12/08/97 ONLINE ORIGINAL: THREE ADS THAT DO THE JOB--CHEAP

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THREE ADS THAT DO THE JOB--CHEAP

Ad man Ian Barry remembers it well: He was taking his poorly behaved Kerin Terrier to the dog trainer. That's when he noticed a store next door that sold invisible fencing. The idea of an invisible fence -- which is actually a collar that shocks a dog when it crosses a boundary of buried wire -- struck Barry as odd. "It just seemed like a great opportunity to do something," he said. "It was just such a bizarre product, fencing that is invisible."
Barry, a senior art director at Arnold Finnegan Martin in Richmond, Va., teamed with freelance copywriter Steve Dolbinski. The pair quickly settled infor their brainstorming session, typically a marathon exchange full of free association, half-baked ideas, and, unfortunately, writer's block. But not this time. "I think we arrived at our idea within 15 minutes," says Barry. "We just hit on it and said, 'That's a home run.'"
The ad was simply a picture of a dog whose muzzle was mashed as if it had walked into an invisible barrier. They took the idea to the store owner, who required a bit of convincing. "We presented to the guy and said, 'we'll do the creative for free,' and I think that was a hard thing for him to turn down," says Barry. "We decided on dachshunds because we wanted something with a long nose that you could see was smooshed in. He sent about 20 takes, and one was just perfect, the dog paw was in motion, and the dog had a look in its eye like it really hit something. It was perfect."
Barry also called on friends who supplied thousands of dollars of photo retouching (to "smoosh" the dog's snout) and printing at a nominal fee. The end result was a point-of-purchase poster for the client and a prestigious Gold Pencil from the One show, an ad-industry award show, for Barry and Dolbinski.
When dentist W. Baxter Perkinson Jr. approached Virginia Commonwealth University students Stacy Milrany and Liz Bekesz, he was already recognized around Richmond, Va., as both a dentist and artist.
His problem was that he was becoming better known for his watercolors than his root canals. The students' solution not only slyly connected Perkinson's professional knowhow to his aesthetic skills, but also set him apart from the typical floss-and-polish dentist. They "had to say what he could do that other dentists in Richmond can't do," says Milrany, who directed the art for the campaign. Milrany and Bekesz, who wrote the copy, rejected the typical elements of dentists' ads (cartoon teeth, haloed pictures of practitioners) for a clean, modern look. They then homed in on Perkinson's cosmetic dentistry practice. "We threw out, oh, about 150 ideas," says Bekesz with some embarrassment. "I don't even want to go into detail."
The small black-and-white ads ran in programs for a Richmond-area lecture series. They cost Perkinson a little more than $1,000 for copy, design, photos, layout, and production, not including the advertising space. It's too early to see results, but the dentist has already taken a bite for three more ads.
While Tom Amico worked at ad agency Meldrum & Fewsmith in Cleveland, he was itching to break away from the constraints of clients like Glidden Paints and Stanley Steamer carpet cleaners. That's right about when he got a telephone call from a friend of a friend. "This guy had an auto improvement place and it wasn't doing that well," recalls Amico. "The guy was running ads, but they were very generic, the kind the newspaper would come up with themselves, and it had the name of the place and the store hours."
Amico and partner Jim Proimos felt they could go against convention, producing 100% art-free ads that lampooned celebrity endorsements and advertising itself. "We saw the opportunity to be a little naughty," says Amico.
Without using any photos, the ads coyly implied that celebrities endorsed various car improvements. Among those the ads invoked were the mayor of Cleveland, the city's top news anchor, and the Pope, pointing out that a sunroof would make it easier to drive while wearing his papal headgear. Each ad mentioned a different celebrity and a different improvement such as car alarms or paint detailing. "Part of his problem, was people came in for tires, but they didn't know about a lot of his other services, so it was a matter of getting out messages that would improve his business." The one sop to advertising convention was to offer a discount with the ad. But instead of including a coupon, the ads required customers to perform. In the case of the Pope ad, anyone who could recite the first 10 words of the "Our Father" got $5 off a $150 sunroof.
While Amico claims the ads worked, with five of them running "for quite a while," he didn't win any awards for them or even get paid for his services. He took his remuneration in personal gratification. "We got nothing out of it, I didn't even have a car at the time," he says. "We did it out of the goodness of our hearts, and the limitlessness of our egos."
By Roy Furchgott in Baltimore

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