“I idolized Don Martin.”

A Day in the Life from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Bill Burnett started at Fred/Alan in 1987 as a hilarious freelance copywriter, eventually becoming our creative director (and he went on to write and create cartoons for Fred in Hollywood). From his blog (check it out to see both spots, and more), here’s Bill’s take on a great campaign he created for us and our client VH-1:

One of the high points of my career was in 1988, when Don Martin, “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist”, agreed to make a series of ads with me at Fred/Alan Inc. You have to understand, I idolized Don Martin. I was that kid who snuck Mad Magazine into class and covered it with a Moby Dick book cover. And Don Martin was one of my favorites. With his geeky characters whose feet folded over the curb and his uncanny sense of absurdist slapstick, he cracked me up over and over.

So, there I was, charged with creating a campaign for VH-1 that would position the network as an MTV for baby boomers. What better way to accomplish that than to invoke the boomer’s bible–Mad Magazine? To the best of my knowledge we are the only people who have ever made an animated film of Don Martin’s cartoons, either for commercials or pure entertainment value. That makes these spots pretty special. 

I just took a spin around the web and found that there IS a guy in Brazil who has been doing some decent Don Martin animations . You can find them by Googling “Don Martin Animation”. It’s not clear to me that he did them with Don’s blessing, but they’re kind of fun. (We did our spots with Don’s complete participation.) And apparently there was an unaired Mad Magazine special that contains an animated Don Martin cartoon.

Still, I think our ads are unique in that they remained true to the spirit of the master and also delivered a strong marketing message. These ads spoke to the prevailing thirty-something sense of living with stress and anxiety and troubled times, and the corresponding feeling of entitlement. “After all you’ve been through, you deserve your own channel.” Don’t we all feel that way? We’ve all been through a lot. We DO deserve our own channels. And with the Internet exploding into niches the way it is, we’ll each have our own channel before too long. 

“Please forward the $300. My wife is spending money faster than I can earn it.”

From the moment Fred/Alan started doing MTV’s advertising in 1988 we’d wanted to create a print campaign that would capture the feeling of change and surprise we’d been able to inject into the on-air identity from the first seconds of the channel.

Finally, in 1990 our clients agreed to a consumer advertising in Rolling Stone magazine, which eventually would run across two years. Their (then) large scale format was perfect and we were able to commission some amazing artists to participate; to contrast our photographic music trade campaign (and emphasize our identity roots), illustration was the primary medium. Our excellent art director Tom Godici picked all the art* (with some kibbitzing from the sidelines) from both sides of the generational divide, with a mix of household names, ad biz faves, and soon-to-be’s. 

Our favorite story from this campaign involved Robert Crumb. Generally, Tom would contact the artists personally, tell them something about the campaign, and emphasize we’d want their take on our headline “Just when you think you know what it is… it’s MTV.” Our only request —it was optional, and most didn’t— was that the MTV logo would be included. Crumb’s representative told us to send over some of the other artists’ work and that he’d send it over to Crumb in France, but that it was extremely unlikely he’d participate. Tom dutifully packed up the stuff with a personal letter telling Crumb we knew he hated contemporary music but we loved his work. 

Months later the package was mailed back, seemingly unopened. Sure enough, the original contents spilled out, to all appearances, unread. But Tom’s eyed popped when along with all the other stuff flies out an old, yellow edged piece of onion skin typing paper with a Crumb drawing (the one up above) and a note.

“Please forward the $300. My wife is spending money faster than I can earn it.”

* By R. Crumb, Lou Brooks, Janet Woolley, Robin Nedboy & Al Harp, Marvin Mattleson, Gene Greif, Jenny Holzer, Alex Grey, Robert Yarber, Fred Schneider, Mary Ellen Mark, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Lisa Powers. 

When Paula was famous the first time.

Since the very beginning (August 1981) the MTV packaging and advertising work we’d done used line illustration and animation to establish a clear identity, distinct from the all too common live action music videos or the slick motion graphics on the rest of the television networks. But photography loomed very high on our radar. Fred’s sister/Alan’s wife, Elena Seibert, is a portrait photographer, and we’d each been to collecting photography at home. Rock photographer Annie Leibovitz had recently been doing advertising campaigns for The Gap and American Express, and Fred was particularly taken by Oliviero Toscani’s”real people” campaign for Espirit. 

