 Everyone messes up now and then. Learn from our embarrassing war stories!
We know a guy who always seems to get everything just right. He always knows exactly what to do, in virtually any situation. So once we asked him: “How do you do it?” Without hesitating, he replied, “I have screwed up so many times, that I’ve done everything else wrong and have been able to rule them out!” Wow. Love that honesty. But it’s also helpful. What happens when a plane crashes? The NTSB rushes in to find out why. They publish a report. It’s a lesson-learned. So others can benefit from it and, hopefully, it won’t happen again. (Incidentally, one of those old “Airport” movies was based on one of those true reports. A plane had crashed because both the pilot and co-pilot suffered from food poisoning. To this day, the pilot and co-pilot are each served different meals, to avoid that problem.) And so goes this article, which is a follow-up to our earlier post on goofs and gaffes. Interestingly, all of the stories we’re going to share here date from our days in agency-based automotive retail advertising: hard-sell radio and TV for car dealers. The professional actor We once directed a TV spot, on location at a car dealership. It was a fairly big-budget shoot, with a union film crew and talent. The star of the spot was a terribly handsome actor, who looked smart and professional: the perfect spokesman type. He had one big line: “We’re big! Big on savings!” So we called “Action!” and he said, “We’re big! Big on action!” *sigh* At least it got a laugh in the editing room. The funny spot that wasn’t We once sent a script over to a radio station for them to record a spot for a car dealer. We had a good relationship with the production people there, and they thought they’d have some fun with us this time. So they played around with the script. They actually recorded a fully-produced commercial in which the announcer excitedly offered “two-for-one Chevy’s” and new cars for as little as “50 bucks,” all buttoned with the name and address of this very-real car dealership—one part of the script that they didn’t change. As part of the quality-control process, we would always request a phone playback of any spot before it aired. So when we heard this one, it certainly scored its intended shock value. But while it was marginally funny, it was incredibly dangerous. Here was a fully-produced 60-second radio spot, with our client’s name on it, sitting inside a prominent market radio station which already had time slots lined up to air commercials for this exact client! Do you have any idea how easy it would be for that spot to accidentally air? We politely thanked the production crew for their cute joke. And then we downright begged them to erase the spot immediately, and proceed apace with a properly-scripted version. The right spot aired. Phew. Lesson learned? Don’t take anything—not even a written script which your client has approved—for granted. Even a well-intentioned little joke could prove disastrous if it aired to millions of listeners. The sound effect that almost sank us Here’s another hand-them-the-script-and-let-them-record-it story for you. It was a different radio station. And no joke was intended. But again, the stakes were high: millions of listeners, and a prominent car dealer who was paying for all this. As we’d mentioned above, this is all about hard-sell car-dealer ads. So the script for this one opened like this: ANNCR: Stop! SFX: [Car chirps its brakes.] ANNCR: Whatever you’re doing, get to [Dealer] and [spend all your money on this great sale before it ends, etc., etc.] Not terribly creative, but terribly straightforward. Right? You’d think. Until we got the playback. In a classic case of what were they thinking?!, the playback that we heard went something like this: ANNCR: Stop! SFX: [Car slams its brakes, skids, slides, and CRASHES INTO A TREE, replete with shattering glass and smashing metal] ANNCR: Whatever you’re doing-- We didn’t need to hear much more. Suffice it to say, you don’t want to sell cars using the mental imagery of a fatal collision! We politely asked the radio station’s production crew (remember, lots of these people are kids straight out of school) to kindly employ a gentler sound effect, one which hewed to the direction in the script. And rather than just “trust them,” we insisted on a new phone playback, after the revision was made. Lesson learned? Check everything. Taking a phone playback is akin to proofreading print. In our early agency days, we once proofread an ad which had two little photos in it, each with a caption. We noticed that the captions were reversed: Photo 1 had Caption 2, and Photo 2 had Caption 1. Turns out it had been running that way for months. Why? No one took the time to look. The previous story was about a car crash that was merely a sound effect. Our next one is about one that wasn’t. A little too close Here’s one of the silliest car-dealer TV commercials we had the dubious honor of directing: It purported to show this dealership’s “huge inventory!” of new cars. How? If you weren’t aware, all dealer showrooms include at least one set of really big double doors, by which they get the actual cars in and out. This dealership had two: one in the front, one in the back. So here’s the ingenious creative of the spot: You’d see a shot of this dealership, with the big front doors of its showroom flung wide open, and, while the off-screen announcer told you how great this place was, you’d see what looked like an unending stream of new cars driving out the front doors of the showroom. The setup was simple. We just had the back doors open at the same time, with a long line of cars, and drivers, queued up in the parking lot behind it. When we called “Action,” everyone would drive into the open back doors, across the showroom floor, and out the open front doors, toward the camera, where they would follow a curve and continue offscreen. Pretty simple. But here’s the problem. Unlike the high-budget spot that was “Big on action!” which we mentioned above, this one was shot on a dirt budget. We used a cable-company camera crew, and for drivers, the dealer’s general manager simply “volun-told” his various staffers that they were going to be TV stars. When we called “Action,” the first two cars made it. The third didn’t. It hit the front-door door-jamb, smashing the aluminum to bits while ripping up the bumper, marker lights, and trim on a brand-new car with the sticker still on it. The driver? A pretty young receptionist, who was bawling her eyes out by the time we called “Cut!” So what happened? The dealer’s general manager was standing right beside us, behind the camera, when it happened, and he—amazingly—thought it was hysterical. Couldn’t stop laughing. Mentioned something about “insurance.” Consoled the poor kid who had crashed. And demanded that we send him a copy of the outtake, so he could show it to all his friends. Lesson learned? Who the @#$#@ knows! On avoiding mistakes To err is human, as Alexander Pope famously wrote. But that last story really does have a lesson: Sometimes, it’s best to call in the pros. Need some creative accomplished with the benefit of lots of lessons-learned? Contact us. We’d love to help.
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