb and his uncanny sense of absurdist slapstick, he cracked me up over and over.

So, there I was, charged with creating a campaign for VH-1 that would position the network as an MTV for baby boomers. What better way to accomplish that than to invoke the boomer’s bible–Mad Magazine? To the best of my knowledge we are the only people who have ever made an animated film of Don Martin’s cartoons, either for commercials or pure entertainment value. That makes these spots pretty special. I’ll pause here to let you look at the second of the spots and then pick up the tale…

Actually, while you were watching the spot, I took a spin around the web and found that there IS a guy in Brazil who has been doing some decent Don Martin animations . You can find them by Googling “Don Martin Animation”. It’s not clear to me that he did them with Don’s blessing, but they’re kind of fun. (We did our spots with Don’s complete participation.) And apparently there was an unaired Mad Magazine special that contains an animated Don Martin cartoon. Still, I think our ads are unique in that they remained true to the spirit of the master and also delivered a strong marketing message. These ads spoke to the prevailing thirty-something sense of living with stress and anxiety and troubled times, and the corresponding feeling of entitlement. “After all you’ve been through, you deserve your own channel.” Don’t we all feel that way? We’ve all been through a lot. We DO deserve our own channels. And with the Internet exploding into niches the way it is, we’ll each have our own channel before too long. (See Next New Networks one post up on this blog.)

Pan Am: Your Very Own Corporate Jet

Commuting is something you want to have happen to a jail sentence. It’s not something you want to do every day. And yet hundreds of business folk make hellish commutes between New York and Boston and Washington DC many times a week. To ease their pain, Pan Am decided to make its shuttle ultra-comfortable, with extra legroom, leather seats, private phones and frequent, dependable flights.

We dubbed it The Corporate Jet. I wrote a jingle which was played incessantly on the radios and TVs of the northeast. And we hired old J.P. Moneybags from Monopoly to come in and be our winking mascot. Here’s what it looked like…

The Hidden Soul of Canon Office Equipment

Canon Office Equipment was looking for a way to go head to head with IBM, without being so ungallant as to mention their giant competitor’s name. (As you probably know, the Japanese are extremely polite.) We came up with this “Think Again” campaign, which provided another opportunity to use groundbreaking animation in a television spot. Here, Glenn Batkin and I came up with an elegant way to express the hidden qualities of, ahem, an electric typewriter. (Hey, stop snickering, or I’ll force you to watch my ads for steam-driven typewriters.) An “animation spotlight” crosses the machine, revealing the poetry, strength, and versatility that lies beneath that beige exterior, accompanied by another Bill Burnett musical composition. It’s a lovely spot. Check it out…

Me and My Clio

In my first year in the business, as a junior copywriter at Grey Advertising, I won a Clio for best animated spot

It was an exciting moment for me, but a dicey one. My bosses–a couple of extremely ambitious veterans–had made a 60 second Timex spot which cost over $1 million. I believe it was the single most expensive spot ever made at that time. And they wanted to win a Clio for it. They really wanted to win. And they lost, and I won. Me and my art director Glenn Batkin. The kids. We won. Our bosses had to sit it out. Awkward. But great!

Anyway, the interesting thing is that we won for best animated spot. Little did I know I would go on to a whole career in animation, doing breakthrough animated spots for Canon office equipment and VH-1, becoming Creative Director of Hanna-Barbera, one of the greatest Cartoon Factories of all time, and creating ChalkZone for Nickelodeon, as well as eight stand alone cartoon shorts for Nick’s Oh Yeah, Cartoons!

Here’s the spot. It’s called “Engine It’s no great masterpiece, but it did pioneer certain techniques in CGI animation which we now take for granted, like being able to fly through tubes filled with liquid. That had never been done before. Oh, and by the way, I also composed the music. Check it out…

Put Us To Work For You!

I’m proud and excited to announce the launch of our new production company:

(Click on the logo to visit the site.)

I say “our” production company because the super talented woman who runs it is my lovely wife Debrah Lemattre. Debrah is a tremendously gifted director, producer, photographer, editor and graphic artist. She can plan a project, shoot it, edit it, author the DVD, and make the packaging for it. No kidding. She’s a quintuple threat, at least.

As its name suggests, Filmanthropy specializes in doing film, video and graphic work for philanthropic groups and causes. Debrah has made Documentaries, Fundraising Videos, PSAs and Performance Films for the LA Free Clinic, Maria Shriver (and family), Physician’s Assistants, and many more. But she’s also worked on a host of “commercial” ventures. And of course, so have I. I have been on the Filmanthropy team, providing writing, music, animation and branding and positioning consultation.

