Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - S6E25 - Bookmarks 2017

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

This week, it’s our annual Bookmarks episode. The research team at Under The Influence does a lot of reading over the year, and finds a lot of great stories - many of which don't fit into our regular season. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be told. We’ll look at why Sting laughs at the beginning of Roxanne, how the U.S. military learned a lesson in branding when it got soldiers to eat their vegetables and the interesting story behind which car was the first ever to feature…a cup holder. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. From the Under the Influence digital box set, this episode is from Season 6, 2017. You're so king in it. You're going to love it in an instant. Your teeth look whiter than noon, noon, noon. You're not you when you're hungry.

You're in good hands with all teeth. You're under the influence with Terry O'Reilly. Ruth Steinhagen was a zealous baseball fan. Maybe more to the point, she was a stalker. The center of her attention was Philadelphia Phillies first baseman, Eddie Waitkus. On June 14, 1949, Steinhagen checked into a hotel where the Phillies were staying. She had a bellboy deliver a note to Waitkiss, saying she had some urgent information to relay to him and asked to meet him in her room briefly. She signed the note Ruth Ann Burns,

a name she took from Eddie Waitkiss' high school yearbook. When Waitkiss got the note, he went up to Steinhagen's room and knocked on the door. When the door opened, he realized he didn't recognize Steinhagen and room and knocked on the door. When the door opened, he realized he didn't recognize Steinhagen and asked her what this was all about. Steinhagen went to the closet, pulled out a rifle, and shot Eddie Waitkus. Waitkus narrowly survived the shooting. Bruce Steinhagen was confined to a mental institution. Eventually, Waitkus

was able to a mental institution. Eventually, Waitkiss was able to return to baseball. Author Bernard Malamud used that story as the basis for his 1952 novel, The Natural. In the book, a gifted teenager named Roy Hobbs is drafted by a Major League Baseball team. But just before he can begin his career, he is shot by a mysterious woman. Hobbes then disappears for 16 years. At the age of 34, he returns to baseball.

He still possesses a natural gift for baseball, but ends up taking a bribe to throw the pennant game. But when he steps up to the plate, he decides not to throw the game and tries for a home run instead. But he strikes out. The game is lost, not by intent, but by failure.

When Malamud's book was made into a film starring Robert Redford, that downbeat ending was completely changed. In the movie, Hobbes refuses the bribe and hits a home run to win the pennant. Golden Boy Robert Redford runs the bases

in slow motion. The crowd screams wildly. It is the quintessential happy Hollywood ending. Screenwriter Phil Dusenberry was a happy ending specialist. After all, he was an ad man. Phil Dusenberry was the executive creative director of advertising agency BBDO in New York. He was responsible for some of the most famous advertising

of all time, including the Pepsi Choice of a New Generation campaign, starring Michael J. Fox, Cindy Crawford, starring Michael J. Fox, Cindy Crawford, and Michael Jackson. This is the Pepsi commercial, by the way, where Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire. Originally,

the rights to The Natural had been purchased by a New York production company that made television commercials for Madison Avenue. The owners hired Phil Dusenberry to write the screenplay. They chose Dusenberry because he was the most successful storyteller on Madison Avenue, and he was a baseball nut.

Critics of the 1984 film say the manufactured happy ending was also influenced by the Reagan era, and Reagan's optimistic message of morning in America being a time of renewal. That was an interesting comment, because what the critics didn't mention, or maybe didn't know, was

that Phil Duesenberry was part of the Tuesday team, the special group of ad men assembled to elect Ronald Reagan. They created this famous campaign commercial. It's morning again in America. And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.

Malamud was writing about squandered opportunity and the disillusionment of the post-war 1950s. Dusenberry's script turned it into a story of integrity and redemption. Even though Dusenberry drastically altered the ending of Bernard Malamud's book, Malamud's daughter said her father actually liked the movie. That's the fascinating thing about books. They have messages, stories, and backstories. Welcome to our annual Bookmarks episode.

Books are a big part of the research we do for this show. Not all the great stories we find can fit into our season. So we save those stories for this episode. Some of the stories today are surprising. Many of them contain an insight that can be applied to marketing. And almost all of them toss out some very interesting curveballs. You're under the influence.

