Fred Seibert's Blog

Tony Schwartz, 1923-2008: his ‘daisy ad’ changed political advertising.

Even though he became famous in an era of black & white and radio, Tony Schwartz taught core lessons of communication to everyone in the media. Whether they knew it was coming from him or not.

His most famous piece was this campaign spot for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, which, lore has it, ran only once (and never even mentioned the opponent’s name) but was responsible for defeating Barry Goldwater in a landslide.

My mentor, Dale Pon, not only insisted I buy and read Tony’s book “The Responsive Chord,” but that I should meet the man himself, which was an incredible experience. From then on, I made the book required reading among my promotion staff.

Check it out. The things you think you know because you’re smart are probably things that Tony was smart about before we were born.

Michael Grant owns the UK based Yarto Group and we first met a few years ago through mutual friends. He introduced me to cartoonist Bill Houston, creator of the Hackman character (whose comics are collected as a couple of books). We usually get together around the Licensing Show and this year was no exception. He caught me up on a lot of the activity at Yarto, and, as always, we thought about different ways we might work together. And, I got another chance to pontificate about how the internet will save us all.

For those of you who comments on Frederator’s blogs, you might notice something new. “Powered by Disqus” (that is, Dis-Cuss). From their own page:

“With Disqus, your readers aren’t just leaving comments — they’re participants in a discussion that you’ve started.

“This is made possible with threaded conversations that are easy to follow and join.

“And, of course, it integrates right within your blog.

“Commenters on the go? Receive and reply to the discussion from anywhere with email and mobile posting.”

There are already a couple of issues we’re working to resolve (right now, we don’t show the number of comments under a post), but hopefully we’ll have them fixed soon.

Will it work better for you? For us? Who knows? I certainly hope so. Please, let us know what you think.

PS: As with the conversion of our blogs over to Wordpress, I want to thanks Nate Olsen, Michael Lee, and Jeremy Kutner for helping us get this thing together. And David Karp and Marco Arment at Tumblr for suggesting it in the first place.

George Seibert, 1950

Frederator Postcard Series 6.10
Mailed the week of June 9, 2008

…..
Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

This advertising was one of the choice campaigns from one of our pet projects at my ad agency. Like I said a few days ago, in the mid-80s my partner Alan Goodman and I came up with the idea of the first oldies TV network, Nick-at-Nite, and our creative director Noel Frankel developed the ad that was the perfect way to start telling people about our nutty approach to building the identity. Then, writer Bill Burnett kept coming up with the twisted ads for places like TV Guide.

Soon Nick-at-Nite was the most popular cable network in prime time and we needed to start selling some ads. Bill Burnett came up with the idea of a faux editorial campaign for the advertising trade magazines (like Advertising Age and Adweek) from a media pundit, Raul Degado (written by Bill, modeled by Tom Pomposello, who had one outrageous media buying scheme after another, every week. By the end of each column, of course, Nick-at-Nite seemed the perfect real time solution to the advertisers’ problems.

This one could be my favorite. It’s funny, and, it came true!

Mailed out the week of June 2, 2008

…..
Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

I suppose you’d have to be a certain age to appreciate this poster my old ad agency created in the 1980s for Nick-at-Nite. Or any of the other ads we made for them. But I wanted to put them up anyway because it’s some of my favorite work from those days (and it’s funny). My partner Alan Goodman and I conceived the idea for the network and built it for Nickelodeon in 1985, and Fred/Alan Creative Directors Bill Burnett and Noel Frankel created the campaign. (You probably know Bill from his cartoon life as the co-creator of ChalkZone and a number of Oh Yeah! Cartoons.)

For whatever it’s worth, I’ll throw in the first written description we put together for Nick-at-Nite, two or three years after it went on the air. You might note that it’s also the first linking of Nick-at-Nite with TV Land (”Hello out there from TV Land!” a variation of the 1950s original “Hello out there in TV Land!”), the precursor to MTV Networks spinning off the 24 hour network called TV Land.

Karl Toerge has worked a lot with Frederator recently, on his original short (with Jim Wyatt) Ratzafratz, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, and the Ape Escape Cartoons. And it’s always great when he stops by the Burbank office when I’m in town, like he did last week to show us a pitch for his new series.

Thanks to Karl for kind permission to show some art from his cartoon pitch.

Dan Meth, Herb Scannell, and Craig Barlett
find something amusing in a Meth Minute. Hmmm.

Old friend and colleague Craig Barlett stopped by the studio in New York to say Hi to Herb Scannell and me, and chat a little about everything from new projects to Hey Arnold!