Now, maybe you’re not a “philanthropic” organization. Maybe you like to make some money out of your worthy endeavors. Well guess what–so do we! We can bring the same budget friendly and brand savvy production techniques to your project that we use for our philanthropic clients. Check out the Filmanthropy A-Z page. I bet you’ll find something there that is just like a project you have in the works–or wish you did. Let’s work on it together!

Dr. Brown’s Soda

Branding and positioning can sometimes happen in public.

Here’s an example of RE-branding my team and I accomplished through execution:

Dr. Brown’s Soda wanted to shake itself loose from the image of being, well, a Jewish drink. At the time it was served almost exclusively at deli’s like Ratners in New York City.

I came up with the notion of making Dr. Brown a character–a totally goyisha Softdrinkologist. We turned him into a philosophical pontificator, like Dr. Johnson. My wonderful art director partner Glenn Batkin made the cans of Dr. Brown’s look absolutely scrumptious and created an elegantly simple design. We ran these ads in classy rags like the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review.

Did we succeed? You tell me–do you still think of Dr. Brown’s as a Jewish soft drink?

Strengthen Our Knees For Comedy Central

This ultra-weird spot–which I created on a shoestring budget with stock footage–was part of the kickoff in the great battle between The Comedy Channel and HA! The result was Comedy Central, a TV network that has become central to our culture. Did I mention I made up the name Comedy Central, and wrote its original Branding and Positioning document? You can read that totally serious document by looking under “Pages” over in the right hand column of this blog. But first, take 30 seconds and enjoy a little workout…

What Is Funny?

Here’s one of my favorite campaigns that I created for HA!, the comedy network that would go on to become Comedy Central. It stars my buddy Marc Weil, of the legendary Madhouse Company of London. The spots were directed by Cliff Fagin…

Torn From the Pages of My Portfolio–The Nick at Nite Logo!

No, I didn’t design this logo. But I did help launch NICK AT NITE and the slogan “Hello Out There From TV Land!”

Here was the situation:

Nickelodeon had become a big daytime success as the world’s first kid network. It decided to start cashing in on its valuable air time at night, after the kiddies went to bed.

But all it could get its hands on for programming was a bunch of old black and white shows from the 60s–Car 54, Donna Reed, My Three Sons–stuff that had already been in syndication for decades.

My job as Creative Director of Fred/Alan, Inc. was to come up with an ad campaign that would make those chestnuts seem cool. We had to somehow make it more fun to watch those shows at Nick’s spot on the TV dial than it had been, or ever would be, over on stodgy old channel 29.
And here was the kicker. We had to do it on a shoestring. There was no budget for big splashy billboards, TV or radio spots.
Our solution? Small space ads in TV Guide. (Click to see them full size.)

We offered fake products, available nowhere…

(The Mr. Ed’s Aftershave was a real scratch and sniff ad that smelled like hay. Hey! What did you expect?)

We even gave out our own version of the Clio. We called it the Hucky. And it went to…

Some might say that this is just silly. Exactamundo! It was silly like the 18 to 49 year old jokers and tokers we were trying to lure to our new TV Land theme park. And it worked! The result of all this lunacy is that NICK AT NITE (now with its sister network TV Land) became one of cable’s most successful channels. Our crazy campaign and the excellent work of Larry Jones and Jim Burns and a host of other talented programmers turned a bunch of old chestnuts into the world’s preeminent nostalgia network. Not bad for a shoestring!

LISTEN TO ME!

THE TRADE CAMPAIGN THAT PROVED
I HAVE A PROPHET MOTIVE

In 2001 Nick at Nite ran a trade campaign about the superiorty of their UNReality TV–the beloved sitcoms we all grew up with– vs. the raunchy so-called Reality TV that had recently become popular. These rants ran under the byline of one Raul DelGato Jr., but I was the campaign’s author. I was the mastermind behind the whole Listen To Me concept. (You can read about it by clicking here and signing up for a FREE membership in Media Post–a cool thing to do anyway.)

This wasn’t the first time Raul DelGato had sounded off in the trades. Allow me to introduce you to my original creation: Raul DelGato Senior.

