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Dear Reader Reviews,

I am submitting this reader review because of a wonderful place we recently visited called “Firehouse 25.”

Dad always wanted to be a firefighter. His father had been one, and his father’s father too. It was sort of a family tradition, and it was his plan until the accident. While playing high school football, another player uninten-tionally clotheslined him. He went down hard and never stood again. In-stead of fighting fires, he ended up fighting criminals from his wheelchair as a forensic pathologist.

For Dad’s 65th birthday, my husband and I wanted to do something spe-cial. His health seems to have given out, and we wanted him to enjoy what might be his last birthday. We considered all sorts of options, but finally using Dad’s old firefighter dream for inspiration, we went to Firehouse 25.

Firehouse 25 is a former firehouse converted into a restaurant. We thought it would appeal to Dad, and boy did it! As we approached the restaurant, Dad caught sight of the building. He started asking about it, but we didn’t reply. We drove into the driveway, and a parking attendant in a firefighter’s tee shirt, suspenders, and jeans welcomed us. He said, “Wel-come recruits. Are you ready to put out your hunger?”

We said that we were and entered the building. A fire bell announced our arrival. On the lower floor, the old fire engine bay served as the lounge area.

Dad loved all the firefighting memorabilia on the walls. The radio room had become a small gift shop, selling firefighter themed recipes, calendars, and knick-knacks. (I bought a set of salt and pepper shakers in the shape of firefighters’ boots.) The slide poles that firefighters had once used were off limits to us, but we saw some of the staff using them. They sure looked inviting.

Once our table was ready, we were taken to the second floor and escorted to our table. It looked like a kitchen table. We were promptly told we needed to do our “chores,” and set the table. Silverware was mismatched, and lying in wait in a plastic container. The glasses and plates were also mismatched, and the salt and pepper shakers were in the shape of Dalmatians.

The waiter (Firefighter Phil) went along with the show. He appointed Dad to be our table’s fire chief. He told Dad his job was to keep the troops in line. Of course Dad said he had been doing that his whole life anyway.

Phil put a firechief ’s hat on dad, and gave the rest of us firefighter badges to wear.

Firefighter Phil wouldn’t serve our food until we stated that we had made our bunks. He asked the kids if they had washed the soot out of their hair. And one time, when my husband asked him to repeat something he just said, he commented, “You’ve been standing near that siren, haven’t you?” He commented that we should finish our meals. “You never know when that alarm will ring, and if it does ring, it may be hours before you eat again, so eat up.”

The food was good and served family style, with oversized portions, as if it was prepared for hungry firefighters. We had Captain’s crab legs, Sarge’s fried chicken, Stash’s baked beans, Stanley’s steak, and Hector’s five-alarm chili.

At dessert time, all the firefighter staff gathered around Dad and sang

“Happy Birthday” as they lit the giant five-alarm candle. They then pre-sented Dad with an honorary firechief ’s certificate. He was beaming.

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“The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the seller only one.”

THE ASCENDANCY OF ENTERTAINMENT

In humans, survival and pleasure exist side by side. They are the ying and yang, the left and right, the balancing forces of our existence.

At the dawn of human history, survival was critical. Pleasure, although important, was secondary, but never absent. As noted in Chapter 2, whenever survival needs were met, even momentarily, pleasure took over. Pleasure could take many guises. Food, sex, and sleep were always pleasurable, and, for survival purposes, came first. As time progressed and survival required less attention, people began to seek out other pleasurable experi-ences. One such early human example would have been the sharing of stories around a nighttime fire. Out of those early stories, a whole new way of giving and receiving plea-sure was born, the entertainment arts.

We know that there are scientific reasons for the development of the entertainment arts. Robert Sylwester, in his book A Celebration of Neurons, reported the findings as fol-lows: “Our brain has more frontal lobe capacity than we normally need to survive because that critical-thinking and problem-solving mechanisms located there must be sufficient for crisis conditions.”²

CUE CARD: The entertainment arts were invented to make use

of excess brain capacity.