One of the books I read as research for a past episode was titled Shared Laughter by Bernard Slade. Slade was born in St. Catharines, Ontario. He was a playwright and screenwriter who eventually moved to Hollywood to pursue his dreams. He would go on to write for Bewitched. He developed The Flying Nun, and he created this sitcom. He also wrote the movie Same Time Next Year. Bernard Slade's book is a fun read, not just because he had a fascinating career, but because he has a screenwriter's eye for detail.

In one chapter, he mentions the value of happy accidents, saying that sometimes mistakes and off-the-cuff ad-libs can create magical moments. He points to a scene in the movie The Philadelphia Story. Cary Grant is talking to a drunk Jimmy Stewart. Stewart chose not to play a drunk in the usual way. Instead, he played it very slow and very loud. That wasn't the way they rehearsed it,

so the amazed look on Cary Grant's face was real and genuine. I don't know. I can't understand how you can have been married to her and still know so little about her. Can't you? No, I can't, you. I have the hiccups. I was a big believer in keeping happy accidents

when I directed commercials, too. Sometimes actors made mistakes that were funny or ad-libbed off-script. There's something genuine and amusing about not being pristine. Some advertising writers I worked with would insist on polishing a commercial to within an inch of its life,

making dozens of edits in search of the perfect commercial. The problem was that it drained the soul out of a recording. It became a Frankensteined commercial. All the body parts were there, but it ain't human. I did many commercials with Denny Doherty, the lead singer of The Mamas and the Papas. He was also a wonderful voiceover artist. One day he told me the story of recording

I Saw Her Again, one of their biggest hits. At one point while doing the vocals, Denny sang the start of a line too early, then stopped, then came in at the right time a few seconds later. When he was done with the take, he apologized to Papa John Phillips for the mistake. Phillips, who wrote the tune, said,

No, I love that moment. We're keeping that in. I have to say, that happy accident is my favorite part of the song. Ever wonder why Sting laughs at the beginning of the police hit Roxanne, a song that isn't funny at all? Well, it was a mistake. He was getting ready to sing his vocals and sat down on the edge of a piano and mistakenly sat on the keys. Then he laughs.

When Sun Records producer Sam Phillips was producing a record for artist Jimmy DeBerry called Time Has Made a Change, a phone actually rang in the studio by mistake. Phillips kept the ring in the record because he said it just felt right. So, I'm with Bernard Slade, John Phillips and Sam Phillips on this one. I'll take an interesting mistake

over a safe move any day. Larry Gelbart was the creator and producer of the long-running television series MASH. His book, Laughing Matters, is a gem. With his signature rhineness tucked nicely between the lines,

Gilbert tells us the remarkable beats of his career sprinkled with amusing stories. One of the stories he tells is about a vaudeville comedian named Frank Fay. Fay was an abrasive performer with a sharp tongue and a big ego. By the 1920s, he was the highest-paid headliner in vaudeville. One time, his tongue got him in trouble, and he was sued for defamation. At his trial, Fay's lawyer warned him not to say much and to make sure he didn't offend the judge or the jury. When Fay was asked to state his name, he said, When asked to state his occupation, he said, Frank Fay. When asked to state his occupation, he said, world's greatest entertainer.

Later, his lawyer, Furious, asked Fay why he felt it necessary to answer the question that way. Fay shrugged his shoulders and said, I was under oath. Hilarious. But that response was totally in Frank Fay's character. There's a parallel in the marketing world here.

In order for a company to be successful, it has to be true to itself. A company can't say it cares about its customers, then keep them on hold for 45 minutes. A conservative company can't all of a sudden try to be bleeding-edge cool. A deodorant commercial can't pretend to be life-altering. Pretend to be something you're not and that's trouble in the marketing world.

Customers will sniff out the gap between fiction and reality in a heartbeat. I read a fascinating book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. He is one of the foremost security experts in the U.S. and is often hired by celebrities who have stalkers or government officials who deal with death threats.

DeBecker's firm has a warehouse full of objects from past cases, like thousand-page death threats, phonebook-thick love letters, facsimile bombs, razor blades, and notes written in blood. There are over 350,000 obsessive and threatening communications stored in that warehouse. While DeBecker tells many stories about his clients

and the business of security, the main message of his book is about trusting your intuition. He believes that intuition is the unfailing alarm system that nature has given us. He believes fear is a gift. In story after story of people who were the victims of violence, he says that each one of them had a nagging feeling that something was about to happen, or had an inkling about a person who eventually became their attacker. DeBecker says intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way.

