For an agency that prides itself on a subtle, soft- sell approach, Arnold Communications hits hard, and hits consistently. The Boston-based agency is best known for its innovative and award-winning campaigns for Volkswagen, but that work alone didn’t make it SHOOT’s choice for agency of the year.
Arnold has also built diverse and effective campaigns for clients such as Converse, FootJoy, Titleist, Pinnacle and Toysmart.com. The agency hit the ground running in ’99 with Volkswagen’s "Synchronicity," directed by Gerard de Thame of bicoastal HSI Productions. The ad featured a couple in a Jetta who, while driving down a rainy New Orleans street, find that everything outside their car is moving in synch with the song playing on the car’s CD player. The spot received quick acknowledgement from awards competitions—the Association of Independent Commercial Producers Show honored the ad in the original music category and it was nominated for the Emmy for best primetime commercial of the year. The rest of the ’99 slate of VW ads has been met with acclaim as well, including spots such as "Mattress," directed by Jhoan Camitz of bicoastal/ international Satellite; "Brief Encounter," helmed by de Thame; "Great Escape," directed by frequent VW helmer Nick Lewin of bicoastal X-1 Films; and "Turbonium," also helmed by Lewin.
Arnold also got several additional nods on the awards circuit this year for other VW work. The agency picked up the GRANDY at this year’s ANDY Awards. The $50,000 prize was awarded on the strength of a three-spot VW campaign for the redesigned Beetle—"Dream," "Flower," and "UFO"—all of which were directed by Lewin, who at the time was with bicoastal Manifesto.
The agency also had several new business wins in ’99. In addition to new clients such as Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and Toysmart.com, Arnold was recently named as the lead agency on the American Legacy Foundation’s national anti-tobacco account, which is valued at $150 million to $250 million a year. The campaign, which is funded by a settlement between 46 state attorneys general and the tobacco industry, seems like a natural for Arnold, which is also responsible for a number of thought-provoking anti-smoking ads for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Tobacco Control Program.
Growth Factors
When agency chairman Ed Eskandarian bought Arnold & Co. in ’92, it was billing $40 million a year. Though Arnold had a strong regional presence in New England, with clients such Fleet Bank and Bell Atlantic, it was only the 134th largest in the country. By ’98, Eskandarian, the agency’s chairman/CEO, had sold the firm to Snyder Communications, a direct marketing firm.
Since then, Arnold has acquired European arms, including London-based Partners BDDH, and bought smaller U.S. agencies such as San Francisco’s Ingalls-Moranville. Now billing over $1 billion a year, and ranked about 60th in the country, Arnold has also made forays into interactive media, with the purchase of companies such as Circle Interactive, an online advertising shop. Arnold now has the means to create client Web sites that complement and expand on TV and print campaigns. The agency currently has 1,120 employees working at four main offices (in Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and London) and 13 smaller regional offices in the U.S. and Canada.
According to its executives, Arnold’s mission with all of the shop’s clients is to build what it calls "brand essence"—giving consumers a sense of how a product is meaningful, useful and unique. To establish an emotional connection with consumers, the agency must find out what various products and brands mean to them, says Ron Lawner, Arnold’s managing partner/chief creative officer.
"Everything we do is based on a strong strategic platform," Lawner says. "We’re here to build brands, not to do one-off spots. To build equity, you can’t be jumping all over the place. Some people would see that as a small box to work in, but I find it freeing. It has a lot do to with consumer insight."
The shop’s attitude toward dot-com ads is a welcomed change from the current wave of outrageous-but-often-unmemorable dot-com advertising. Arnold’s style is exemplified in "Anthem," directed by Marcus Nispel of bicoastal RSA USA, the first spot for the online educational toy store. While many toy ads, even those aimed at parents, focus on satisfying a child’s immediate desire for a particular toy, "Anthem"—with its images of kids playing outdoors, challenging themselves to impossible feats—is more about how parents can give their children the tools to learn on their own.
Lawner says the agency gets "about a dozen calls a week" from new Internet-based companies. "They’ve got lots of money, and they’re ready to try anything," he says. "But we’re trying to be careful and pick the ones that are going to be around for a while. I love comedy spots, but I’ve had to watch some dot-com stuff six times before I figured out what it’s for. I think there’s a lot of restraint needed in that area to keep that stuff meaningful."
In an industry that’s often marked by abrupt about-faces in strategy, Arnold has allowed its creative personnel to create variations on, or amplifications of, a powerful theme. For instance, after the aforementioned "Anthem" introduced Toysmart.com to viewers, the campaign moved on to three more spots—"Artist," "Clouds" and "Imaginary Friend"—also directed by Nispel, showing children talking with their parents about things they’ve created or observed. In "Clouds," a little boy explains the difference between cumulus clouds and those that look like "horsies." The tagline for the campaign is: "Click on your child’s potential."
The line featured in "Artist"—"Toysmart has toys that awaken your child’s natural talent. You know—good toys"—is written on a yellow Post-It note, stuck to the wall near the desk of group creative director Nick Kaldenbaugh, who with John Petruney, also a group creative director, oversaw the creative side of the Toysmart.com spots. Visiting the set, Kaldenbaugh says, they were astonished by the improvisational skills of the child actors. "Just like the spots show, kids will surprise you."