He continued by explaining that the entertainment arts were invented to make use of our excess capacity:

“Since our survival doesn’t require our problem-solving mechanisms to operate at capacity most of the time, we’re invented social and cultural problems to keep them continually stimulated and alert. The arts, games, and social organizations provide pleasant metaphoric settings that help to develop and maintain our brain’s problem-solving mechanisms.”³

As survival became assured, we have increasingly moved toward those things that give us pleasure. Whether the forum was a nighttime cave fire, the Greek coliseum, the Eliz-abethan stage, the vaudeville palace, Broadway, the movies, television, or most recently, the Internet, a straight line can be traced from the receding of survival needs and the ascension of entertainment.

We have become a society obsessed with entertainment. In the United States, on average, we spend 5.1 percent of our income on entertainment. That’s figure is compara-ble to our spending on health care (5.3 percent), and is more than we spend on clothing (4.7 percent).

What those figures don’t represent is the rise in entertainment spending through the years. In 1935–36, we spent just 3.3 percent of our income on entertainment, 4.4 per-cent on health care, and 10.4 perper-cent on clothing. Even more discouraging, the perper-cent- percent-age spent on education, mostly for college and continuing adult education, has remained relatively unchanged through the years, from 1.0 percent in 1935–36 to 1.4 percent in 1999.

Where spending on entertainment is at a high, the rate of personal savings is at a low, under 3 percent.⁴After housing (32.6 per-cent), transportation (19.0 perper-cent), and food (13.6 percent), enjoyment trumps all.

In addition, the percentage of income spent on food is misleading, because 5.7 percent of that category is dining out costs.⁵As we shall soon see, a significant success factor in the food service industry is the enter-tainment value a restaurant provides.

In The Entertainment Economy, Michael Wolf observed, “The lines between enter-tainment and non-enterenter-tainment are dis-appearing.”⁶He then continued to explain

that “entertainment has found itself at the forefront of economic growth and cultural revo-lution,”⁷and that “we seek entertainment in activities that used to be purely work-related or at least chore-related (such as buying groceries, choosing a car, looking for a new home).”⁸

He also suggested that the implications for organizations are huge: “Without enter-tainment content, few consumer products stand a chance in tomorrow’s marketplace.”⁹ Walt Disney concurred: “In my opinion, entertainment in its broadest sense has become a necessity rather than a luxury in the life of the American public.”¹⁰

The impact of entertainment that Wolf and Disney referred to is upon us. Advertis-ers, news organizations, businesses, sports, and educational services have all responded to the info-fog by placing entertainment content in their products. We will examine the ways that organizations in each of these arenas use entertainment techniques to com-municate. In the process, we will set up our later examination of Show Biz Training techniques.

Advertisers

Advertisers have an especially difficult task. They must make buyers out of people who have no knowledge of, or interest in, their products. They must cut through the info-fog, gain and then hold attention, and move people to favorable action. As advertising exec-utive, Bill Bernach (Doyle Dane Bernbach), stated: “The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you are saying, and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you, and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting, and you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.”¹¹

The advertiser’s task is especially daunting when you consider that the actual differ-ence between products is often minimal. Advertisers cannot rely on reasoning or logic to prove their point. Instead, they must associate their products with pleasure, and they use entertainment to induce pleasurable emotions. As Malcolm Gladwell explained in The Experience Economy: “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”¹²

These days, entertainment usually provides the packaging. The entertainment industry is so involved in the production of commercials that advertising is responsible for approx-imately 40 percent of the entertainment industry’s revenues.¹³

Television commercials provide excellent examples of how advertisers package infor-mation through entertainment techniques. Advertisers start with a solid story that engages people, add comedy, use props, present gee-whiz magical effects, and play toe-tapping music to make their points. See if you can identify the use of specific techniques in Table 3-1.

