It’s now a clichi to note that the Super Bowl ad blitz has become a parallel spectator sport to the game itself, a $135 million soap opera with its own winners, losers and squalling corps of color commentators. But to the guests at Bill Westbrook’s party Sunday night, the Ad Bowl was no game-inside-a-game. It was the game.

For the last few years, Westbrook, who is worldwide president at the New York agency Fallon McElligott, has generously opened his plush SoHo apartment on Super Bowl Sunday to fellow agency types who share his preference for tag lines over linebackers. In this brand-building Bizarro world, guests all but tune out the game — even this year’s spellbinder — perking up only when the announcers cut away to the commercials. The air hums with shop talk.

“What do you think of the letterbox?” the guests ask each other as they feast on a folksy repast of chili and barbecue. “Doesn’t it arrest your attention?” A whimsical TBWA-Chiat Day spot for Pets.Com provokes widespread guffaws. “All those titles in the left-hand corner!” marvels a Fallon design director. “What a fuck-up!”

It soon becomes clear that this is a tough crowd. Westbrook’s party, not surprisingly, tends to be a Fallon-centric affair. And, within the industry, Fallon is considered forbiddingly chic — Helmut Lang to Ogilvy’s J.C Penney. “It seems casual, but it’s pretty political,” whispers a copywriter. “You have to know when to laugh, and what to slag.”

As they recline on leather couches, feasting their eyes on Westbrook’s 58-inch TV, the brand mavens resemble jaded fashionistas at a disastrous runway show, all crossed arms and indulgent smiles. “Light on concept, big on execution,” scoffs one guest of Autotrader.com’s 30-second spot.

“How did they sell that to the client?” giggles his friend. “‘OK, so then all these cars are going to come into the frame!’”

“Maybe they made a diorama,” someone else says.

A Budweiser ad provokes more slagging. “The old talking-dog gag.” “Everyone loves a talking dog!” “And it even looks real!”

Many companies, particularly the ubiquitous dot-com rookies, seem a mite ambitious in their estimation of what the average Super Bowl watcher could grasp. Microstrategy’s 30-second spot features the following plot line:

1) A harried business traveler gets a message on his cell phone, informing him that his flight has been canceled. 2) He reschedules, and runs to a new gate. 3) In the chaos, someone steals his credit card. 4) The credit card is triumphantly recovered when the thief tries to use it to buy a plane ticket.

The convoluted spot provokes widespread groans. “That’s more than happened on tonight’s episode of ‘The Sopranos,’” chuckles Michael Fanuele, director of account planning at Bozell Worldwide. “It’s got to be incredibly simple,” agrees Judith Grey, an art director at Fallon. “The creative director should have said, ‘Out, out, out. I need a three-line super that explains the whole thing.’ As much as we want to perceive ourselves as artists, you’ve got to keep in mind that these ads are being seen by drunk people in noisy bars. They have to work like billboards.”

A parody of a Gap ad, in which gyrating dancers are mowed down by a gleaming Oldsmobile, is pronounced a waste of a good idea. “The payoff at the end should have been better,” carps Neil Powell, creative director and managing partner at Fallon. “They should have somehow kept it straight. It would have been more effective if it had kept you wondering: Was it a Gap ad? Or was it a car ad? I hate to see such an obvious cut to a hard product payoff.”

Some ads go over big. The group is impressed by a first-quarter Mountain Dew spot, which features a Dew drinker cycling manically across an African plain to reclaim his soda from a cheetah. “Does Mountain Dew really make you bike that fast?” “All I can say is, anyone who isn’t drinking Mountain Dew is an idiot.” “Fire up the Dews!”

Someone else volunteers that “cheetahs are really expensive to rent.” Nods of agreement all around.

Dew’s third-quarter spot, a complex parody of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” goes over less well.

“Too many ornaments on that Christmas tree,” says Powell. “That one just merged too many ideas,” agrees Judith Gray. “It’s what you call a long walk for a short drink.”