It's knowing without knowing why. He feels it's the brain that sees, not the eyes. When your intuition is tugging at your stomach, it is always in response to something. He feels it's the brain that sees, not the eyes. When your intuition is tugging at your stomach, it is always in response to something. Your intuition has your best interest at heart. It is always learning. It will never waste your time. De Becker maintains you should listen to your intuition without debate.

I subscribe to that theory too. I think intuition has many functions beyond keeping us safe. Intuition can also help you generate powerful ideas. The day I started listening to my gut feelings is the day my career took a big turn for the better. When trying to come up with creative solutions for tricky marketing problems, I learned to trust my instincts, even if I was the only one in the room who had a differing opinion. The greatest ideas come directly from intuition and hunches,

not data or statistics or flip charts. Because a hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. The problem is that a lot of people in the corporate world think intuition is flaky, that because it can't be quantified on the spot, it should be ignored. I couldn't disagree more. Intuition is perceiving what is not yet in the open. That is what I call a competitive advantage,

because once that information is in the open, everyone sees it, and the advantage is gone. De Becker sums up his book with this wonderful line, listen to the quiet wind chime of your intuition. In business and in life, those are words to live by. Movie producer Brian Grazer wrote a book titled A Curious Mind. I've mentioned it before on the show. It's a terrific read from one of the most successful executives in Hollywood, having produced hits such as A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Splash and the TV show 24. I saw Grazer talk at the Cannes Advertising Festival last year.

He's a big believer in knowing your audience. If you're going to ask for attention, you will never get it if you don't have a deep understanding of the people you're trying to appeal to. In his book, he talks about when the first cup holder was put into automobiles. If I were to ask you which carmaker created the first cup holder in cars, what would your guess be?

The answer isn't BMW or Mercedes. It was designed by Dodge when it launched the Caravan minivan in 1983. The designers were endlessly curious about what kind of customer would drive a minivan. The answer to that was parents. Parents with kids. Parents with their hands full. So Dodge designed accordingly.

They installed cup holders so parents could put their coffee somewhere while they dealt with groceries or kids. Know thy customer is the golden rule in marketing. It's a lesson the Army would soon learn. We'll be right back to our show. If you're enjoying this episode, why not dip into our archives, available wherever you download your pods. Go to terryoreilly.ca for a master episode list. In a book titled You May Also Like, Taste in an Age of Endless Choice,

author Tom Vanderbilt tells an insightful tale about the power of branding. In a book titled You May Also Like, Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, author Tom Vanderbilt tells an insightful tale about the power of branding and how it affects the choices we make. The Army was always trying to find ways to preserve food for the battlefield and tried to make that food as edible as possible for the troops. When the Army put green giant corn into military food pouches, the soldiers hated it. But when they put that same corn into green giant packages,

the soldiers loved it. The very branding on the green giant packaging made the corn taste better in their minds. That's the power of branding. The first taste is always with the eyes. Songwriter Bert Bacharach wrote a memoir not long ago called Anyone Who Had a Heart, My Life and Music. He talks about his early days as a songwriter.

He would write songs, play them for his bosses at the record company, and they would always insist on changing them. They would tell Bert he was breaking the rules of music by writing in 6-8 or 12-8 time. They would force him to write in more traditional time measures. But when Bacharach did that, the songs became terrible. So Bacharach decided to listen

to the quiet wind chime of his intuition. He ignored all the voices around him. He broke the traditional rules of music and time measures and refused to change his songs. As soon as he started doing that, an interesting thing began to happen. He started having hits.

Like, I Say a Little Prayer for You, Walk on By, The Look of Love, What the World Needs Now, Do You Know the Way to San Jose, and dozens more. He also wrote Close to You, which he first recorded with actor Richard Chamberlain. Thankfully, he didn't listen to his instincts on that one and instead gave it to the Carpenters. Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David wrote one of the world's greatest song catalogs. And the key to that success was to break the rules.

In all my time in the advertising business, the biggest successes I've ever been a part of were always ideas that snapped a rule in half. The key is to first learn the rules, then break them creatively. I wrote a book this year called This I Know, Marketing Lessons from Under the Influence. It's written for small to medium businesses that don't have huge budgets or a big advertising agency on speed dial. The first chapter asks this question. What business are you really in?