COMEDY IN COMMERCIALS

Comedy is a major factor in ad success. In fact, approximately 42 percent of all commer-cials use humor to communicate their messages.¹⁴It may also be appropriate to say that the best commercials use humor, given that 69 percent of the commercials honored with an International CLIO award had a humorous tone.¹⁵

Comedic ads deliver an amazing feat: people watch for them, enjoy them, and talk about them with friends and colleagues in spite of the fact that the ads are sales pitches.

Think about the number of telemarketing calls you hang up on, and you begin to see the point. Commercials dodge the “hang up” reflex by making the product being sold more appealing and therefore more likely to be marketed successfully. Advertising expert Luke Sullivan, in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, explained it this way: “In all categories where products are essentially all alike, the best-known and most-well-liked brand has the winning card.”¹⁶

ENTERTAINMENT IN COMMERCIALS

Each of the commercials listed below made extensive use of one of the following elements:

comedy, illusion, props, or music. Determine which commercial relied on which element then write the appropriate word on the corresponding line. You should use each element twice.

In some cases, more than one entertainment element was utilized. In those cases, select the one item that the commercial relies on most. The answers are listed below.

____________ 1. A Break Today—McDonald’s staged a full production themed to clean burger machines.

____________ 2. In the Drivers Seat—People floated to earth, as Hertz put them in the driver’s seat.

____________ 3. It Takes a Licking—Timex tried to destroy its own watches to prove they

“keep on ticking.”

____________ 4. Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz—Speedy Alka-Seltzer sang, water fizzled, and what a relief it was.

____________ 5. Atsa Spicy Meatball—For Alka-Seltzer (again), an actor needs relief after 40 takes.

____________ 6. That Bunny’s Still Going—Eveready Energizer poked fun at commercials through a toy rabbit.

____________ 7. Museum Art—The Honda hangs on the museum wall, until one brave soul drives it away.

____________ 8. Where’s the Beef?—Clara Peller looked at a hamburger as she realized she should have gone to Wendy’s.

In Table 3-1, we saw some likable ads, including the meatball filmshoot stuck in neu-tral, and a hamburger without beef. Both commercials demonstrated a sense of humor.

The Alka Seltzer “Atsa Some Spicy Meatball” commercial, from Doyle Dane Bernbach, consisted of outtakes from a fake “Mama’s Meatball” company. During filming, every-thing that could go wrong did. As a result, the actor was forced to eat meatball after meat-ball, eventually finding solace in Alka Seltzer. The beauty of this commercial was the way it satirized the advertisers themselves. In the process the ad implied that the advertisers used the product too.

Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” commercials, created by Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample, used humor to suggest that not all hamburger chains were the same, and that Wendy’s had a big-ger burbig-ger.

The ad was so successful that during a 1984 presidential primary campaign debate, Democratic contender Walter Mondale actually said, “Where’s the beef?” when he com-pared the “new ideas” that fellow Democratic candidate Gary Hart was promoting to the commercial. By suggesting that Hart’s “new ideas” lacked “beef,” Mondale subtly ridiculed his main contender, and went on to win the Democratic nomination. (He would later lose to Republican Ronald Reagan.)

In addition to the commercials already mentioned, three others bear special attention.

For in each case, humor deftly accomplished what a more traditional approach could not.

For years, California wines, and Gallo in particular, were regarded as poor substitutes for French wines. Originally, the advertising response was to hire Orson Welles to intone pompously that Gallo would “serve no wine before its time.” The advent of wine coolers turned the whole idea of highbrow wines on its head. Wine coolers were intentionally de-signed as a more casual drink. Stuck with the limits of its own self-created image, Gallo hired Hal Riney & Partners. They created an ad campaign built around two decidedly unsophisticated down-home old timers, Frank Bartles and Ed Jaymes. The two men, completely fictional characters, would sit on the porch, introduce themselves, or rather Frank would introduce non-talking Ed, and read letters from “customers.” Each com-mercial would end with the understated but preposterous line, “Thank you for your sup-port.” It was self-parody at its best, Gallo became low-brow, and the Bartle’s and James Wine Coolers were launched.

