Jerry Della Femina Reflects on the Good Ol' Days

Advertising icon Jerry Della Femina, named one of the 100 Most Influential Advertising People of the Century, is the chairman and CEO of Della Femina Rothschild Jeary and Partners. He’s also the author of From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, a 1970s cult classic about the advertising business in the 1960s. Conveniently for Della Femina, that decade is the setting for AMC’s wildly popular show Mad Men, prompting the book’s re-release last week by Simon & Schuster.

“The book is back!” Della Femina proclaimed this morning. “Don’t ask me why, but it’s back.”

The title for the book was lifted from a slogan Della Femina, who has worked in the industry since he was 16 years old, concocted on his first day of work at an ad agency called Ted Bates.

During a meeting with the president and chairman of the agency about how to improve sales for the Japanese company Panasonic, Della Femina had blurted out, “From those wonderful folks who brought you Pearl Harbor!”

The reaction, he told Imus, had been utter shock. While he didn’t lose his job, Della Femina admitted, “I didn’t go very far at that agency.”

The 1960s and 70s were, in Della Femina’s estimation, “the great years in advertising.” It was then that he got to know Imus because Bob Sherman, then Imus’s boss, hired Della Femina to do some advertising.

“CBS refused to run a commercial we did for you,” Della Femina recalled. “So I decided I was going to buy one share of stock in CBS, and then have the stockholders vote and bring Bill Paley up to the stand to explain why he was turning down money, I was a stockholder. Bob Sherman almost died.”

Back in those days, life in the advertising world was much as Mad Men portrays it, with everybody partaking in three-martini lunches and extra-marital affairs.

“It was the best time, and it’s over,” said Della Femina, who used to hold a contest in his office in which 300 people voted for the person they most wanted to go to bed with. “The winners won a weekend at the Plaza Hotel.”

He owed the cleaning up of the industry to an increase in political correctness, but conceded that the process of wooing a client is essentially the same as it was back then.

“You’re still looking to do a job for them,” he said, adding, “The fact is a good commercial still works.”

One particular campaign that Della Femina’s agency came up with was the “Face Up to Wake Up” slogan for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which promotes positioning a baby on their back while they sleep to prevent SIDS. It has proven very effective.

“You can show a lot of statistics for selling this and selling that,” said Della Femina. “But that’s the greatest statistic of all.”

-Julie Kanfer