Then We Set His Hair on Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall of Fame Career in Advertising: Phil Dusenberry
Editorial Reviews
When author Phil Dusenberry began his career at the giant ad agency BBDO in 1962, advertising–and really all of marketing–was a very different industry. Products were simpler, customer segmentation and targeting less sophisticated, and even the vocabulary of sales and marketing less extensive. In the ensuing four decades, as Dusenberry rose to become Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of BBDO, the world changed. Still, the relative simplicity of a bygone era comes through in Then We Set His Hair on Fire–it’s a refreshing read and a throwback to the time of David Ogilvy’s classic, Confessions of an Ad Man.
Partly a memoir, partly a textbook on classic advertising campaigns, and partly one man’s discourse on the complicated art of persuading people to do a simple thing–”buying more stuff”–Dusenberry’s work will satisfy different audiences. Most obviously, eager business students wanting to learn the behind-the-scenes details that went into the creation of world-famous advertising campaigns will find a trove of rich anecdotes. Dusenberry describes the epiphanous moment that led to GE’s two-decade slogan, “Bringing Good Things to Life.” He then weaves an entertaining narrative around the clients and campaigns that defined his career: HBO (”There’s no place like HBO”), Pepsi (”Generation Next”), Cingular (”Raising the Bar”), even President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign (”Morning in America”), and others.
Dusenberry pays brief lip service to the science of advertising, describing the kind of background research that underlies great ad campaigns, but he admits a greater faith in gut instinct and the all-important insights that drove his clients’ success. The alternative? Dullness and failure. According to the opinionated and colorful Dusenberry, overly careful reliance on empirical data leads to copycat advertising, which in turn produces the worst of all situations: a “parity economy” in which goods and services are relatively commoditized, without the kind of special differentiation that creates lasting businesses.
Instead, Dusenberry exhorts his readers proverbially to “move the needle” in non-trivial ways, to get “sauce on your sleeve,” to “stand for something,” and every once in awhile, when circumstances warrant, to make the boldest of all moves, “betting the farm.” These axiomatic phrases might seem trite from another author, but somehow, Dusenberry makes them seem trenchant with his never-ending stories. In one of the newer stories, for example, he recounts how BBDO staged a pro bono campaign for New York City shortly after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, using celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, Robert DeNiro, Billy Crystal, Ben Stiller, and Barbara Walters to illustrate the power of the dreams that draw so many young people to the city, even today.
It’s those powerful dreams that have become lost in so much advertising today, and which Dusenberry recalls in spades. While his playfully titled volume cannot be taken as a comprehensive, scientific manual for better advertising, it does well in reminding us of the qualities from advertising’s origins that remain ever-relevant. –Peter Han
From Publishers Weekly
In Dusenberry’s practical if sometimes self-congratulatory memoir-cum-handbook, he asserts, “A good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials.” The book is as thick as Campbell’s Chunky Soup with instructive anecdotes from his long and storied career as former chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America. With illustrations from BBDO accounts including GE, Federal Express, Gillette, HBO and Pizza Hut, Dusenberry stresses the importance of strategic insight for distinguishing your brand and cutting through the proverbial clutter. GE’s tag line, “We bring good things to life,” which endured from 1979 to 2003, was built on the corporate giant’s pervasiveness, for example. Dusenberry addresses the challenges of branding in today’s “parity economy,” doing research, creating ads that actually “sell more stuff,” launching a brand, distilling what it stands for as the starting point for generating insights, and building a superior creative team. Throughout, he strikes an authoritative but conversational tone as he offers behind-the-scenes observations (e.g., on the infamous Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial). Dusenberry’s theses are hardly earth-shattering, but his firsthand take on some major campaigns of the past few decades make the book worth a browse for aspiring marketers. (Sept.)
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