Fifties (37 page)

As BBD&O was developing the overall theme for Ike’s campaign, Rosser Reeves, of the Ted Bates Agency, was working on Ike’s television spots. If it was a campaign in which the American people carefully studied Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, it was also a campaign in which they did not study Rosser Reeves, who became a critical adviser to Ike that fall. Rather, he studied them, and he became, in the process, one of the two or three most influential men to emerge in politics in 1952—yet his name rarely appeared in the millions of words written about the campaign. Rosser Reeves was not a politician and he had little use for politicians in general; he was an advertising man, and in 1952 he helped change the nature of American politics by introducing the television spot. He was the head of the Ted Bates Agency and a dominating presence, perhaps the most successful advertising man of his time in terms of reaching a mass audience. He had grown up in Danville, Virginia, gone to the University of Virginia to study history, and subsequently drifted in and out of journalism and banking before ending up as an advertising man in New York in 1934. He wrote poetry, often under another name, and after his retirement he wrote a novel about a Greenwich Village eccentric who rejects a life of privilege and wanders the universe speculating about religion and philosophy—“my secret self,” he later explained. But if others were making a name in advertising with the
elegance and sophistication of their work in the exciting new medium of television, then Reeves was a throwback to the more primitive days of advertising, when the main idea was to hit people over the head with the product as bluntly as possible. It was not to be beautiful; it was not to be artistic. It was not to amuse viewers, who might not even buy the product. It was to sell. Rosser Reeves had decided early in his career that the most effective advertising campaigns were not the ones with the biggest budgets but the ones that held relentlessly to a single theme. Advertising, he believed, particularly in the age of television, was primal. Reeves liked to tell the story of the mule trainer, called in to deal with a recalcitrant mule, who had begun the treatment by first hitting the mule in the head with a two-by-four, explaining to the astonished owner, “Well, first I’ve got to get his attention.” One of his campaigns for Anacin was a classic example of this. It portrayed the inside of the head of a headache sufferer. Inside were a pounding hammer, a coiled spring, and a jagged electric bolt, but they were relieved by little bubbles making their way up the body from the stomach. The Anacin ads, he later admitted, “were the most hated commercials in the history of advertising.” But they increased Anacin sales from $18 million to $54 million a year in an eighteen-month period. “Not bad,” Reeves once said, “for something written between cocktails at lunch.”

While his brother-in-law, David Ogilvy, was doing campaigns for Schweppes tonic, Rolls-Royce, and Hathaway shirts (the last of which featured the man wearing an eyepatch), Reeves was working with mass-consumer items: soap, toothpaste, and deodorants. As far as Reeves was concerned, the difference between him and Ogilvy was the difference between doing snobbish ads for the elite that ran in
The New Yorker
and running mass campaigns for America’s most important consumer merchandise. When Ogilvy once mentioned that he had learned much about advertising from Reeves but that it was a shame he had never been able to teach Reeves anything, Reeves replied, “If we ever get out of packaged goods and into luxury items, I’ll be glad to go sit at David’s feet and listen.” When his friends complained about the crude quality of his commercials, Reeves would go into their bathrooms, open up their medicine chests, and take out several brand-name products as evidence that his campaigns worked, even with them. One of his more genteel competitors, Fairfax Cone, said that Reeves delivered advertising “without subtlety, and without concern for anyone’s gentler feelings. He also proves that advertising works.”

Reeves had admired Ted Bates, whose agency he eventually took over, because Bates had, in his words, “the most unconfused mind” he had ever seen. What he had learned from Bates more than anything else, he would say, was that a commercial should be cut to the essentials: Most commercials were too long and too repetitious, wasting viewer time (and goodwill) and advertiser money. Years later he looked back on the early television commercials as colossally wasteful. Sponsors would pick up an entire program, to do one long commercial at the beginning, one long one in the middle, and one at the end. Far more effective, he eventually decided, was the spot: in quick, out quick, and done. This new medium of television was so powerful that less could easily be more. He gradually evolved the principle of USP, or the unique selling proposition. Reeves had an uncanny ability to determine the essence of a product and then make it seem dramatically different from its competitors (when in fact the difference was often negligible). At the heart of USP was finding one feature about the product that was allegedly unique and pummeling the public with it. “The prince of hard sell,” he was called. Advertising without illusion, his campaigns might have been called. They were simple and repetitive: If the claims were not always true, they were never exactly untrue, either.