The endless procession of inscrutable dot-com ads — actually only 17, but it seems like twice that many — provoke much head-scratching. “Is it a purchasing portal, or a commerce network?” someone asks of Computer.com. “It’s a purchasing portal that aggregates content across a vertical commerce network.” “No, that’s Epidemic.com.” “I thought that was a real-time, cross-platform purchasing portal.”

Suddenly — “Hey, isn’t that our BMW commercial?” Shushes all around. The 30-second spot features a woman skiing down a steep slope. The only sound is the whoosh of her skis slicing through the snow. The spot ends with the written tag line: “It’s not a feeling you can get every day — or is it?”

Loud whoops all around. “Yeah. Go Fallon. Love the letterbox.” But amid the cheering, there are a few discreet rumbles of dissent. “The set-up was way too mundane,” whispers one creative, who is seeing the ad for the first time. “If you’ve got to have the tried-and-true structure, why not do something that will shock viewers? The skier should have been nude or something.”

“We had a lot of ideas originally,” confides a creative who worked on the account. “I think the skier actually was nude. But BMW is a really conservative client. They said, we love it — but the skiers have got to wear comfortable ski clothing.”

The room grows quiet again. Another Fallon spot is coming on. This one tugs with both hands at the heartstrings. The ad, for the bond company John Nuveen & Company, has been digitally composed to show Christopher Reeve rising from a chair and walking across a stage. As the music soars, a tag line flashes across the screen: “Leave your mark,” it reads. Even the most hysterical disciple of Ayn Rand might find the equation of a soul-stirring medical miracle and the profits generated by bond trading a bit of a stretch, but the group breaks out into wild applause. Brian Murphy, Fallon’s design director, is pink with pride. He leans over and asks me if I noticed Nuveen’s “new identity.” “New identity?” I ask. “Yes,” he whispers. “Nuveen has a whole new approach to identity. A new logo. New typography. Before, it was a hard ’70s look. Very geometric. Now, it’s much softer. It’s classy, simple, sophisticated.” Ah.

Late in the third quarter, we hear the twang of country-Western music. “Here we go!” someone screams. “Herdin’ cats!” The Fallon spot, for Electronic Data Systems, is the funniest ad I’ve seen all night. It parodies an old-style western, with grumpy cowbows herding thousands of house cats across an open range. “Being a cat herder is probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” one of the craggy-faced cowboys says in his best John Ford, brushing cat hair off his jacket. The three-line super informs viewers that “in a sense,” this is what EDS does: “We bring together information, ideas and technologies, and make them go where you want.”

That “in a sense” epitomizes the challenges the money-burning dot-coms have in crafting effective ads. What they’re selling is so abstract that almost any narrative, no matter how clever, feels disconnected. EDS might as well have shown a bunch of screaming Japanese soldiers emerging from a pillbox, or a photo of a galaxy exploding. How far can you pull a metaphor before it snaps? EDS — for all your cat-herding needs! People will remember the clever ad, but will anyone remember which one of the 8 zillion dot-coms made it?

The Fallonites are proud of themselves. “High fives for cats!” “Go, Fallon!” The conversation turns to just how the production people were able to create the illusion of thousands of cats paddling across a river. “How’d you pull that off?” someone asks. “Cats don’t swim.” “Mirrors and wires,” one of the creatives says cryptically. Another volunteers that it was “catnip in the water.”

I never do find out exactly how they did it. My attention turns to another part of the room, where a Bozell executive is worriedly telephoning his account director. It seems one of Bozell’s clients, the National Fluid Milk Processors’ Board, has filmed two ads, starring quarterbacks from both St. Louis and Tennessee. The plan was to show the ad featuring whichever quarterback was ahead in the fourth quarter. “They were going to choose one of them to steal the milk,” he tells me. “But one of them just got injured. It would be really strange for the ad to show a quarterback who got hurt.” The executive hops about frantically until someone takes pity on him and informs him that Blaine Bishop, the injured player, is actually not a quarterback, but a defensive back.

