26
Aug
2010
I’m never one to ignore a challenge, so when 3fold’s CEO announced a friendly office decorating competition I took him quite seriously. Last weekend, after two years in my office, I finally put art on my bare walls.
Among the various pictures I’ve hung, there’s now a vintage Clairol ad on one of my shelves that my co-worker, Alicia, found for me in the June 1960 issue of Life magazine. “Does she…or doesn’t she? it asks. I find myself staring at the model’s red lips and simple wedding band, curious about what her life was like. But what I really love is the ad’s story, which I first read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s 1999 article in the New Yorker.
You see, this ad was created by a woman–Shirley Polykoff–a junior copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding. Female copywriters were rare in the 1950s ad world so Polykoff was certainly an anomaly. In 1956, she was given the Clairol account just as the company was launching “the first hair-color bath that made it possible to lighten, tint, condition, and shampoo at home, in a single step.” (In my head, Mad Men’s Peggy Olson is perhaps modeled after Shirley. Makes sense, right?)
“Miss Clairol gave American women the ability, for the first time, to color their hair quickly and easily at home,” Gladwell writes. “But there was still the stigma-the prospect of the disapproving mother-in-law. Shirley Polykoff knew immediately what she wanted to say, because if she believed that a woman had a right to be a blonde she also believed that a woman ought to be able to exercise that right with discretion. ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ she wrote.”
The campaign led to overwhelming Clairol sales, and hundreds of other hair color options now available in today’s drug stores.
About ten years after the successful Clairol campaign, another brilliant female copywriter emerged: Ilon Specht, who created the advertising for L’Oreal’s hair color line. You’ll have to read Gladwell’s article for the full scoop on her campaign’s strategy. Trust me, it’s worth the read.
But one thing that really sticks out in Gladwell’s article is this:
“They were brilliant copywriters, who managed in the space of a phrase to capture the particular feminist sensibilities of the day. They are an example of a strange moment in American social history when hair dye somehow got tangled up in the politics of assimilation and feminism and self-esteem. But in a certain way their stories are about much more: they are about the relationship we have to the products we buy, and about the slow realization among advertisers that unless they understood the psychological particulars of that relationship-unless they could dignify the transactions of everyday life by granting them meaning-they could not hope to reach the modern consumer.”
Specht and Polykoff’s findings have never been more relevant. Reaching the modern consumer is about being part of their everyday life, understanding their passions, responding to their frustrations.
Today, exactly 90 years after the 19th Amendment passed, I can’t help but be thankful to work at an agency where females represent a large majority of our work force. We are following in Polykoff’s steps, although I would imagine we haven’t had to fight as hard to get to where we are today. She fought for us.
I’m also thankful I work in an age where the consumer is our focus. How fun that I get to connect daily with the very consumers I’m trying to reach–whether it be through the copy I write for an ad, Twitter or Facebook.
Does she… or doesn’t she? It’d doesn’t really matter anymore. And that feels really good.
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