In an age in which advertising in general prospered from the growing affluence of the society, Reeves prospered more; he took Ted Bates from $16 million in billings in 1945, and no place among the top ten firms, to number five, with $130 million in billings in 1960. Reeves often depicted products the way heroes and villains were depicted in Hollywood in B movies: His product would be, in effect, in the white hat, and the other product, lesser medicinal strength or cleaning capacity, wore the black; on occasion it would be known to the entire nation only as brand X. Reeves’s commercials for over-the-counter medical items generally featured pseudomedical testimony delivered by someone wearing a white jacket, playing the role of the doctor. Some competitors, not so amused, spoke of his fondness for “the uncheckable claim.”

For the 1948 campaign, Reeves had proposed a series of radio spots to Tom Dewey, who had turned them down, saying he felt they would not be dignified. His decision not to use them had left Reeves convinced that if Dewey had been a bit more modern and a bit less of a prig, he might have been elected President that year. So in 1952, when a group of Texas oilmen (“I had some oil interests at the time,”
Reeves once noted) who supported Eisenhower asked him to come up with a retaliatory slogan to the Democrats’ “You Never Had It So Good,” he told them that what they needed was not a slogan but a campaign of quick television spots, featuring the general speaking to the American people on a vast range of issues—in short, punchy, unanswerable takes. Some of Reeves’s people got together and came up with a plan called “How to Insure an Eisenhower Victory in November.” It recommended that $2 million be spent in the last three weeks on spots, “the quickest, most effective and cheapest means of getting across a message in the shortest possible time.” With that, American politics and American television advertising were about to be married by a man who did not believe in overestimating the intelligence and attention span of his audience.

Reeves, who was relatively new to politics, went out and did his homework. He read a popular book by Samuel Lubell, one of the early analysts on ethnic voting in America, and came away with the belief that the Dewey people had been incalculably stupid in their campaign. A shift of very few votes in just a few critical states would have won the election for him. Reeves was so impressed by the Lubell study that he hired a brilliant young man named Michael Levin, a disciple of Lubell’s and a firm believer in the value of polling. The Lubell study and Levin’s research convinced Reeves even more that spots were the answer for the Republicans. The election was going to be close, so they had to concentrate their best efforts on key areas in the swing states—forty-nine counties in twelve key states, he decided. The spots had many advantages, he argued: They were a relatively low-cost way to exploit an expensive new medium; they could be fine-tuned to reach undecided voters; there was a vital element of control to them—the candidate never ended up saying things that surprised his backers or himself; and finally, they allowed the campaign manager to concentrate money and effort in critical areas. If they did them in the last few weeks of the campaign, the Democrats would be hard-pressed to answer them. The oilmen liked the idea, and shortly thereafter, the forty-two-year-old Reeves, under the aegis of Citizens for Eisenhower, took a six-week unpaid leave from Ted Bates to work for the Eisenhower campaign.

Earlier in the year Reeves had sat with some friends, including liberal columnist Drew Pearson, when Douglas MacArthur had key-noted the Republican convention. Pearson and others had thought MacArthur’s speech powerful, but Reeves thought the prose too purple and that MacArthur had wandered all over the map, failing to dramatize the very issues he stood for in American life. To make
his point, Reeves sent out a research team to interview 250 people about the speech. Only 2 percent of the people had any idea of what the general had said. That, as far as Reeves was concerned, proved his point. In September, as he sat in the St. Regis Hotel reading Ike’s clips from newspapers across the country, he concluded Ike was as bad as MacArthur. He was doing a terrible job of packaging and selling himself. He had the advantage of a popular, recognizable name, but he was letting it all slip away, talking in all kinds of directions about too many different things. This was a disaster. “You don’t do that in advertising,” he said. “You lose penetration.” Reeves zeroed in on three essential themes: Ike cleaning up corruption; Ike the soldier who was, in truth, a man of peace; or Ike who would clean out the Communists in government. Then he went to the
Reader’s Digest,
which had what were considered the best mailing lists for middle-of-the-road, mainstream Americans. He did three mailings of ten thousand each, asking the subscribers to say which theme would be most effective. Most people responded to Ike as a man who knew war but who would now bring peace. Reeves also met with George Gallup and had him do some polling. The results were similar: The American people were worried about Korea above all. With that, Reeves thought he had his USP, so to speak: “Eisenhower, the man who will bring us peace.” That slogan was brought to the general for his approval, and much to the surprise of Reeves and his group, the general demurred. He, no more than anyone else in the world, could guarantee peace. So the slogan was made even simpler and better: “Eisenhower, man of peace.”

