Meanwhile back at Y&R, I was on a mission to run the table, from sales promotion writer to copywriter, sharing a small office with another copywriter, then on to copy supervisor and my own office plus a secretary. What a wonderful partner came my way in the person of a recent Manhattanville College grad named Maura Kavanagh. Tall, blonde, blue eyed and very bright, Maura not only typed my copy, she edited it too. I hit the Irish Sweepstakes. Maura remains a friend of the Hampel family to this day. Next came a giant step up to associate creative director and ultimate creative responsibility for a half dozen important accounts. My office space grew as large as the office of the copy department head who first interviewed me. It had two gigantic windows and came with the privilege of picking out my own furnishings.. It was here where the legendary yellow paisley sofa which drew more visitors to my office just to glimpse it, made its debut. Someone said, "Wow you could throw up on it and no one would know the difference. Someone once did.
With associate creative director came the mantle of vice president of the company. Imagine, the nebbish from 23rd Street a VP of Young & Rubicam, the paragon of the craft of advertising, the engine of American business. When I excitedly phoned my dad to give him the news of my promotion, he said "Mazel tov. How old is the president?"
Navigating the talent laden layers in the highly structured creative department at Y&R. was no cake walk. After all, I could not leap tall buildings or fly faster than jet airplanes or skip the hierarchy of the agency’s organization. Even though I was once referred to as "Super Jew" in a pejorative way by a Texaco client at another ad agency. When I arrived at Y&R in 1957 it didn’t take long for me to size up the landscape. Now the nebbish from 23rd Street in Paterson, New Jersey was in the big leagues, like a rookie shortstop from the minors on his first day on a major league team roster. What will it take to shine in this environment among copywriting stars whose award winning print ads and TV reels make my meager output look like typical catalog copy?
Alan Jay Lerner of the musical writing team of Lerner and Lowe was once asked why so much time elapsed between writing of his shows. "It's not that I'm slow to write. I'm just quick to throw out." (Lerner was married eight times). I subscribed to Lerner's method. In fact I became a fanatic.For every headline I ever wrote, I rejected dozens and dozens. I knew what I was after and I was never satisfied until I reached that "aha" moment. Every assignment became a challenge on which my reputation rested. So I chased the winning solution while at home, during the commute, while on long walks and doing chores around the house, before bed and upon waking. Chasing perfection can drive a person crazy. My wife will attest that it did.
There was always a better headline around the corner. The idea was to keep going until you found it. Years later at another ad agency I distributed buttons in the form of a STOP sign but with the word" "Don't" superimposed on top. I still have a limited supply so if you want one e-mail me, alhamp@aol.com.
Early on I identified what I was after. I worked to create the kind of advertising that would attract me and that I would remember. That genre is best summed up in the word UNEXPECTED. I think people like surprises in advertising, just as they do the unexpected endings of stories by O.Henry , Poe, Roald Dahl and films by Hitchcock.
Most advertising is so boring, an unexpected approach stops the reader or viewer and contributes to memorability. And that's why I'm also a great believer of HUMOR in advertising. The punch line of a joke is the perfect example of the unexpected. Case in point: George Burns was asked "What was your worst sexual experience?" Burns replied, "Terrific." The most popular and most memorable TV commercials are almost always the humorous ones.
Searching for a headline for a Jell-O Pudding ad, the strategy of which was Jell-O's superior texture or smoothness, I must have filled two pages of possible captions before finally settling on "Jell-O Believes You've Taken Enough Lumps in Your Life". The line ran over a scrumptious Irving Penn photo of a dish of Jell-O Pudding. The ad was an award winner.
It has been said success is a matter of luck, tenacity, attitude and talent. The loss of any one can sink you. But if you have all four, success is assured. I could influence the latter three and I did. But luck? How do you get lucky? You have it or you don't. Luck came to me when I was assigned to General Foods. and particularly its flagship brand, Jell-O Gelatin. It was one of Y&R's oldest and most carefully nurtured accounts. My first job for Jell-O began when I subbed for an ailing copywriter and wrote a cast, or integrated commercial for the Jack Benny show. It featured the stars of the show and appeared to be a continuation of the story line but was really a pitch for Jell-O Gelatin's new fresh fruit flavors woven seamlessly into the show's theme. Sometimes the Benny writers would help polish my scripts. The job of crafting General Foods commercials for some of the most popular TV sitcoms of the day became my stock in trade. I was forever winging off to L.A. to oversee my General Foods spots as they were produced at such studios as Desilu and Warner Bros. I remember kidding around with 5 year old Ron Howard, while as Opie, he waited for his next scene on the Andy Griffith Show. The kid grew to be one of Hollywood's legendary award winning directors. These were undoubtedly exciting times as I fancied myself a TV sitcom script writer for the shows I would watch on my 12 inch duPont TV in our apartment back home in Paterson. Who'd of thought that the nebbish from 23rd Street would make it in show business. Wasn't I producing miniature, 30 and 60 second movies that were seen by more people than many feature films? To those who knew me best, I was in the process of leaving my humility on the doorstep and morphing from a nebbish to a gonse k'nocker (a big deal).
It didn't hurt to have a patron in a high post at Y&R. Mine was Dermott McCarthy, a big lovable Irishman who was copy chief of the agency. He dug my copy and always matched my style with accounts that appreciated the unexpected. We took memorable trips to the West Coast together. L.A. was Dermott's home town. The plane would no sooner land than Dermott would shlep me to one of his old haunts, a neighborhood bar where he knew every bartender and most of the patrons. One time he took me to lunch at a convent where his sister was a nun in residence. It was o.k., I was wearing a mezuzah at the time. Dermott loved his martinis. Try as he did he could not convert this Manischewitz drinker. When he and Dorothy flew out together to meet me in L.A. he almost made a shikker (drunk) out of my wife during the flight. Martinis before and during were Dermott's antidote for fear of flying. The flight attendants who served him became his friends and those flights turned into parties in the sky. One flight attendant became Dermott's secretary.
Dermott McCarthy was the first one to recommend me to replace him as copy chief of the agency when he went off to become creative director of European offices.
