The Two Biggest Flops in My Career

It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
I don't know how Dickens could have been so prescient, but he certainly pegged 1998 with surprising accuracy.

My Art Director, John Shirley and I, had just come off the whirlwind success of the ABC "Yellow" campaign. We had never experienced anything like it in our lives. Rolling Stone was writing about it, Bill Maher was talking about it, and pundits were buzzing about it.

Naturally folks back at the agency, Chiat/Day, were happy about all this free press. And for one fleeting moment in time, Shirley and I were unofficially named the unofficial creative Flavors of the Month. The Golden Boys, as it were.

But that Dickens fellow sure knew what he we was talking about.
When things seem too good to be true, they often are.

In February of 1998, something was amiss at the NY office. And when I say amiss, I mean a Vietnam War era, surrounded-by-Charlie, lost-in-the-jungle clusterfuck. A young creative team was about to go into production on a series of three new commercials. But a week before the shoot, the client, Outback Steakhouse,  decided they weren't happy with the concepts.

That's when Lee Clow, the legendary Chiat/Day Creative Director, came into our office. He asked us to stop polishing our awards, get on a private jet and fly down with him to Tampa to fix the mess.

The dismissive and disrespectful CMO and her fresh-out-of-college assistants ignored all our sage advice.

They wanted a spot with hot twenty year olds, frolicking on a beach, eating steak, shrimp and Bloomin' Onions. Nevermind that the Australian Outback is a vast desert inhabited by Aborigines. And that their "food" is served in a restaurant, usually in a strip mall and not on some non-existent beach populated by the rainbow coalition.

There's so much cognitive dissonance going on here, it could only make sense to people who choose to live year round in the Florida heat.

Oh and one last thing. The spots had to include the Outback Steakhouse jingle. That's right, I said jingle.

Flash forward a month after all the beach frolicking and onion blooming had been meticulously committed to film and my partner and I are in NY, at 57th and 5th Ave, at one of the premier jingle houses in the advertising business.

We laid down the first track (I can't believe I even wrote that) and not knowing anything about jingles, we mistakenly thought it sounded OK. So we corralled Lee Clow back in LA, on the phone and played it for him.

It wasn't right. Of course, having zero experience with jingles, how were Shirley and I to know what right was.

Lee didn't like it. So he did what could only be described as the unthinkable, he grabbed the phone and sang the jingle the way he wanted it sung. There are but a handful of creatives in this industry who have heard Lee Clow sing a jingle. John Shirley and I are two of them.

That experience made up for all the pain and suffering we went through for what I am about to share.
I think.

By the way, finding these two spots, made before the age of digital storage, was no simple task. It has taken me over two years to track them down.

And now I can't stop looking at them.
It's like when you have a stinging abscess in your mouth and you keep rubbing your tongue over it until your brain produces dopamine.

Mmmmmm, dopamine.