So, 1990 rolled around, nine years we’d been developing and executing MTV’s DIY, low-fi style. It was time for a change and a music business trade magazine campaign was just the place; Billboard, Hits, maybe Cashbox. The music industry had begun to take the network for granted, assuming it was just their amazing artists(!) that was responsible for the boom in sales. F/A creative director Noel Frankel directed the first ad with Winger, and then art director took the helm for the rest. A classy, quality, photographic look, black & white, featuring top artists of the day, and lyrics from their top recording.

Unfortunately, in those days right before Nirvana broke, it wasn’t the most impressive lot. OK, half of them (Tone Lōc, the B-52’s, Living Colour) were respectable. But Paula, Hammer, and least of all, Winger? And I’m not really sure what to say about Faith No More.

The Fats Boys for Swatch.

Fat Boys for Swatch on Vimeo.

This commercial is Alan and all his talents at their best. 

Our great friend and colleague from MTV, Nancy Kadner, had bought me a Swatch when they were first imported in 1983. Two years later Max Imgrueth had set up a US office and she was running marketing. Since Swatch’s approach was essentially the same as MTV’s ever changing logo she sensed a good fit and we started plotting some stuff together. We’d loved Swatch’s first TV commercial for MTV with The Fat Boys, and when Nancy and her colleague Steve Rechtshaffner intro’d us to their manager Charlie Stettler it was a lovefest, and we became friends for three decades. 

Charlie was a complete character. A Swiss national in New York City, he’d embraced hip-hop early and completely. Putting the two together for Swatch’s first Amercan commercial, he made a fee-free deal that would insure his trio national television exposure at a time when MTV refused to program hip-hop. Two years later, Swatch wanted to make a spot for their limited edition Christmas watch, Nancy, Steve, and Charlie asked Fred/Alan to create it. 

Up until that point we’d only done media promotion, never anything for an actual, physical product, so we took the assignment seriously. As seriously as you could with an act that weighed almost a ton between them. Alan, our resident writer and director, constructed a spot that fused the hip-hop spirit of improvisation and the slickness of TV. The bit with the couple on the couch being interrupted by Buffy, the Human Beatbox was scripted. The “Swatch” shouts and the rap bed were improvised in the back of the shooting stage. Alan constructed the track and the graphics in the video studio in post-production. 

As Alan recalls the shoot: “I remember only that Buffy had no underwear and we had to stitch two pair together; that I experienced the ultimate director humility when, with me four inches from his face directing him in the scene, I watched as his eyes settled and closed and he fell asleep (hey, it was after lunch and he was taking ‘antibiotics’); and that I had no idea what the track would be or how to end it until I heard The Fat Boys rapping ‘Ho, ho, ho’ in the next room. Which taught me the rule I live by: be 100 percent prepared and 30 percent flexible.” 

…

Director: Alan Goodman 
Producer: Linda Schaffer 
Assistant Producer: Daria McLean 
Production Manager: Steve Sheppard

We can’t meet Mr. Brown?!

Unity from fredseibert on Vimeo.

“PEACE! UNITY! LOVE! And HAVING FUN!“ 

Over nine years, Fred/Alan only made two* music videos**, but they were both doozies. First up, James Brown and Afrika Bambaata. I mean, wow, wouldn’t it too cool to work with The Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk?

JB was half a decade away from his latest chart hit and hip-hop was beginning to explode, completely usurping The Godfather of Funk’s excitement. A pioneering Bronx DJ, Bam had hit it big in 1982 and was looking for his way back on the charts.

Fred/Alan had been around less than a year and exhilarated by all the possibilities in front of us. We called anywhere that seemed interesting and one of those places was Tommy Boy Records. Fred had read about their trailblazing Malcolm X & Keith LeBlanc mix “No Sellout,” the first sampled record, picked up the phone and started talking to label president Monica Lynch and founder Tom Silverman, figuring (correctly) they might be kindred spirits. 

In 1984, Tom called and told us about an amazing session they’d just recorded. James’ contract with Polydor had expired a few years before, and Tom snagged him for just one single, a Bambaata duet, a perfect marriage of mentor and student. Indies didn’t know too much about this music video thing (they could just about afford the record), but they’d videotaped the vocal dubs in lovely (ahem) VHS. Could we somehow make it into a video? The average video in 1984 probably cost $40,000. Tommy Boy’s budget was $5000.