Soon Reeves had worked out an entire strategy for the spots. He wanted them to air at critical times, between two highly popular regular shows (“You get the audience built up at huge costs by other people,” he wrote in a memo to the Eisenhower people). The announcer would say, “Eisenhower answers the nation!” Then an ordinary citizen would ask a question and Ike would answer it, in words crafted by Reeves from Eisenhower’s speeches. The candidate approved of the idea but was not entirely comfortable with it; it was something, he made clear, that the people who knew more about this game of politics were insisting he do. Most assuredly, he did not like the fact that these same people were running around telling him that his forehead shone too much.

The subject of the relationship between his bald dome and the television camera had already considerably irritated the candidate. It had first arisen back in Paris, when David Schoenbrun, a CBS correspondent, had pointed out that he had something of a problem. Ike
had told him he knew he was bald, but what could he do about it? Schoenbrun told him, “You tend to lower your head and that elongates it and makes it seem longer and balder, like an egghead. Maybe you can tilt your head the other way, back a little.” So Ike had tried, but he had clearly disliked his television appearances. Once when Schoenbrun had suggested the use of makeup to take some of the shine off his head, Ike had said, “Why don’t you just get an actor. That’s what you really want.” But gradually Reeves and his people persuaded Ike to overcome his reservations.

In order to film the spots, Ike and his closest aides decided to give Reeves only one day, in early September, which was a reflection of how seriously the candidate took it all. Reeves knew he was working with a reluctant candidate and that he would have to accept the limitations imposed on him. He had wanted to do fifty spots, each twenty seconds long; but given his limited time frame, he decided to do only twenty-two. He wrote them all himself. When Ike arrived at the studio, it was obvious he was uncomfortable in this alien place. He had brought along his trusted brother Milton to act as censor. It was Milton’s job to look through proposed spots and announce which ones the candidate would and would not do. “No,” Milton would say, to Reeves’s annoyance, about words taken verbatim from one of Ike’s speeches. “Ike will never say this.” But he had already said it in a speech, Reeves would protest. “He’s not going to say it again,” Milton would answer with finality.

Technically, everything was quite primitive: This was before the coming of the TelePrompTer, and Reeves had wanted to shoot Ike without his glasses, but Ike could not see the prompter board. So Reeves improvised a giant handwritten board, which Eisenhower could see without glasses. Now, at least, Ike would look like he did in his photos—hale and hearty, not like some aging, tired politician or banker. If the candidate initially had some misgivings, once he started doing the spots he relaxed. Seeing that things were going better than expected, Reeves wrote an additional eighteen spots and the general did them. The general was still not pleased by all this; at one point he sat shaking his head and saying, “To think that an old soldier should come to this.”

Now that he had Ike’s answers in the can, Reeves needed to get the questions. He sent film crews to Radio City Music Hall to search out the most typical-looking and -sounding Americans they could find—“real people in their own clothes, with wonderful native accents.” Typically, a woman would be directed to say: “You know what things cost today. High prices are driving me crazy.” Then Ike
answers: “Yes, my Mamie gets after me about the high cost of living. It’s another reason why I say it’s time for a change. Time to get back to an honest dollar and an honest dollar’s work.” Or a man asks: “Mr. Eisenhower, are we going to have to fight another war?” Then Ike answers: “No, not if we have a sound program for peace. And I’ll add this: We won’t spend hundreds of billions and still not have enough tanks and planes for Korea.”