Windsong Was on His Mind
THE BREEZE CARESS-es a wind chime. Near the French doors, a man stands framed by billowing curtains. Cut to a woman, spraying on perfume. Cut to the man and woman together, kissing. Back to the man, alone, dreamily inhaling the scent of his beloved's letter. He looks out, and there she is - in a car below. Smiles all around. Cut to a bottle of Prince Matchabelli's Windsong perfume. In the background, romantic music and a whispered message: ''I can't seem to forget you. Your Windsong stays on my mind.''
That was how the 30-second spot finally took shape. But as of a September morn in 1987 - when a handful of men and women took their places around an oval table at the headquarters of Chesebrough-Pond's in Greenwich, Conn. - the commercial was little more than a glint in the eye.
This is who took the photo
On one side of the table sat Kay Desmarais, the product manager for the Matchabelli division of Chesebrough. Facing her was a team from Ogilvy & Mather, Matchabelli's advertising agency, including Nancy Perez, the producer on the account, and Roy Carruthers, the art director. A few days before, Matchabelli had given Ogilvy the green light on a concept for a commercial to relaunch the 33-year-old Windsong; its sales had been flat since 1980.
There was another substantial presence in the room that day in the person of Jeffrey Glasserow, the 38-year-old president of Glasserow Management Advisory Group. A huge, bearded man, Glasserow is a cost consultant, a member of a fast-growing fraternity with a single mission: to help advertisers control the escalating price of producing television commercials.
Cost consultants and advertising agencies are natural enemies. Agencies usually receive 17.65 percent of the total cost of making a commercial. They have no built-in incentive to keep expenses down, and the agencies rise or fall on their creative skills. Cost consultants, whatever their views on creativity, are focused on the bottom line. ''Cost consultants are Dr. No,'' says Philip B. Dusenberry, chairman of BBDO New York. ''If you say you need 30 dancers, they'll ask why you can't get by with 20. But you can't evaluate creative just by numbers.'' When consultants and agencies get together, it's a clash of cultures - ''Polyester meets Armani,'' says one veteran advertising art director.
For the Ogilvy representatives, the meeting at Chesebrough could not be over soon enough. Glasserow challenged the agency on a variety of points concerning the Windsong commercial, including the locale where it should be shot. But Nancy Perez recalls that she managed to maintain her composure, constantly reminding herself: ''The person who stays the calmest keeps the upper hand.'' It was a harbinger of storms to come as the agency's concept became a reality. THESE DAYS, MOST MAJOR AD-vertisers use some kind of cost consultant,'' says Frank DiGiacomo, president of Travisano DiGiacomo Films, a New York production company. Such companies as Procter & Gamble, American Express and Ford Motor rely on the consultants, keeping them on retainer or bringing them in house. Cost consultants, says Jerry Della Femina, chairman of Della Femina, McNamee WCRS, have a calming effect on clients -''like Valium.'' He adds, ''Anything that can calm people down in these unbelievable times of $750,000 commercials is a good thing.''
Glasserow offers some examples of skyrocketing production costs. Over the last five years, a top director's daily fee has gone from $7,500 to $25,000; the editing charge has risen from $4,500 to at least $12,000; incidental music - including original score, arrangement and performance - has doubled to as high as $15,000.
Meanwhile, the relationship between many of the agencies and their clients has been deteriorating. In line with a general belt-tightening in the business community, advertisers have been trimming agency fees and commissions. The consolidation of the agency business, the result of a spate of buyouts, has led to a host of client conflicts and a reshuffling of accounts.
The environment is ready-made for cost consultants, who promote themselves as impartial, outside authorities with just the kind of money-saving expertise the advertisers are seeking. When Martin Sorrell, the British financier, and his WPP Group took over J. Walter Thompson in the summer of 1987, Glasserow dispatched letters to all of Thompson's clients. Citing press reports about ''Thompson's inability to control the ever escalating cost of creating advertising,'' the letter continued: ''We help our clients save money. . . .We can help you do the same.''
D URING THE EARLY months of 1987, Chesebrough-Pond's was acquired by Unilever U.S. Matchabelli's management team was overhauled, and a major commitment was made to reviving Windsong. Its main customers were 35 years of age and older. Now the company intended to reposition the product, targeting that prime audience between 18 and 35. To accomplish the relaunch, the advertising budget for Windsong would be jacked up from about $1.5 million to $6 million.
Prince Matchabelli's market researchers developed a profile of their intended new customer: She was self-sufficient, a feminist, but she also believed in traditional, monogamous love - a mainstreamer, in marketing parlance. To appeal to that audience, the researchers concluded, the advertising message would have to be gentle but direct, not the oblique, soft-core eroticism brought into vogue by Calvin Klein's Obsession. ''What we had to capture in this commercial,'' says Joseph J. Jesuele, associate director of market research for Prince Matchabelli, ''was the traditional romantic relationship redefined for the 80's.''
