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When conversing with George Lois, you instantly feel the passion he has for creating memorable advertising. In the advertising business, much has been written and discussed about presenting creative to clients. Great creative is only the beginning. It takes good salesmanship to get a client to buy into a concept. Sometimes that is a piece of cake...other times it can be slightly more difficult. Below is an excerpt from our telephone interview in which the overwhelming passion and immense character of George Lois is clearly demonstrated. Goodman's Matzo was a client of George's during his days at Doyle Dane Bernbach. According to George (Phone interview, October 2003), sometimes art directors or writers were allowed to work hands on with a client without the account supervisor present. The story below has become a classic in the field of advertising and can be found repeated in numerous books and articles...here's how George described it in his own words for our interview. GEORGE: I walk in and there's Mr. Goodman, president of Goodman's Matzo...he was about ninety years old with heavy eyebrows and he was sitting in a glass room in a big area where the work was all over the place...and he had the glass room right in the middle of it so he could watch everybody, right...so I go to his big desk and on one side are big casement windows...and the room was full of maybe seven or eight [people], I found out later they were all his family...grandchildren and great-grandchildren who worked there and they were all lined up, mostly young people. I walk into this little auditorium, almost. This glass auditorium and start pitching away. I start pitching the this Goodman Matzo ad...big gigantic matzo...and over in Jewish in Hebrew kosher for Passover which I handled at it...and it was a striking poster...you could see it in the New York subway...back in those days it was this Yiddish...this Hebrew poster...it was exciting! So I'm explaining and he says "I don't like it!" I talk some more. "I DON'T LIKE IT!" Meanwhile some of his family is saying "Dad, I think it is very unusual and it will get a lot of attention"..."NOPE, I don't like it..." Everyone around him is saying "gee this is pretty exciting"...and then finally he says again "I don't like it". I didn't know what to do because I was not going to go back to DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach) with my tail up my a--, ya know. I'd be looking for another job. So I see these big windows and I go up to pull open the casement window, climb over it and stand out on the ledge...I'm maybe on the third or fourth floor...high enough to kill yourself...and holding on to the metal casement. I unfurl the poster with one hand and say "you make the matzo...I'll make the ads!" He says "come in already, please come in"...he almost had a heart attack...so I go back in and everybody in the place didn't know whether to sh-t in their pants or laugh He says "alright, alright...we'll go with your idea". As they are fanning him down I thank him very much for receiving my work and start walking toward the door and he says "young man...if you ever quit advertising, I'll give you a job as a matzo salesman!" (Phone interview, October 2003) And the rest is history...George stuck to hit guns when he believed the concept for Goodman's Matzo advertising was a big idea...and yet another memorable campaign and another chapter of advertising history was created. |