(Note: To read this ad, click on “Edible Advertising” below)

His face was that of the late Tom Pomposello, a lovable and talented guy who composed a lot of Nickelodeon’s music. But his words were the words of a prophet, and they weren’t written on the subway walls. They were written in the pages of the industry’s most staid media publications. Here are a couple of my favorites. Click on them to enlarge–they’re well worth the read. Then we’ll talk…

Listen to Me!: Monumental Licensing

Listen to Me! Edible Advertising

Okay, first of all, check out the ideas in “Monumental Licensing.” Raul proposes licensing our great national treasures to corporations for a fee. Can you say “Staples Center”? AT&T Park? Are the Stove Top Stuffing Mountains really more ridiculous than that? And how about Pink Floyd, M & Ms, and Windows 95 all turning the Empire State Building different colors? Raul saw all that coming and more.

In one of our ads Raul exhorted media buyers to “Buy Space In Space”, encouraging them to put ads on the next NASA probe heading out of our solar system. Well, Arnold Shwarzeneger did just that to publicize his film True Lies–he bought ad space on the nosecone of a NASA rocket.

The Edible Advertising in the second ad is still a tasty idea waiting to happen. Come on media buyers, get with it! There are hungry reader/eaters stuck in subway trains and busses all over America.

Another one of Raul’s big concepts was “Mutter Media”–hiring people to walk around town muttering about your product. Today new media companies now hiring bloggers to merely mention their products and services on the web. Isn’t that just about the same thing? (I like Java Chip Ice Cream, by the way. In case anybody’s interested.)

There is a long list of things that Raul ranted about in the early 90s which came true.
When he returned on May 2, 2001, here’s what he had to say, in the Wall Street Journal no less. You’d be crazy not to heed his words…

REALITY IS A SHAM!

Advertisers–Follow Me Into The Future. Embrace UN-Reality Before Reality Dumps You!

Is This Guy For Real?
That’s the question you’re asking yourself as you clutch this Newspaper. And the answer is NO! I’m for UN-Real. I’ve given up Reality, and so should you. I’ve placed this ad in order to deliver one simple message to YOU  Mr. and Mrs. Advertiser, before it’s too late: WAKE UP!   “Reality Television” is about to follow the dotcom business down the drain of cultural history. It will soon take its place alongside flagpole sitting, HUAC hearings, and Pet Rocks as just another quaint but vaguely annoying artifact of a bygone era.

There’s No Future In Reality!
I’m giving you the insider info you wish you’d had last summer–Get out of the reality market, NOW! Already people like me are starting to realize an ugly truth: Reality has us surrounded! It’s in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the news we read, the lines we stand on in the post office, the jobs we go to every day. Everything we do has one thing in common–It’s all real! And now–thanks to a bunch of network real-aholics–it’s even in the TV shows we watch. Shows featuring so-called “survivors” eating rat and slaughtering wild boar; “real” cops making busts; marriages going on the rocks in front of cheering audiences; angry fat people throwing chairs at each other. Do you really think that is what your target audience wants to come home to in the evening?. I wouldn’t bank on it. People everywhere are waking up to the fact that they have lost their grip on UNreality. And they want it back!
Call me an UNrealist
One month ago I reached the epiphany I described above. I gave up reality and cut myself off from the real world. I canceled all my magazine subscriptions, yanked out the radio and the phone, and threw my appointment book down the garbage disposal. I’ve never felt happier. The only connection to the “real” world I have maintained is NICK AT NITE. They’re the one TV network that presents 100% UNreality. Nick at Nite’s brand of UNreality comes in the form of an endless stream of sitcoms. All sitcoms, all the time. Think of the irony at work here! As the dotcoms are plummeting the sitcoms are on the rise! And NICK AT NITE is at the vanguard, leading us all into the Golden Age of the UNreal. At my house, all other channels have been blocked. Thanks to Nick at Nite, I can turn on my TV and preserve my reality-free living space without fear of being assaulted by the big R.

UNreality is the wave of the Past, the Present , and the Future
Already people across the country and around the world are following their UNstincts and joining me in giving Reality the boot. What that means to you is clear: soon the only place you’ll be able to reach anybody is through the timeless sitcom treasures of Nick at Nite, where past, present and future come together in a glorious celebration of the UNreal.

Why am I telling you this? I guess I felt I owed the advertising community–which has been so kind to me and my family over the years–one last communique before I disappear completely. A word to the wise should be sufficient.

Okay, so Raul didn’t always get it right. In the years since that ad ran Reality TV has done pretty well, and the dot coms are making a major comeback. But he still makes some mighty good points, and the whole campaign is funny and fits with the Nick at Nite Brand. That’s pretty good for the trades!