Early in September, Matchabelli asked Ogilvy & Mather to come up with a concept for a 30-second television spot. Two weeks later, the agency made its presentation.
In pitching a concept, agencies often show the client a storyboard -a scene-by-scene depiction of how the commercial will play out. With Matchabelli, Ogilvy put on something of a show: Romantic music, the reading of a one-page description (''Open on a large, lonely house in the country . . .'') and a watercolor painting that bore three key images - the exterior of a mansion; a room with wind billowing through the curtains; a young man by a window, holding a letter, with a photograph of his loved one nearby. The commercial would be a romance novel shrunk to a half-minute of tape.
The Matchabelli team was enthusiastic. But Greg Van Gasse, Matchabelli's marketing director, was nervous about the potential price of the spot. He had spent part of his career working in Thailand and Brazil, where production costs were typically $30,000 or less. In those countries, he says, ''If it doesn't work out, it isn't such a big deal.'' The Windsong project was a big deal, with an estimated budget of about $300,000 for both 15-second and 30-second versions. And there had been some talk about shooting the commercial in Europe, at a chateau.
''When we heard a chateau-type environment,'' Van Gasse recalls, ''our antennae went up and we said, 'Whoops, a chateau.' '' The call went out for Glasserow, who was already on retainer with Chesebrough-Pond's.
THIS IS WHAT OGILVY DID, and you can see it's a lovely drawing,'' says Jeffrey Glasserow, leaning over the conference room table at his spartan offices on Manhattan's West Side, and holding up a photostat of the Windsong concept board. He remembers the day when Van Gasse sent the Ogilvy concept materials over, and the questions that percolated through his mind.
How many rooms would have to be set up to shoot the commercial? What were the lighting requirements? What kind of wind-making equipment would have to be rented to achieve the special effects? The one-page description and the sketch offered few clues. But unless the production companies that would bid on the job were given detailed information, they were likely to offer inflated bids to cover any and all contingencies.
Glasserow saw another kind of problem. When an advertiser approves the making of a commercial based upon such a limited presentation, he says, ''The client can get the finished product and say, 'That's not what you sold us.' And the agency says, 'Oh, yes, we described it vividly for you. If you made a picture in your mind and this doesn't match it, what do you want us to do?' ''
He is a child of advertising - his father, Norman Gladney, was a partner in Kane, Light & Gladney, a New York agency. Born in New York, Glasserow attended Emerson College in Boston, where he majored in broadcast communications. It was there that he met his wife-to-be, Deborah Dawson; they now have a 3-year-old daughter, Coby Lee. In 1973, Turner Broadcasting hired Glasserow to help produce shows on professional wrestling in Atlanta. He moved on to Georgia's public television station, where he won a regional Emmy for a series he directed and produced.
Glasserow was hired in 1977 by Ernst-Van Praag, one of the leading cost consultant companies along with Bird Bonett Stauderman, Hooper White and Arthur Bellaire. He was chief operating officer when he left in 1986 to start the GMA Group.
The company acts as a consultant on broadcast and print advertising for such clients as BMW of North America, Calvin Klein Cosmetics and Mitsubishi Motor Sales. Like most other cost consultants, GMA works on retainer.
In part, Glasserow functions as an accountant, one well schooled in the minutiae of the production business. In examining a bid, for example, he would notice if a script clerk has been budgeted at $500 a day, since the going rate is $275. That $225 difference compounds quickly when one adds in the production company's standard markup of 35 percent and the agency's 17.65 percent commission.
But Glasserow also tries to save his clients money by spotting potential production problems. His experience on location comes in handy. ''One time I was on a film shoot in 'Deliverance' country in Georgia and watched an improperly rigged $70,000 camera tumble down a mountain and into a river,'' he says. ''You tend to remember those things.''
He tells of being asked to look at a storyboard that called for an entire three-ring circus. The commercial's main focus was on a child interacting with a clown; the circus would provide only an establishing shot. ''We asked the client,'' he recalls, ''if there weren't a way to challenge the agency to bring the scope of the commercial back down from CinemaScope to TV screen and to very quickly focus on the little girl with the clown.'' The client was informed that the circus section of the spot would cost $200,000. Out went the circus.
Cost consultants, including Glasserow, insist that they do not interfere in the creative process. Ogilvy's Nancy Perez begs to differ: ''A lot of times they say, 'You don't need 10 hours to shoot this job,' and we say, 'We feel we need 10 hours,' and then they say, 'You can't have it.' If that's not getting involved in creative, I don't know what is.''