Our second example concerns an underappreciated fruit. In the 1900s, Stan Freberg was one of the funniest men alive. He had a dry, irreverent humor that was ideally suited to the sale of Sunkist Prunes. For years, prunes were viewed as a fruit for old people. Fre-berg brilliantly played off this perception by creating a spot featuring an aristocratic, pompous man. In the spot, the man fussed about his dislike for prunes. He complained that they are nasty, that they have pits, and are badly wrinkled. The announcer convinced him to try a prune anyway. Much to his surprise, he liked it. He commented on its flavor

and the lack of a pit. But then, in the most upper-crust manner possible, he concluded by complaining, “They are still badly wrinkled.” This was the set-up for the tag line, “Today the pits. Tomorrow the wrinkles.” Suddenly, Sunkist Prunes were for the non-pretentious.

Finally, there’s the case of an ad that was brave enough to mock its own profession.

The image of the slippery car salesman, who will say anything to make a sale, is ingrained in our society. It seems like long ago, but at one time most Americans bought their autos from the “big three:” Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. The only exceptions were people who preferred a more reasonably priced Volkswagen Beetle, or, if really desperate, the American Motors’ Pacer. Carmakers from other countries were just entering the U.S. mar-ketplace when Isuzu, courtesy of Della Femina, Travisano & Partners, settled on a novel approach to making their name known. The ads featured David Leisure as an archetypal lying car salesman. He blatantly stated falsehoods while the correct information scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

By making fun of their own kind, Isuzu was in essence acknowledging the largest challenge in buying a car, and encouraging a perception that Isuzu salespeople were dif-ferent. As a result, many sales closed, including for David Leisure himself, who became a regular on the TV show “Empty Nest.” In addition, the ads have such long-term staying power that a new series of these, again featuring Leisure, reappeared in 2002.

All three ads, those for Wendy’s, Bartles and Jaymes, and Izusu, overcame negative perceptions with humor. The ads captured an emotional essence that people could relate to, and told their story in an engaging manner that cut through the info-fog.

MAGIC IN COMMERCIALS

Today we live in an era of special effects. Whether you need a walking robot, a sinking ocean liner, or a full-scale battle of clones, today’s Hollywood can create it. Hollywood developed this capacity because illusions fascinate people. In television commercials, illusions are an effective method for capturing attention. They force viewers to stop, look, and wonder if they are seeing what they think they are seeing.

Once illusions have captured attention, they help maintain it. For, once viewers de-termine that what they think they see is correct, they begin focusing on how the illusion was achieved. In the process, their focus stays on the ad.

The Hertz ads created by Norman, Craig & Kummel were especially amazing. A per-son, sometimes two, would, in a seated position, gracefully glide through the air and downward into the seat of an empty convertible driving itself down the highway. It was a fascinating and beautiful image to watch, and people did. The tag line of the commercial was, “Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat,” and millions still do.

Another example concerns a Honda ad in which an automobile is seen on display in a museum, as if it is a work of art. One museum patron walks by the car and stops to look longingly at it. The man looks around to see if anyone is watching, and seeing that the coast is clear, walks up the wall and into the auto, and drives it away. The ad amazed. The illu-sion of a hanging car was so perfect that it demanded attention.

A final current example is a 2002 commercial for Propel, a fitness water drink in the Powerade family. The commercial begins with a blank space, perhaps a darkened gym, or an empty stage. Oversized water droplets fall onto this floor. As each water drop splashes on the floor, it morphs into an athlete—a tennis player, a jogger, a bicyclist, and others.

The commercial ends with a person swimming up and around a Propel bottle. The

The commercial ends with a person swimming up and around a Propel bottle. The