What a company sells and what customers buy are always two different things. In other words, Molson isn't in the beer business. It's in the party business. Michelin isn't in the tire business. It's in the safety business. Whitewater rafting companies aren't in the personal transportation business. They're in the personal transformation business. Until an advertiser can answer that question clearly, their marketing will always be fuzzy. The sand trap here is that a company may be selling the wrong thing in their marketing. If people are looking to buy safe tires,

and a company is just selling tires, they will cross the street to the tire dealer selling safety. As writer Theodore Levitt once said, people don't buy three-quarter inch drill bits, they buy three-quarter inch holes. As writer Theodore Levitt once said, I saw that subject mirrored in a terrific book called Gods Like Us. Written by Ty Burr, it's a book that explores movie stardom and modern fame. Burr begins by talking about the earliest movie stars. Clark Gable, for example, was the first sensation in the talkie era. He was proof that sound could create stars the way silent pictures did.

Many leading men of the silent era didn't fare well when the audience could actually hear their voice. It didn't match the fantasy. But Clark Gable was different. Burr makes a fascinating point about Gable. He says Gable was psychologically crucial during the Depression. At that time, men as breadwinners

felt functionally impotent. They couldn't provide for their families. But Clark Gable walked into a room like he owned it. Gable was proof, when proof was needed, that virility still existed. Men looked up to him, and as Burr says, Gable gave

women dreams they couldn't share with their husbands. Gable knew it and delivered it, because he knew what business he was in. Burr says actor James Cagney's gift was threat, a storm cloud of imminent violence that broke with a sense of joy. Humphrey Bogart exuded a bone-deep wariness.

The allure of Bogart is what is withheld. Bette Davis's brand was ferocious and peppery. John Wayne was the ultimate man of action. But John Wayne worked hard ultimate man of action. But John Wayne worked hard at that persona. He himself said it was, quote, as deliberate a project as you'll ever see. He would practice the Wayne thing in front of a mirror.

He understood what moviegoers were buying. Judy Garland's magic was a trembling emotional intensity. Tyrone Power? Shallow right field. Every smart marketer knows what business they're really... If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe,

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Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca In. In a recent episode, I talked about the moment I discovered I wanted a life in advertising. I was studying radio and television arts at Ryerson. Every Wednesday morning, we would have a lecture class where someone from the industry would come in and tell us about their job. One day, some advertising

people came in. They talked about the puzzle of marketing, the business of coming up with creative ideas, the high-pressure presentations, the film sets, the radio studios, the excitement of working with actors. I sat there, transfixed. I saw my future. The moment when your future suddenly unfolds before you is always profound and memorable.

I recently read the Phil Collins book, Not Dead Yet, where he talks about his moment. When he was a kid, his mother, June, started a talent agency supplying child actors to the advertising business for commercials. One day, she was asked to send a bunch of kids to a movie shoot. She also sent 13-year-old Phil Collins. The movie set was in a theater in London. None of the kids knew what the movie was about. But they sure figured it out when they saw the Beatles walk out onto the stage and break into this song.

As it turns out, it was the final scene in a new movie called A Hard Day's Night. One camera was pointed at the Beatles, the other camera was pointed at the theater full of screaming kids, and young Phil Collins was front row center. When he eventually saw the film, his scene was cut. He was heartbroken. Many years later, in the early 90s, producer Walter Shenson asked Collins

to narrate a making-of documentary for the 30th anniversary of A Hard Day's Night. As an added treat, he sent Collins the outtakes of the scene he was in as a 13-year-old. As Collins watched it, he finally realized why he was cut from the film.

He's the only one not screaming like the other kids. He's standing there, transfixed, because he sees his future. The joy of books, for me, are the stories within the stories. Wonderful authors break down complicated ideas, helping you to internalize them.

When Bernard Slade talks about being open to happy accidents, that's one thing. But when he illustrates it with a scene between Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, that insight comes to life. When Burt Bacharach tells us to learn the rules then break them creatively, he can point to one of the world's greatest songbooks as living proof. When Gavin DeBecker tells us to listen to the quiet wind chime of our intuition,

it's a profound statement from a man who deals in life and death every day. You might be lucky enough to glean these insights over the course of your life or career. You might be able to pluck the lesson out of a situation years later with 20-20 hindsight. But books can arm you with insights and epiphanies at any point in your life. That's why reading is so rewarding. It can mean the difference between a home run and shallow right field when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly.

Under the Influence was recorded at Pirate Toronto. Series producer, Debbie O'Reilly. Sound engineer, Keith Oman. Theme music by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Digital content producer, Sydney O'Reilly. Find a list of all the books we talked about today at cbc.ca slash undertheinfluence. See you next week. This episode brought to you by

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