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Little, Better, Yellow, Different In Gumbo America

But there’s another thing about Crispin Porter’s ads that makes them stand out. They do not pretend to be anything but what they are. They do not claim that Burger King or Ikea or BMW “understand” you or claim that they “care.” “What if McDonald’s ran a campaign that told the truth?” quips memoirist Augusten Burroughs, who spent eighteen years in the advertising industry. “ ‘We’re greasy and salty and dirt-cheap, and we’re open after the bars close!’ ” CPB’s commercials come surprisingly close to doing that. They assume that everyone who sees an advertisement understands the basic fact that it is an advertisement. Says Alex Bogusky, CPB’s creative director: “I don’t mind looking like we’re selling something. I just want to make sure everyone’s in on the joke. Everyone is having fun with it. The consumer is there, and they know we’re trying to sell a Mini. Why else would we be there, y’know? And we know that they know.”

There is an award-winning CPB commercial (directed by Spike Jonze, it should be noted—there is no agency that has yet proved immune to the charms of having an Academy Award–nominated director) for Ikea called “Lamp.” A woman takes a lamp out of her living room and leaves it out on the street. Rain starts falling. Sad music plays. The lamp’s curve makes it look like it is hunched against the rain, weeping. Finally—this is one of those spots where the twist is at the end—a portly Swede comes out, his hair matted by the rain, and screams at the camera: “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That’s because you’re crazy! It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.” It might be the most effective takedown of advertising ever done. “Lamp” (which, predictably, given the classic advertising ambivalence about advertising, walked away with a prize at last year’s Andys) is the best takedown of commercials ever because it undermines the whole religious idea of the Brand Essence. “Lamp” might be the perfect commercial for the new world. The one in which everybody, even the 15-year-old—especially the 15-year-old—knows, and knows that the people making the commercial know that they know. It says that a lamp is a lamp is a lamp. It has no other essence. Even when it comes from the people paying for the commercial.

Before Lubars left Fallon, he had been working on a project that would have been perhaps the ultimate multimedia advertising coup. Having hired big-name directors to make movielike BMW ads, Lubars was hoping to come full circle and turn the BMW commercials into a full-scale theatrical movie. The movie would keep the mini-films’ star, Clive Owen. Fallon would “produce.” There was even a big-deal Hollywood agent involved, Spencer Baumgarten of Endeavor. (Lubars: “The hottest agent in Hollywood.”)

I called Baumgarten to talk about the movie; I surmised that in a feature-length production, “the car” would no longer be the star. I imagined something like James Bond (whom Clive Owen’s BMW-film character is very consciously patterned on). No, no, Baumgarten corrected. Of course the car would still be the star.

The car was the movie, the movie was the car, and the movie was the ad. Naturally, Baumgarten explained, “you don’t want anything in the concept of the movie that will offend potential BMW buyers.” The movie, he continued, “would send an incredibly strong subliminal message of BMW.” The irony is too obvious to play up and too extreme not to mention. Start with advertising that tries not to sell, a creative director who wants to show—really wants to show—how things really are, put it all through the Brand Essence machine, and you come out with talk of subliminal advertising. “Real is back, authenticity is back,” says Augusten Burroughs of today’s advertising climate. “Agencies say, ‘We’re just being real here, we’re just being honest.’ They polish it up, and make it as far from real as possible.”

Advertising is the ultimate reinvention industry. Everybody who has spent any time in that world is hardheaded about that. Says BBDO’s Charlie Miesmer, “There was a creative revolution in the seventies and there was one in the eighties,” he says. “There will be another creative revolution because creative revolutions are responses to the public’s perception that the work sucks.” Lubars himself uses the reinvention word when talking about what he’s trying to do at BBDO, comparing it to what the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper. “They thought their name was passé,” he says, “so they said, ‘Let’s reinvent ourselves as this psychedelic band.’ ”

It’s hard not to sympathize at least a little with Lubars. The bottom line is that you cannot fail to like something about a guy with enough of a sense of humor to take his philosophical cues from Wayne’s World and worries that making bad ads is “polluting the culture with crap.”

Another way of looking at this is that reality is BBDO’s new brand image, and Lubars its representative—the new, improved, 99 44⁄100 percent pure adman. But eventually, advertising being advertising, the brand image—reality—will have to be reinvented.