99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-57- What Gave You That Idea

Episode Date: June 29, 2012

Starlee Kine’s friend Noel works in advertising. In 2003, Noel was working in at an agency in Richmond, VA. Everyone wanted to work on flashy spots like Apple or Nike or Gatorade. Do you know what wasn’t flashy? Insurance. Which … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. My friend Noel works in advertising. That is Starly Kind. And this is her friend Noel.

My name is Noel Ritter. And I'm an Associate Creative Director. What is a Associate Creative Director do? Uh, boy. Um, an associate creative director, Guides, uh, helps. Help, oh my god. I don't know what I do. In 2003, Nol was working at an agency in Richmond, Virginia.

Everyone wanted to work on flashy spots like Apple or Nike or Gatorade. Do you know what wasn't flashy? Insurance. Which is why when a company called Geico became a client, everyone hoped the campaign would end up on their desk. People would run the other way when the creative director for Geico

would come down the way. Literally? Yeah, definitely some ducking was happening. Noles and Cherfew is at a wrong water cooler at the wrong time or what, but he ultimately got stuck with Geico. His job is to help them somehow figure out a clever, not painfully boring way

to explain how simple it was for people to sign up for their insurance online. So put this in the context for us because I've seen about a million of these ads at this point. It's true. I feel like these ads are on all the time. Do you watch the Bravo channel at all? No, not at all. If you did, I feel like your kind of top chef is still good. And if you watch Bravo every single commercial for Bravo is an insurance ad.

And it's not just Geico anymore because now it's all these TV people selling you insurance, right? There's a president from 24. He's selling you insurance. And there's that loser boyfriend guy from 30 Rock who sells it to you. Well, the maim wants it. I love those. You like the maim? Really? Absolutely. The kids make me skip back and watch them again. But see, there's enough on now that your kid can actually have a favorite. Like back then, like before Geico, there weren't any on, so nobody could even, you wouldn't, nobody would be competing about which was their favorite insurance commercial because there weren't on insurance commercials. And I guess when Geico first came to Noel's office, insurance was almost entirely marketed

through direct mail. The title is also in the midst of reading the short story collection Pasterelia by the writer George Saunders. The title is about a theme park, which has come to learn how other civilizations live. Among the attractions are Russian peasant farm, pioneer encampment, and wise mountain hermit. The focus of the story, though, is on the prehistoric exhibit, where two actors, a woman and a man, play the part of cave husband and cave wife. No-one loved the way it contrasted two very different elements that shouldn't have gone together. It was like taking a natural cave with stalactites and stalagmites, and then showing what life was like back in caveman times

by hiring these low-ren actors. I have to admit I'm not feeling my best. Not that I'm doing so bad. Not that I really have anything to complain about. Not that I would actually verbally complain if I did have something to complain about, no. The story is both very funny and very sad. The caveman husband takes his work super seriously, using body language to communicate.

Hardly breaking character, even though weeks pass when no visitors come by to watch. I'm sitting back in my haunches, waiting for people to poke in their heads. Although it's been 13 days since anyone poked in their head. The cavewoman on the other hand speaks English all the time. And Janet speaking English to be more and more. She drinks on the job and tries to get him to loosen up. Which is partly why I feel so, you know, crummy. It's a tedious routine, full of pointless tasks,

and a lot of the language echoes that of office life. Janet scratches under her armpit and makes it sound like a monkey. Ben lights a cigarette. What a bunch of s*** that she says. Why you insist I'll never know. Who's here? Do you see anyone here but us? At the end of each day, they have to fill out

daily partner evaluation forms. And the cave husband always says his cave wife is doing a good job, even when she's clearly not. I gesture to her to put out the cigarette and make the fire. She gestures to me to kiss her butt. Nol had to hit a wall on the Geico campaign. He and his creative team, whatever that is, are trying to come up with interesting analogies. Maybe they could show a baby who couldn't be potty trained, but who could push the few

buttons necessary to file a claim with Geico? Or puppets who kept pulling fire alarms? None of their ideas felt right or special enough. We needed a break and we had gone to lunch and were sitting there eating our lunches, and then all of a sudden I'm like, wait a second, these cavemen from the Saunders' Book like that, that's perfect. And the whole slogan came to me fully formed. It's so easy a caveman can do it. Which of course became the ads that you are probably picturing in your head right now.

Like the George Saunders' story, the ads are funny, but also a little sad. It's our casted cavemen who seemed truly pained by the label that society has given them. Why does that bother you? Why does it bother me? So easy a caveman can do it. Well, it's just a commercial. OK. Well, what if it said, geico.com, so easy a therapist can do it?

Well, then commercial wouldn't make sense to me. Why not? Well, therapists are what? Smart. Noel says when the caveman commercials first aired, his agency received several letters from individual viewers, asking of a blurry caveman playing a piano in the background to one of the spots was the actor Bell Kilmer.

The commercial put Geico on the map. So that got Starly wondering if she could trace the trail of inspiration back even further. So she called up George Saunders to ask him about some of the influences in his life that made him the kind of writer he is. Normally when you're a writer and you go on tour and people talk a lot of inspiration,

you have a kind of a bull-****-list. Yes. A little Shakespeare, you know, a told story. And then if you think deeper, there's a other list which is actually sometimes a little bit embarrassing, even you know, a total story. And if you think deeper, there's other lists, which is actually sometimes a little bit embarrassing, even you know, or at least it is coming from a different direction. And by different direction, what he's trying to say is

that Charlie Brown, peanuts, Christmas, and Halloween, shells are embarrassingly big in my childhood. I'd never seen anything that was quite so tonally complicated or something, but I felt a real direct line between the way I was feeling about things and the way my neighborhood looked and felt. For example, I would do a lot of dreamy walking around the neighborhood and really love that you see him in line as doing that.