After the game, I walk home with Dan Rollman, an earnest young copywriter fresh out of creative school. Rollman and I talk about how the most noteworthy characteristic of Super Bowl XXXIV was not the blur of rookie dot-coms, but the rise of meta-advertising — a spurt of advertising about advertising, and about Super Bowl advertising in particular. There was the Oldsmobile ad about the Gap ad. There was the E-Trade ad with a dancing monkey and the tag line: “We just wasted 2 million bucks.” There was the low-budget Lifeminders ad proclaiming itself “the worst commercial on the Super Bowl.”

What to make of Madison Avenue’s increasing self-obsession? “Where do advertisers draw their inspiration from?” Rollman asks rhetorically. “Other ads. You saw what we were like tonight. We’re obsessed with ads. It’s a little disturbing.”

Rollman sighs. “Maybe there’s a point where you need to take a timeout and reconnect yourself to the real world,” he says. “You need to remind yourself of all the brilliant ideas you could derive from other places … Maybe we shouldn’t have sat there watching all these Super Bowl ads. Maybe going out and watching a movie tonight would have been better inspiration.”

Or hey, maybe even the game itself.

In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower and the pre-Eisenhower highway system in the United States was less developed, there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser’s name, “Burma-Shave.”

Examples of vintage Burma-Shave road signs, including a blue South Dakota version. (Ray Crockett photo)

These red ads (one state, South Dakota, insisted that they be dark blue to keep them from conflicting with the red reserved for warning notices) usually consisted of five signs. For example: “DON’T PASS CARS/ON CURVE OR HILL/IF THE COPS DON’T GET YOU/ MORTICIANS WILL/BURMA-SHAVE.”

Some slogans touted Burma-Shave as a pre-aerosol “brushless” shaving cream—a cream you could scoop out of a jar and lather onto your face without relying on an old-fashioned brush and moistened soap in a mug.

 

("Thoroly"? I guess if the word doesn't fit the composition, change the spelling. . .)

In 1925, Clinton Odell, a Minneapolis lawyer, took the liniment his father created and transformed it into a brushless shaving cream. He named his company Burma-Vita—Burma, because most of the essential oils in the liniment were from the Burmese portion of the Malay Peninsula, and Vita from the Latin for “life”: “Life from Burma.”

Some of Burma-Shave’s primary “brushless shaving cream” competitors were Barbasol and Noxema.

The company was sold to Philip Morris in 1963, and all the signs were removed soon thereafter. As a testament to the campaign’s cultural significance, a set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian, where it still resides. But the brand eventually petered out. After being sold yet again (this time to the American Safety Razor Company) and then reintroduced in 1997, it never regained a hold in the market.

A history of the Burma-Vita Company, written by Frank Rowsome Jr. and illustrated by Carl Rose, was published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1963.

By the early 1960's, the rising costs of road-sign maintenance (as well as new and more effective ways of advertising) sounded the death knell for the Burma-Shave signs.

The following pages from Frank Rowsome Jr.’s book list all the road-sign Burma-Shave phrases produced from 1927 to 1963.

I became interested in pop bottles (I grew up in the Chicago area where we all said “pop”) and related stuff when I was about 12 years old. I had gone inside an old garage that was attached to a neighborhood house that was being torn down and inside was a cache of un-returned pop bottles that must have dated from the 1940-’50s period. I took one of each type home (about 20 of ‘em) and yes, still have them to this day. I really got off on all the different labels and colors of glass and because I used to like to read old magazines I actually recognized most of the brands that were no longer around or had changed their design. I’ll go into this more in a future post, but wanted to lay some sort of a foundation for this piece, which is exclusively on 7Up, with a special focus on their branding efforts of the 1950s.

The soft drink that would be known as 7Up was created in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg in St.Louis as part of his “Howdy” line of sodas and was originally called “Bib-Label Lithiated (it contained the mood stabilizer lithium citrate until 1950) Lemon-Lime Soda.” It was almost immediately re-labeled “7 (7 natural flavors) Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime,” and then finally just “7Up”.

