It just takes one

My wife Andi and I were driving home yesterday, when she turned to me and asked out of the blue what was my favorite print ad that I’ve ever done. Hmmm. “Why do you ask?” I replied. She said, “Oh, I just saw something that reminded me of my favorite one.” I answered, “It’s an oldie, but probably the Honda License Plates one.” She said with a smile, “Mine, too.”

There’s quite a story behind that ad. So, I thought I’d share.

Long ago, it was “Honda Season” at Rubin Postaer and Associates in Los Angeles, and everyone was feverishly working on concepts for the upcoming year. In those days, the agency produced about 60% of year’s Honda work all at once. Each creative team was given a car model to work on and there was no safety net. If you didn’t nail it, it meant Larry, our creative leader and co-owner of the agency, would put a second team on it. And you never wanted that.

My art director partner, Keith Weinman, and I had been concepting for a couple of weeks on the model we had been given, the Civic Hatchback, when one morning while I was ironing a white shirt at home before work, the idea came to me. I thought, since our brief was all about the car having a lot of personality, what if we do something with vanity license plates, which were just becoming all the rage at the time.

I told Keith the idea later that day and he went to town comping it up, while I began writing lines for it. I probably wrote 30 versions of the same line until I had it just right. And Keith, well, Keith was a marker comp maniac. Truth be told, we won a lot of assignments because our comps just looked better. They were, in a word, tight. Keith made sure each detail of each plate from each state was correct, even down to month, year and stickers. (Note: This is pre-Internet, so this was nothing short of a monumental task.)?

When it came time to show Larry our ideas, we walked down to his office, comps and storyboards in hand, and were pretty confident we had a few winners. Still, we were sweating it because it was always a daunting task to keep up with the Coburn and Yoshida, who were the best team in the house by leaps and bounds.

Whew. Larry liked the work. Especially that License Plates ad and the TV spot that went with it. His approval meant everything.

Next up, the big meeting.

In those days, Larry presented all the work to the Honda client himself. He had earned the clients’ trust and respect, and when Larry spoke, they listened. (We did, too.) Meanwhile back at the agency, all of the creative teams anxiously awaited his return and the results. It was probably 6 o’clock or later in the evening when he got back to the office. It might as well have been midnight. You could hear the echoes down the hall in the creative department, “Larry’s back! Larry’s back!” All the creative teams quickly gathered around a long conference room table and Larry pulled comp after comp out of a large black pizza bag, the fate of each ad determined by a nod or a word or two from the big man. It was like Christmas. And Larry was Santa with a cigarette.

License Plates had gotten the thumbs up.?

Now came the challenging part. Each plate had to be checked with each state’s DMV to make sure it wasn’t owned already. And if it was, we either contacted the owner for approval or swapped it out with another state and came up with a new one – which all took a bit of doing.

The owner of one plate “BRRRRR” in Minnesota refused permission and even got stinky saying he’d file a lawsuit against us if we used it. So, we simply added an extra “R” and put it on another chilly state, North Dakota. In its place for Minnesota, we came up with a new one: SOSUME. Both Larry and the Honda client loved that.

We filmed the print ad and commercial with Jim Hall from Lamb & Hall, someone Bob and Gary had worked with quite a bit. (It couldn’t hurt, right?)

Then disaster nearly struck.

We had just looked at the first round of color proofs of the magazine ad, when I was thumbing through a car magazine in my office and there it was – a new one-page ad for Subaru featuring vanity license plates. My heart sank. I thought we were screwed. I took the ad in the magazine down the hallway and showed Larry, fully expecting ours was about to die a quick death even though it was about to be shipped.

To my amazement, Larry looked at the Subaru ad and said in his oh-so-Chicago way, “Their ad is a page. Your ad is a spread. And it's better.” He handed me back the magazine and returned to what he was doing. I was speechless. He didn’t know it, but he changed my professional life at that very moment.

You see that ad went on to win every award show it was entered in. Communication Arts. One Show. New York Art Directors. Los Angeles Belding’s. Advertising Age's Best of the Year. It even showed up in the Kelly Awards for the best magazine work of the year. But that was nothing.

Honda dealers requested showroom posters of it.?

An old roommate sent me a silk tie version of it (someone had completely ripped it off without permission).?

One of my former professors at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, Roy Paul Nelson, called me to ask permission to include it in the latest edition of his book, The Design of Advertising, which was the standard text book in most recognized advertising programs in America at the time.

While having ice cream after a movie with Andi’s folks, her dad said go walk past that table with a bunch of high school kids. When I passed their table, they were all a buzz trying to decode the ad’s license plates in a magazine.

And here’s the kicker. My phone rang and I was offered the creative director job to run BMW of North America out of a Manchester by the Sea mansion for Mullen, who had just won the account from Ammirati & Puris. (What? I was just a copywriter. Do you have the right phone number?)

Well, I took that job. And my creative director career was off to the races.

Now don’t get me wrong, leaving Larry and Rubin Postaer was one of the single most difficult decisions I’ve ever made. I often wonder whether it was the right one. But as another suitor at the time, Bill Borders of Borders Perrin & Norrander, told me before I had accepted, “You have to take it. You have to try to walk in Ralph Amiratti’s footsteps or you’ll always wonder.”?

Moral of the story: It just takes one (to quote Rob Siltanen).

Why automotive ads today, especially in print, are so boring is beyond me. Creatives, advertising agencies and clients either: A) Don’t care; B) Don’t know the difference; C) Don’t have the time; D) Don’t have the skillset; or E) Some deadly combination of the forementioned. Just open any car magazine and look for a good ad; one that has stopping power, originality and readership scores that rival the editorial that surrounds it. You’ll have more luck trying to find a pre-1965 silver dime in your pocket change.

Now should you scoff and say those are days gone by and nobody reads magazines anymore, you’re missing my point. Every touchpoint matters. Craft matters. Originality matters. And most importantly, nailing it matters.

CUL8R.

To see more ads like License Plates, visit jackfundcreative.com. For freelance availability, you can reach me at [email protected].