By and large, once a client has approved a concept, the agency immediately sends it to several production companies and solicits bids. The cost consultant is brought in to help analyze the bids. Glasserow prefers to enter the process at an earlier stage. Thus, after examining the Windsong concept board, he urged Matchabelli to set up the pre-bid meeting with Ogilvy. He also had his clients send the agency a four-page form to fill in. It covers virtually every aspect of the production process, from the cities where the casting of the commercial is to take place to the props and wardrobe.
All this in the effort to cut costs and (Continued on Page 64) prevent the ultimate disaster. ''Picture this,'' says Glasserow. ''There's only one copy in someone's desk of a $1.5 million commercial that was never aired and cost a lot of people their jobs.''
F ROM HIS PORTRAIT ON THE wall of the windowless conference room in Greenwich, Prince Georges V. Matchabelli, the dashing Georgian nobleman who founded the fragrance company in 1926, gazed over the assemblage that September morning. The pre-bid meeting was about to begin.
Nancy Perez was not happy. A producer with 10 years in the trade, she remembers having ''a fit'' when the session with Glasserow was first mentioned. ''That kind of roadblock at the beginning of a job is not something you look forward to,'' she says. ''It was like, oh God, another layer.'' Her colleague, Roy Carruthers, a 30-year veteran of the business, was of a similar mind. He fretted that his vision of the commercial was about to be diluted beyond recognition.
Glasserow was sympathetic. ''I know what it's like to have someone looking over your shoulder,'' he says. ''But we wouldn't have been there if there wasn't a problem, or at least the perception of a problem.''
After the Ogilvy team put on its Windsong show for Glasserow's benefit, the consultant moved directly to the concern uppermost in his mind, the single aspect of the agency's Windsong proposal that would be the most costly. It was, as they say in the real estate business, location, location, location.
Glasserow is a voluble man with a story to fit every occasion. He tells, for example, of working on a spot for a tropical fruit drink. Traditionally, the product's commercials had been filmed in the South Seas and, on several previous shoots, bad weather had added appreciably to the cost. Glasserow consulted with a meteorologist and then suggested moving to a new site. The commercial was finally filmed in the Virgin Islands, where the weather was clement and the logistics were easier. As it turned out, a big storm did hit the South Seas location during the very time the commercial was being shot. The total saving to the client, says Glasserow, was close to $500,000.
At the pre-bid meeting, however, Glasserow refrained from such reminiscence. He suggested that a European site for the Windsong commercial would be expensive and unnecessary. As he recalls, he told the Ogilvy team, ''I bet there are plenty of mansions within a two-hour radius of where we're sitting. Would you object to scouting for a location nearby?'' Simply shooting a spot that close to New York - as opposed to, say, Newport, R.I., never mind Europe - shaves at least $80,000 off the total cost, Glasserow says. Ogilvy agreed to look for a suitable location in the area, but reserved the right to bid the job in England as well.
Glasserow had other questions. He asked Carruthers how he envisioned the wind moving the objects in the commercial. According to Glasserow, Carruthers replied, ''That's the production company's responsibility.'' Glasserow agreed, but added that the production companies had to understand just what effect Carruthers wanted so that they could make realistic bids. Otherwise, the companies would have to rent various kinds of fans and compressed-air machines to cover all contingencies - a costly proposition.
In production, Glasserow insists, items that seem of little consequence can powerfully affect the final price. He always encourages agencies to hold down the number of props. ''It's not just a matter of renting a chair,'' he says. ''The more chairs, the more trucks and teamsters to unload the trucks, the more outside prop people who have to bring the chairs into and out of the house, the more inside prop people to move the chairs around inside the house, the more people to feed, the more people to put up overnight.''
Perez was concerned that Glasserow was trying to tie up too many details of the shoot too soon. ''You can't lock up everything so specifically,'' she says. She wanted the director who was eventually selected to have some latitude to work his or her magic. ''I've never been involved with something like this in my life,'' she recalls. ''I dealt with Arthur Bellaire. They're excellent, and they don't have all those steps.''
By the end of the meeting, the pre-bid outline that Ogilvy had prepared had been expanded to include a more extensive list of specifications, and the agency had agreed to create a scene-by-scene storyboard charting the action of the commercial.
By Sept. 23, the bids were in, and Glasserow set about analyzing them. The high bid of $356,000 came not from England but from an East Coast company. The low bid of $228,000 came from Britain, but Ogilvy and Matchabelli were not interested; the cost of sending agency and client representatives to the shoot would hike the price substantially. Ogilvy alone would have had to spend at least $30,000 extra. The agency recommended that the shoot go to Spot Films and its Clio Award-winning director, David Cornell, whose bid of $250,000 was the second lowest. Cornell planned to shoot the commercial at a mansion his company had located on Long Island.