The first 7Up logo from 1929.

In terms of logos, an original winged trademark soon gave way to the red squared logo that lasted until the late 1960s that coincided with that period’s brilliant “Uncola” re-branding campaign. I always felt they had GOLD in that Uncola moniker. . .

A 1935 7Up label before the Howdy Company's name was changed to 7Up in 1936, followed by two Howdy beverage labels.

By the late 1940s 7Up was the third most popular soft drink in the United States. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the company had employed extensive branding techniques to keep the momentum going. The following three binders contain examples of what was offered to the bottlers and distributors to reinforce the product’s presence.

A catalog of 7Up sales/marketing items circa 1954.

This page includes tipped-in glossy paint chips.

These next three pages would NEVER fly with the HR Dept in 2012. . .

Before everyone had TV's in their home, it was common to go out to watch television.

7Up Sales & Promotion Merchandise Catalog circa 1954 - 59.

(would love to have those binders. . .)

Actual cloth swatches included.

More swatches.

1959 "Salesmakers" Catalogue

2 actual decals using the older logo with the woman reaching for bubbles- love the way the color is broken down into separate shapes and levels.

Actual booklet attached.

"Fresh Up Freddie" was the 7Up mascot created in 1957 by ad agency Leo Burnett and Walt Disney to help sponsor the Disney "Zorro" TV series.

Here’s a link to more info on “Freddie”: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fresh-up-freddy.html

Remember, it's from 1959. . .

Ditto. . .

2 mid-1930's 7Up bottles.

Left: 1940's bottle with 8 bubbles on label. Right: 1950's bottle 7 bubbles.

"Like" was introduced in 1963 as a diet version of 7Up. It contained Calcium Cyclamate which was determined to be a carcinogen in 1969. "Like" was discontinued in that same year and Diet 7Up was introduced in 1970 sans the Cyclamates. This bottle is dated 1964.

Late 1960's/early 1970's can.

"The Uncola".

As a final footnote, I was lucky enough to work on spots for 7Up International using the Susan Rose/Joanna Ferrone character “Fido Dido”! Here’s one of my favorites done while I was at the Ink Tank Studio in N.Y.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JpHjeGXyw8

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

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As if Michael Jackson wasn’t creepy enough when he was alive. The self-proclaimed King of Pop, who died nearly three years ago, is making a return via a new Pepsi campaign. The fabulously un-self-aware tagline? “Live for Now.”

The corporation is set to festoon one billion cans of Pepsi around the world – that’s one billion cans – with the singer’s unmistakable silhouette. It’s a bold move for a company whose most famous association with Jackson is that back in 1984, his hair caught fire filming a commercial for them. Jackson’s estate orchestrated his sponsorship resurrection, and a family spokesperson confirmed to the Wall Street Journal Thursday that “more such marketing agreements are planned.” Did anyone else just feel that collective shudder of revulsion?

Somewhere, Charlie Sheen is laughing and saying, “At least I never did that.” This week, we learned what’s even less funny than Ashton Kutcher: Ashton Kutcher in brownface.

In an ill-advised Popchips ad spoofing online dating that launched Wednesday, the “Two and a Half Men” star appeared as a variety of love-hungry “World Wide Lovers” vying for your affection. In a spectacular display of racial tone-deafness, one of them included “Raj.” Raj, all darkened skin and heavy accent, is “a Bollywood producer looking for the most delicious thing on the planet.” He’s looking for something “Kardashian hot … I would give that dog a bone.” He brags that he once won a milking contest, and he does a little dance that will haunt your nightmares.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 2 to 1 this morning to require broadcasters to post political ad data on the Web, making it easier for the public to see how as much as $3.2 billion will be spent on TV advertising this election.

The files — which, among other information, detail the times ads aired, how much they cost, and whether stations rejected ad buy requests from campaigns — are currently available only on paper at stations.