We had three things going for us: Fred had a vision of James Brown’s feet, producer/director Tom Pomposello, and producer/artist Marcy Brafman. Oh, and we were so psyched to be working with James (OK, at least were working on something of James) Fred/Alan was willing to make zero dollars. 

• Tom had just started working with us, but he was an ace blues guitarist and didn’t really know much about television. But, he came in every day eager to do anything we had, and he was willing to try anything. When we asked him to produce this video, no matter how much time it took, he jumped at it. 
• Marcy was a producer (and painter) who’d been the senior producer that launched MTV in Fred’s promo department. She’d recently become the creative director at her friend Peter Caesar’s independent video production facility in Manhattan and Peter had one of the few digital painting devices in the world at his studio. Fred/Alan was willing to hand over the entire $5000 fee to Caesar Video. 
• We’d always loved James Brown (we weren’t dead), and for some reason Fred had always imagined the hardest working man in show business’s dancing feet generated electrical sparks. 

Put the original VHS footage in a Blendtec, with all this stuff plus a dash of hip-hop graffiti, and a lot of long days and night. It made a pretty happening video. Low-fi? Sure. It was shot on a home video camera, for funk’s sake.

* The other way Amy Grant’s “Find a Way.”

** Neither Alan or Fred was a director, and in the final analysis, video music is a director’s medium. Besides it was really hard to make a profit.

Nickelodeon’s hero.

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

Nickelodeon: Everyday Hero on Vimeo.

Writer/producer Scott Webb is probably the creative hero more responsible for the Nickelodeon you love everyday than almost any other single person. It’s not for nothing that he began at Nick as a writer/producer and went on to become the network’s worldwide creative director.

In June of 1984 Fred/Alan was asked to help revive Nick. WASEC/MTV Networks management knew the success we’d had with the ‘branding’ of MTV (though the B-word wasn’t in use yet), and thought they need to taste more of our secret sauce. The channel had the worst ratings on cable and kids everywhere disliked it intensely. We thought the reasons were clear, Nickelodeon was not welcoming to kids of all ages. It looked and sounded like it was for babies, which was exactly American children thought of it. 

We thought the solution was to stop telling kids what was on (they didn’t really care) and promise them that Nickelodeon was the right place for them to hang around when they were watching television. Why? Because Nickelodeon was going to actually listen to them when it came time to pick the shows. No one else listened to kids, but we would.  

Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece, Nick’s head honchos, pretty much gave us carte blache as to how we’d pull off this task to them. We, in turn, insisted they hire Scott Webb. Scott had been through boot camp with Fred’s mentor, Dale Pon, so we knew he was whip smart, creative, and strong. He had worked for Fred at The Movie Channel, so we knew his phone number. We knew that even though he didn’t resemble any other hack promotion producer in America (he was less of a TV head than a comic book geek) he’d have exactly the right vibe to reinvent Nickelodeon —and all of television— for the future. 

When he brought in the soundtrack for his first promo Debby thought we’d made a horrible mistake. It’s funny when you hear it now, but at first she thought it was too fast and that no one could ever understand it. (Put it up against any episode of The Fairly Oddparents and it sounds downright sloowwww.)

Scott wrote this promo in a media vocabulary that kids would recognize. Comics was the image, “everyday” was the message (it wasn’t just Saturday morning for kids TV anymore), and fun was the takeaway. 

From this day forward, Nickelodeon would never worry about kids again. Six months after “Everyday” ran, with hundreds of other creative spots that followed Scott’s model of “talk with kids, act like kids,” Nick’s image was fixed forever. They went from worst to first in the ratings, where they’ve remained for 25 years.

“Positioning” MTV. 1987.

Positioning MTV: Music Television

Throughout the 80s, our in-house creative team at MTV had established all the original vocabulary (written and visual) for the channel. In 1983, Alan and I resigned and set up Fred/Alan as the media’s first “branding” consultancy and advertising agency. Bob Pittman was a smart and shrewd competitor; he signed us right back up. MTV Networks was our first client.

By 1987 we were being driven insane by a raft of new employees who thought they had the secrets of MTV in their heads, and kept telling us how to “improve” our work for them. The problem was, each and every one of them had a different version of what was right. We suggested that there should be a definitive (yeah, right) “positioning” document so we were all singing from the same (that is, our) hymn sheet. 