Glasserow did lose one battle. He had hoped that the 33-person shoot would not have to stay overnight near the location, but could commute to and from New York. ''But Cornell insisted it was necessary,'' Glasserow says, ''because he needed to capture certain kinds of light - both early morning and at twilight.'' The decision would cost an extra $15,000, but the client went along with Cornell.
At daybreak on the morning of Oct. 25, a small convoy of trucks pulled up in front of a vacant three-story mansion in Old Brookville that had been rented for $15,000. An advance crew had worked for two days to set the house up for the Windsong shoot: They hauled in $6,500 worth of rented furniture, set up $7,500 in lights and rigged $1,000 worth of fans.
David Cornell had already fine-tuned the script, putting more focus on the young man pining away for his lady love. ''I was afraid,'' he says, ''that without more sense of the guy being there, the drama would have been lost. This commercial could have easily slipped over into something corny.''
Other changes were made out of necessity. Carruthers had conceived an opening that was a wide shot of a mansion sitting atop a hill, surrounded by open fields. There was no open field around the Old Brookville house. What's more, the surrounding trees were starting to lose their leaves, and the commercial was scheduled to air in the spring. Thus, when Cornell called ''action'' for the opening shot, the camera frame was tightly focused on the young man standing behind French doors.
Another scene had been added to the commercial since it was first conceived, showing the woman arriving at the mansion. The production company brought in a Mercedes-Benz convertible with a stick shift, only to discover that the actress could not drive it. The Mercedes had to be put into neutral and pushed forward by crew members off-camera before the final scene was complete and Cornell could announce, ''That's a wrap.''
I N MID-NOVEMBER, WHEN the Windsong commercial was first screened for Prince Matchabelli, it was greeted with applause.
The client showed the spot to several focus groups representative of the target audience. Because the woman had such a minimal role - in the shorter version, only in a photograph; in the longer version, in the Mercedes as well - some members of the focus groups thought the young man was remembering a lover who had died. Most of the women in the groups did not identify with her - a central mission of the commercial. ''It wasn't definitive enough,'' says David J. Waldron, Matchabelli's vice president of marketing. ''There was no payoff. You never really saw the girl.''
After two months of discussions, Ogilvy and its client agreed to shoot new footage and re-edit the spot. The major addition: A passionate kiss. That bit of business was going to cost upwards of $100,000. Jeffrey Glasserow received another call from Prince Matchabelli.
A testy disagreement ensued as to who should shoot the new footage. Ogilvy wanted David Cornell, but he was on location in California. ''Cornell is an extremely talented director with a distinct style,'' says Ruth A. Gutman of Triple Vision, a producer Ogilvy had brought in to supervise the reshoot. ''With him I knew the look would be consistent with the earlier footage.'' Since the reshoot was to take place on a beach in March, she argued, southern California was an ideal location.
Glasserow wanted the shoot put out for bid to several directors in New York. It would be less expensive. ''Taking into consideration how long that scene was going to take to shoot,'' he says, ''and what those actors would be paid, a little cold on a Long Island beach wasn't going to kill them.''
Ogilvy ''got its dander up,'' Glasserow recalls. The agency's attitude, he says, was, ''By God, nobody is going to tell us how to do our job.'' But eventually Matchabelli heeded his advice, and the kiss scene was put out to bid. Cornell bid the job at $106,000, but Martha Holmes, the director who ended up shooting the new footage, came in at $80,700. As it turned out, the difference in their bids was virtually canceled out when the crew was rained out on the first day of the reshoot.
The final price tag on the Windsong commercial was $544,000 - the first shoot, which came in within 10 percent of its $300,000 budget, plus the reshoot and some additional costs. It premiered a year ago, and Prince Matchabelli has been more than happy with the results. According to Van Gasse, sales have risen 20 percent. He sums up Glasserow's contribution in these words: ''What Jeff brought to the party was a way to do the commercial, maintaining its integrity, while doing it as efficiently as possible. We could have done the same creative and spent twice as much.''
Nancy Perez, on the other hand, says Glasserow had no appreciable impact, creatively or financially, except for whatever he might have saved on the kiss shoot, which she did not supervise. She insists that she could have kept the production on target without him. ''I knew from the beginning how much the client had to spend. There was no question of going out of town.''
Glasserow himself is convinced that the agency, left to its own devices, would have done the shoot in Europe. In the end, he looks, as usual, to the bottom line. Says the cost consultant: ''We can conservatively say, all told, we saved the client $300,000.''
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Article originally posted on the NYTimes.
Correction: June 11, 1989
Sunday, Late Edition - Final An article in the same issue, about cost consultants in the advertising industry, misstated the role of Ruth A. Gutman. A freelance producer, she was retained by Ogilvy & Mather to shoot a revised television commercial for a Prince Matchabelli fragrance.
