linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/release-the-condor

Text File | 2013-02-21 | 7KB | 163 lines

[A legendary story in the advertising business, re-found after many
years at
http://web.archive.org/web/20100303001636/http://www.burkhardworks.com/witdom.htm#CONDOR .]




 "RELEASE THE CONDOR!"


      The agency for Mercury, I think, was shooting a car commercial in
the Andes.  Pretty expensive trip, eh?  Somebody said, We need to show
people that these are the Andes, not the Rockies. How about we get a
condor to chase the car down the mountain road?

     Finding a co-operative condor in Peru is easier said than done.
But the Agency Producer scouted around and did find an ancient Peruvian
gentleman with a caged pet condor.

     He said, Put dead burro in trunk of car. Condor will chase smell.

     Yecch!

     Anyway, they found somebody with a ripe dead burro and stuffed it
in the trunk of the Hero Car.

     Sunrise.
     Golden Light.

     "Cue the car!"
          Rmmmm!
     "Camera!"
          "Speed!"

     "RELEASE THE CONDOR!"

     Old man pushes condor out of cage.

     Condor plummets five hundred feet down the side of the cliff.

     SPLAT!

     It had forgotten how to fly.





The REAL story:


RELEASE THE CONDOR

a true story related by retired ad-man Eli Silberman at
the August 2011 West Chester Story Slam,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkA9sA19LKs


I spent fourteen years at one of the largest ad firms in the
world, in New York, a company called McCann-Erickson.  One of our
clients was Buick.

Buick was going to introduce a new car, and they asked us to come out
with the advertising campaign.  And we worked on it for about two
months.  We had some great stuff.  We all got... five of us flew out to
Detroit to Buick's headquarters:  big conference room, take out our big
portfolios, take out the TV story boards, go through all these great
commercials.  And the client sat there, looking at us, and they actively
detested it.  They hated it.

So, we all went back to New York, and started working on another series
of TV commercials to introduce this new Buick.  And about a month later,
a group of us fly back to Detroit, more campaigns, same conference room,
take out the story boards with great enthusiasm, I present it so that
the team leaves stuff. and they hated this stuff even more than the
first stuff.  So, we get back on the plane to come back to New York, and
we're all very dejected.

And before we left, they said 'Guys, it's now May.  We're introducing
this car.  These commercials have to run in September.  We do not have a
lot of time.'


So, by this time, the tension's running high at the ad agency.  We come
up with some more stuff.  I actually came up with this idea:  We go back
out to Detroit, and very tentatively -- our confidence is gone, now --
we presented for the third time, and they loved it.  And the idea was,
very, very simply, to show a condor, which has the largest wingspan of
any bird in the world, just soaring through the skies, and this would be
shot out in the West, in the Monument country, with great great cliffs.
On a long ribbon of highway is this Buick, beautiful mood music,
superimpose the condor over the Buick, and just sheer drama, hardly any
voiceover.

They said 'This is great!'  On the plane back, we're celebrating,
drinking gin & tonics, having a wonderful time, 'We did it!', and that's
why when we settled in the conference room at McCann-Erickson, there's
this hot TV-film director out in L.A. we were going to use.  We figured
out how we were going to shoot it and all, and then somebody said:
'Wait a minute.  We now have to find a condor, to film it.  Oh, my God,
we forgot about that'.

So, we have a worldwide search to find a condor in captivity that we can
film.  After two weeks, we struck gold:  We found the only condor in the
_world_ in captivity, in a zoo in Lima, Peru.  So, we call up the zoo,
and say 'We're going to make your condor famous.  We'd love to come down
and film the condor.'  And the zoo wasn't interested.  They didn't want
these New York ad guys coming down to Lima to film their bird.


Suddenly, somebody said 'Wait a minute.  This is General Motors.
General Motors has lobbyists in Washington.  The lobbyists know
politicians.  Why don't we get somebody in Washington to call the
embassy in Lima, or the consulate in Lima, to get to somebody who's on
the Board of the zoo, to get permission to go down to Lima to film the
condor.  And that's exactly what happened.
So, we sent a location person down there.  She found a great spot,
outside of Lima on this cliff.  And, a month later, this great film
production company from L.A., guys from Detroit (our client), and we
from New York, all show up in Lima, Peru.  Very early in the morning,
we're all on the cliff.  And way off in the distance, to a dusty dirt
road, we see the sun is coming up, and we see this dust coming from a
truck.  And, as the truck got closer, it looks like one of these Brinks
armoured-car trucks, and that was the truck from the zoo.


There must have been about thirty of us, on the cliff.  We had a
helicopter with a new camera mount called a Steadicam, where somebody
could hang out of the helicopter and film.  We had a camera on either
side of the cliff.  The zoo truck pulls up, and there's two guys in the
truck, and they're wearing uniforms that look like they're admirals in
the American Navy, including scrambled eggs on their caps, and they were
the zookeepers.  They opened up the back of the Brinks armoured-car
truck, and there, in a big cage, was the only condor in the world in
captivity, and he was not looking very happy:  He looked sick.

The two zookeepers struggle to get the bird to the edge of the cliff,
they take him out, they have him on the thing like this [spreads arms
out] on the pole, they undid the pin... the chain.

The directors says 'OK, camera on helicopter, helicopter ready.'  And
the helicopter is like 100 yards off the cliff.  Chop-chop-chopping.
Guys hanging out of it with a camera.  Says 'Camera on the left, ready.
Camera on the right, rolling.  Camera rolling, ready.  The zookeepers
have the bird like this [stretches arms out], and the director says
'Release the condor!'

They go like that [flings arms forward], and, instead of soaring into
the sky, the condor plummets 300 feet to its death.

And it was as if this film company from L.A., these New York guys, and
the guys from Detroit, all assembled on this cliff outside of Lima to
murder the only condor in the world in captivity.

Now, for months afterwards, whenever there was a real screwup at
McCann-Erickson, it was followed by somebody saying 'Release the condor!'

Incidentally, this was written up in _The New Yorker_ magazine, and made
advertising history, way back when I was in New York and dinosaurs were
ruling the earth.