Alan wrote an amazing story. I should emphasize the word “story” because, unlike the marketing documents written by typical advertising geeks, or marketing executives trained at business schools, Alan Goodman is first and foremost a brilliant thinker who has complete control of the craft of writing the English language. He wrote a persuasion that thought through the issues at the network (advertisers aren’t sure where MTV fit into their 1980s conception of television channels) and defined within the wider context of media consumption by viewers (“Normal TV is boring. MTV is alive and looks interesting.”) His story had drama and conflict, and ultimately, a solution. And, by the way, he wrote my favorite description of successful media. To paraphrase: television can’t be predictable, it needs to be dependable.

(Everyone liked Alan’s piece so much that it became the template for the future of MTVN marketing. Soon enough, “positioning” documents became de rigueur. To this day, Alan writes these things, as do many other, less talented thinkers. MTV Networks doesn’t do much of anything without “positioning” it first.)

The result? “MTV vs. Normal TV” became the common thinking around the network for quite a while (I would argue they still try to think that way today) and became our ad campaign: 

“TV or MTV?”

We wanted to keep “I Want My MTV!” (which was created by our friend, and my mentor, Dale Pon; but we’d been the network clients for it). But marketing executives of the 1980s were already infected with the virus they have today. “Why stick with a working plan? We want something new!”

-Fred

Our last office

1991-1992

Fred/Alan, Inc.
708 Broadway @4th Street
New York City

Our first office.

1983-1988

870 Seventh Avenue, @56th Street
The Omni Park Central Hotel
New York City
Original production home of the Jackie Gleason Show

…..
The original Fred/Alan office was incredibly ugly. The evidence in these posted pictures (and the few others we’ve saved) should give you a slight taste of someone’s warmed over mid-century lack of sense. But, it didn’t really matter, because the people we had in the company were an incredibly inspired and talented group. 

In the mid-80s, we’d inherited the space from our friend and first producing partner, Buzz Potamkin, who executed our famous MTV “moonman” IDs and produced Dale Pon’s “I Want My MTV!”. He’d just started Buzzco and offered to share space he’d found at the top of what’s now the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan, for about a third of the going rents. It had a modicum of fame because it was where Jackie Gleason his 1950s Honeymooners offices (which eventually had us name our production arm Chauncey Street, adress to Ralph Kramden in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn), but God knows who had it in between.

The most striking features were the round, stalagtited reception area (above) and the rugs (just one example, below). Each floor of the hotel had a different, mid-century rug knockoffs in the wildest colors and designs they could print. Someone had the money saving idea of using the remnants for the flooring in our space. So right where they’d run out of carpet, they just slammed the next one up against it, no matter the clash. We must have had 25 different designs jammed together. Talk about psychedelic. 

No matter. The cheap rent let us populate the place with an incredible group of folks —not all of them in our company— free thinkers all; more than 25 years later many of us still work together. We had a wild time.

Rug remnant courtesy of Robert Small & Jim Burns

Rock school?

A few years in the company was getting a little worn out exclusively working on branding projects, and we looked for assignments that would get us a little closer to the television show productions we hoped for when we started the company in 1983. Sometimes things would come our way that allowed us to bridge past our visible strengths towards our bigger goals. Like Rockschool.

This was a wacky gig. Whatever it is that moves rockers to be legit (can you imagine Hip-Hop Fantasy Camp?) has spawned a number of how-to-rock venues, but this BBC2 TV series was one of the first that tried to be formal about it all.

Fred/Alan didn’t produce the show itself, but in 1988 we were asked by our friend David Thomas at Thirteen to repackage it for United States consumption. We were to keep the name, but produce the American wrap-arounds with host Herbie Hancock (still hot enough off his MTV hit Rockit), and design the branding, instruction books, and advertising. 

Tom Corey and Scott Nash (Corey McPherson Nash, Boston) collaborated on the print (Scott did the illustrations); our colleague Tom Pomposello oversaw the television production. 

…..
Poster copy: 

Be True To Your School.

There’s one school they make you go to…now there’s a school you’ll want to go to.

“Rockschool.”

A TV series where real rock stars show you how they make their music.

With guest starts Chet Atkins, Bootsy Collins, Sly Dunbar, Bernard Edwards, John Entwistle, Larry Graham, Gary Moore, Ian Paice (Deep Purple), Carl Palmer, Nile Rogers, Robbie Shakespeare, John Taylor (Duran Duran) and more.

And special appearances by Stanley Clarke, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Maiden, B.B. King, Motorhead and The Police. 

Hosted by Herbie Hancock.

Rockschool.