Kicking the Tires

I bought my first new car in 1987 — a Volkswagen Golf, five speed, champagne silver. It was tough giving up my fire-engine red ’73 Beetle, but in the end I opened the sunroof, cranked the radio, and drove off without looking back.

I worked at Advertising Age back then, still recovering from teaching college. In ’87, Ad Age put me in charge of the nascent Promotions section (two pages, twice a month). I have always thought I was given that project, frankly, because no one else wanted it. I suspect Ad Age started a dedicated section to compete with a start-up called PROMO, the same way it had instituted regional coverage a few years before to compete with another new kid, Adweek.

I knew nothing about promotion, but I liked the detail work and the vast scope of possibilities that media advertising didn’t have. I liked wacky campaigns. I liked clever ideas that got people involved with a brand in ways a TV screen never could. And I liked being in charge of something.

One of my first interviews was with Chris Sutherland, then executive director of PMAA (back before it dropped “of America”). He explained promotion to me by comparing it to a car wash: Image advertising is the polish, and sales promotion (yes, that’s what we all called it, don’t be coy) is the requisite car wash, necessary for sales but not especially respected. When sales need a quarterly goose, you send your brand through the sales promotion car wash and hope it doesn’t damage the image-ad finish too much.

Chris delivered the analogy far more elegantly than that, but you get the picture: Everyone likes a shiny brand, but no one likes cleaning its undercarriage.

You’d think that would have resonated with me, the new-car owner and all, but it felt incomplete. It sold promotion short.

Also in 1987, I met Kerry E. Smith. We were in L.A. to help judge the Council of Sales Promotion Agencies’ awards competition. (CSPA has since become the Association of Promotion Marketing Agencies Worldwide, and its competition has evolved into the Globes after a few years of collaboration with PROMO’s own PRO Awards.) Back then, CSPA had trade reporters judge alongside council members (who were mostly agency presidents) to bring some objectivity to the proceedings. Judging a competition was a great way to get immersed in the business by reviewing tons of work in one afternoon. (It still is, by the way. Anyone who might like to be a PRO Awards judge this summer, drop me a line.)

Kerry wore a black turtleneck and well-tailored blazer and I assumed he was an agency president. He was the only one in the room who answered my naїve questions, and he did it eagerly and thoroughly. That night, over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, I got a history lesson that has served me well ever since. He talked more about boats than cars, and had an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm for agencies that wanted to do more than give away logoed T-shirts and print FSIs. He, too, envisioned bigger things.

Business can change a lot in 15 years. It’s been fun to watch this business grow up, and to talk with a new generation of marketers who really like what they do. That’s the best part of my job: Hearing your stories.

Here’s one that made me laugh: Ad agency guy wants to do an SLO with baseball caps, but he doesn’t know where to buy caps, or how to get them to consumers (or, for that matter, what “SLO” stands for). “There are companies who specialize in that,” a promo colleague tells him. Overwhelmed, Ad Guy hands it off to her. She rolls her eyes, then makes it happen.

Promotion doesn’t wash cars. It keeps them running. It bolts the brand to the retailer, and wires the consumer to the brand. It’s greasy, not glamorous, but it’s mechanics, not Min-wax.

My VW has 170,000 miles on it and it’s still my favorite car. A month ago, the garbage truck backed into it and wrenched off the front bumper. The car runs fine without it. The heat is iffy and the horn is broken and the sunroof has been shut since that time it got stuck open and we had to pay a guy $20 to close it before it started raining again. It hasn’t been washed in ages but it runs, man.

It runs no matter what.