And it seemed that just reassure you somehow that your experience is actually really sacred. You know, it's really valuable. Your neighborhood is really as important as any other place in the world. You know, part of the thing of influence is that we think there's something in the world that intrudes on us and changes us. But the other way to see it is there's something in us that finds a mirror. And then I think when you go to do some work, something and you rise us to it. George was also influenced early on by the jerk, money python and jaws.

When you the teenager, he listened to his favorite yes album over and over and over again, fixated on the way they had ordered their songs. Why is that song third? What did you mean? What did they mean by putting this one last? The dat later influenced how you ordered your stories in Detroit called 100%. After high school, George became an engineer. When he first started seriously writing, he read only authors who were dead, Hemingway, Keraq, Maler, he consciously tried to avoid all living writers. And one day, just to get it out of the way, he went to the Chicago Public Library and piled together a stack of literary journals. I sat at the lunch at, my goal was to read about 15 lily-rimagging so I could then totally

abandon the contemporary story, not have to bother with it anymore and go back to trying to be Hemingway. He would open a magazine, start reading a story, and then push it aside, thinking it was dumb. Then he came across a short story called Hot Ice by a Chicago author named Stewart Dieback. It was the first time I'd ever had the experience of reading a work of literature that was set in a physical place in time that I knew. And literally in 15 minutes I l lurched for it and I understood

the relationship between actual experience and literature in a way I never had before. But I mean, not like your stories are these hyper realistic scenes. No, you're free to invent 100%. You can just make up whatever you want, knowing that your experience will come through you onto the page, even if it's a theme park, even if it's cavemen, because in that story, you know, in the direct story, it's not really a real story at all, but you can feel that the directs hard to sing. Whatever it takes, we're going to get this machine up and flying. We're going to use the streets for all it's going to use mythology. We're going to use poetry, you know, that I don't know what the hell he was doing. It was so crazy. But at the end, I was shaky. And tears in my eyes.

The face was red. I mean, I mean. And then you did do it immediately to start trying to write like that then? Yep. Yep. Immediately. I like that night.

Which got me thinking, what influenced Stewart Diebeck to write the way he did? I called him up at the place in Florida. He rents every year, where he catches fresh fish every morning and then fries him up for lunch. Stuart told me that when he first started writing, he had also fallen in love with the great American realists. Saul Bellow and Scott Fitzgerald and Nelson Aldrin.

It had never occurred to him to write any other way. He always wrote while listening to music. When he was 25, he became enchanted with two Hungarian composers, Zoltan Kodali and Bella Bertak, who had traveled around Eastern Europe recording music on phonographic cylinders. He went to the Chicago Public Library, the same one that George Saunders would go to years later when he discovered Stuart's story, and checked out as many bar talk and Kodali records as he could find. later when he discovered Stuart's story. And checked out as many bar talk and Cadolay records

as he could find. And I put this music on and sat down to write a story about some stuff we used to do as kids and the neighborhood pills of that. I grew up in an inner city neighborhood on the southwest side. And it's kind of corny to say you went into a trance, but I was taken out of myself. And after I turned the music off and looked at the three

or four pages that I had written, I realized that I was writing in a way I had never imagined. I could write in a voice I didn't know I had. The music had just opened something up in me. just opened something up in me. Stuart says that listening to that music was a central thing that would happen to him as a writer. Everything he would write from that point on was due to putting those two records on. Barthocking Giddali were influenced by the work of the French composer, Debussy, who was inspired by the work of the poet, Bodelaire, who loved the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

Bodelaire wrote that he loved Poe because he was like him. Quote, the first time I ever opened a book by Poe, I discovered with the rap, Cher, and awe, not only subjects which I dreamt, but whole phrases I'd conceived written by Poe 20 years before. Poe's story, The Raven, was inspired by a bird in Charles Dickens' story, Barnaby Rooge, which Poe would actually pan in a review he wrote when the book first came out. The bird in Dickens' story was inspired by the real-life pet, a Raven named Grip, who died from eating paint chips.

Which brings us back to the caveman, who surely drew, at least a drop of inspiration from the lovely bird song. Didn't those guy co-cafe minutes inspire a half hour said come? Yes. Did that inspire anyone? No. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Starly Kine with a little help from me Roman Mars. It's a project of KALW, 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, and American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Support for 99% invisible is provided by the Facebook design team who believes that

design can bring positive change to the world. Visit them at facebook.com slash design. Support is also provided by Tiny Letter at Tiny Letter dot com. Email for people with some binesay. If you can email from my son, Maslow, it would probably be comprised of pages and pages of images of Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk. I love Hulk, but I'm awesome.

I swear he gets to earth those all day. It's the simplest way to write an email newsletter, tinyletter.com, from the people behind MailChimp. 99% invisible is distributed by PRX the public radio exchange making public radio more public find out more at PRX.org. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. A lot of stuff happens on the Facebook page you should join us there. I tweet at Roman Mars. Oh you know what's brand new? Playlists from Groove Shark and Spotify of songs that I use in 99% of visible episodes.

So you can score your life like it's an episode of 99% Invisible. It's all there and 99% Invisible. Daughter. you