8.
Team Up wíth Energy

Due to rising energy costs, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned

Unknown

I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.

Samuel Goldwyn

Teamwork is essential—it allows you to blame someone else.

Unknown

We’re all in this alone.

Lily Tomlin

Painting and writing and composing and sculpting— indeed, physically creating most forms of art—are, like brushing your teeth, jobs best done alone.

But when you’re trying to get an idea, it often helps to do it with a friend.

Not simply a coworker or an acquaintance. A friend.

Or with a couple of friends.

The different experiences and frames of reference and points of view and backgrounds and needs and bits of knowledge other people bring to the effort often open doors to rooms you might not otherwise have known about.

And sitting inside one of those rooms, smoking a big fat cigar and looking swell, might well be an idea that solves your problem.

For make no mistake:

There is strength and spice and adventure and excitement and vitality and life and newness and power and energy in variety; in sameness there is lethargy.

This is the reason the people in advertising agencies who are charged with coming up with ideas—with thinking up the new products and ads and slogans and commercials and positionings—almost always work in twos or threes. They’ve learned from experience.

Indeed, of all the advertising ideas I’ve had over the years, I can remember only a few I can honestly call mine and mine alone.

Mostly my partner and I would be trying to come up with an idea for, say, a new soap for kids, and the conversation would probably go like one I remember having with two of my friends, Hal Silverman and Cliff Einstein. It went something like this:

Hal: Washing’s a drag for kids. It’d be great if we could invent a soap that’d be fun to use.

Me: Why don’t we call it Gorilla Soap? Or Giraffe Soap. You know how kids like animals. It’d be a kick.

Cliff: Call it gorilla, hell. Let’s make it in the shape of a gorilla.

Me: Packaging would be a bear. No pun intended. Besides, after the first bath, the bar wouldn’t look like anything, certainly not like a gorilla. All the fun’d be gone.

Hal: OK let’s put the gorilla inside the soap, a prize, you know like Cracker Jack does, so when the kid finally uses up the soap, he gets a gorilla prize. Moms’ll love it, too. It’d give the kid an incentive to wash, to get the prize.

Cliff: Each bar could have a different prize. A secret one. A gorilla in one, a car in another, dinosaurs,dolls for the girls, a secret decoder ring . . .

Me: So it’s not Gorilla Soap anymore. It’s Cracker Jack Soap.

Cliff: Better yet, we’ll call it SOAPRIZE. (Hal and Cliff sold the idea to Dial Soap, which marketed it unsuccessfully.)

And this is the way Bill Bartley, an advertising agency art director, and I came up with an outdoor billboard for Knudsen yogurt in nine seconds flat:

Me: The client wants us to feature more than one flavor.

Bill: Oh, whoopee, hooray.

Me: Hooray for the red, white, and blue.

Bill: Hooray for the red, white, and blueberry.

And there we had it. The board had Bill’s line and showed three cartons of yogurt—strawberry, vanilla, and blueberry.

Now I ask you: Whose soap idea and name was that, mine or Hal’s or Cliff’s? Whose yogurt idea?

More important: Would one of us have come up with those ideas working alone? Perhaps.

But even if one of us would have come up with them, I’m convinced the ideas surfaced faster with a couple of us working on them than they would have with just one of us working.

Let me tell you another story:

Years ago the Schick Electric Company came to our advertising agency with an assignment. “Here’s something we made a couple of years ago,” the company president said, “and we can’t sell them. Got a warehouse full of the damn things.”

The damn thing was an electrical device that heated cans of shaving cream. All the research showed that men thought it was a great idea. After all, who likes to lather up with cold shaving cream in the morning? But, as the president said, few bought it.

So we looked at the commercials they used to sell the device, wherein men used the product and said how it made shaving easier, and how nice it was to feel warm in the morning.

We liked the commercials. But Jean Craig, one of our copywriters, said: “I know what’s wrong with that advertising. The commercials are beautifully done, but they’re positioning the product all wrong. It’s not something you should be trying to sell to men. It’s something you should sell to women as a gift for men. Every Christmas I’m running around like crazy trying to find something to buy for my husband. This is perfect.”

We did some focus groups with women. They, like Jean, were crazy about the product as a gift.

So we dubbed it “The Great Gift Invention of [that year]” and did a commercial showing guys waiting in line at a patent office with all sorts of inventions, including ours, which all the other inventors thought was a “great gift invention.”

We put it on the air before Christmas in Chicago and Philadelphia and some other test markets.

Bingo.

The stores sold out of the dispensers the first week. We had to cancel the advertising and promise the stores we’d make more of the damn things for next year. Which the company did.

The next year we changed the copy in the commercial to “The Great Gift Invention of [that year],” went into more markets, and the same thing happened. And the next year, too.

By that third year it was delivering more profit to the company than any other product they had.

All because one of the people we teamed up with was a positive, energetic woman who had trouble finding a suitable Christmas gift for her husband.

So next time you’re stuck with a problem, ask a couple of upbeat friends you get along with to help you kick around some ideas.

You’ll be amazed, I think, at how smart and insightful and creative they are, at the different things they think of, the different roads they go down, the different doors they open.

Always remember three things, however:

1. Too many friends may rot the party.

Oh, I know that “brainstorming"—the classic idea-generating technique invented by Alex Osborne, himself an advertising man—calls for ten to twelve people, plus a group leader. And I know that thousands have used that technique successfully.

But—perhaps because of the peculiarities of the people I’ve worked with or the way we conducted the brainstorming sessions—in my experience in the workplace, that’s way too many people.

Granted: it seems to work OK in the classroom. But two seem to work best at work; occasionally, three or four, no more.

2. Sometimes it’s hard to make an ass out of yourself—to say the wild, far-out, stupid, unworkable idea that might trigger a great idea—in front of your boss.

So if you and your friend(s) are employed by the same company, you should be at the same level there. Unless, of course, one of your friends is a boss who’s willing to make an ass out of herself.

3. As I mentioned in chapter 1, the group that has the most fun often has the best ideas. And since nothing “lethargizes” a group faster than a negative, sluggish member, make sure the friend(s) you team up with is (are) positive and energetic.

Follow David Ogilvy’s advice: “Get rid of sad dogs who spread floom.”