Ready To Ride
What was behind Arnold’s leap from being a regional agency to a high-profile, internationally known entity? The turning point came in ’95, when Arnold won the $100 million Volkswagen of America account, which is currently headed by Lance Jensen, executive VP/ group creative director, and Alan Pafenbach, executive VP/group creative director. Though the German automaker’s sales were slowly declining, the company still had a reputation for building reliable cars. Indeed, "German engineering"—a phrase that appears again and again in Volkswagen’s advertising—had become synonymous with good quality. However, the general image of VW cars (functional, unglamorous) didn’t gel with the increasingly sleek, powerful models of the ’80s and ’90s.
To revive the automaker’s overall image, according to the account’s group creative directors, Arnold needed to reflect the "vibe" of Volkswagen ownership. After studying VW’s data on its drivers, who were evenly divided between men and women in the 18-to-45 demographic, the "Drivers Wanted" campaign began in ’95, with Lawner writing the tagline: "On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted."
The breakthrough ad in the campaign is regarded by many as being "Sunday Afternoon," directed by Baker Smith of Tate & Partners, Santa Monica. Set to Trio’s "Da Da Da," the spot for the VW Golf featured two twenty-something guys driving around aimlessly in their Golf. When they happen upon a vintage armchair on a curb, they retrieve it, load it in the back of the car, then discard it when they notice that it is the source of an unpleasant odor. The final voiceover says of the Golf, "It fits your life—or your complete lack thereof."
Though Arnold’s VW creative does not draw directly on the Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York, campaigns of the ’50s and ’60s, the new ads share the same appeal. "There’s really no comparison conceptually," says Lawner, "but those sixties ads have a refreshingly honest voice. We continue to have that sense of honesty, but we’ve evolved it into a contemporary style."
If Jensen and Pafenbach took anything from the ’60s ads, they say, it was the agency’s and VW’s sense of knowing who its consumers were. "Volkswagen cars have a personality that’s straightforward and sort of self-deprecating," says Pafenbach. "The trick is that the entertainment portion of the commercial has to align with the personality of the car. People form opinions of cars before they ever see ads. They go, that’s a cute car, that’s a fancy car, that’s a nice car. A cute commercial for a fancy car is not going to work, no matter how hard you try. That’s what’s great about VW. They know who they are. They know who buys their cars. And that’s why the ads work."
Volkswagen’s Beetle was celebrated in the ’60s in a series of groundbreaking commercials. Where other automotive ads created fantasies of power and pleasure, Doyle Dane Bernbach’s spots were affectionate, funny, and soft-spoken. The Bug’s indestructible image got a further boost from Woody Allen’s ’73 comedy Sleeper, in which a 20th century man is revived after 200 years in a deep freeze. The only remnant of his time: a sturdy VW Beetle, which starts up immediately when the key turns in the ignition. Says Lawner, "Everybody’s got a story about a Volkswagen Beetle, because everybody had one, or their parents had one, or their friends. And they stayed around, because it’s hard to kill those old ones."
Arnold faced the formidable task of introducing the newly redesigned Beetle in ’98. Its efforts included several spots, such as the aforementioned "Flower," "UFO," and "Dream," all presenting the Beetle against a stark-white backdrop. The campaign met with success, and was followed up this year with "Turbonium," which touts the Beetle’s turbo-charged engine.
Corporate Culture
Arnold’s top executive began his career far from Madison Avenue. Eskandarian was an engineer for NASA, but became interested in advertising while earning an MBA at Harvard. In ’71, after working on Procter & Gamble accounts at Compton, New York, Eskandarian moved back to Boston to become a senior VP at Humphrey Browning MacDougall (HBM). Among HBM’s employees were Lawner, then a copywriter, and Francis J. Kelly III, who would later become managing partner/chief marketing officer at Arnold Communications. When HBM was bought out by British interests, Eskandarian remained on board as chairman/ CEO, overseeing the purchase of several Boston-based agencies. One of them was Arnold & Co.
Like Eskandarian, Lawner’s advertising career had an unlikely start. As an undergraduate at Adelphi University, Garden City, New York, Lawner, a Bronx native, studied marketing. "Since we were only a half hour outside of Manhattan, the school would invite advertising people to come out and talk to us," he recalls. "These creative guys would be in jeans and T-shirts, and they were making a lot of money. Jeans and T-shirts! That was big deal. And ‘writer’—that sounded so good, even though I’d never written anything in my life."
After graduating from Adelphi, Lawner took courses in copywriting and TV production at New York’s New School for Social Research and put together a spec book. But in an era of layoffs and recession, Lawner had trouble finding full-time work as a copywriter. In between freelance jobs, Lawner drove a taxicab and managed a massage parlor. One of his earliest efforts as a copywriter was a print ad for his employer, the Pink Pussycat Boutique, which read "Our customers come first." The ad, which appeared in Screw magazine, "tripled their business," Lawner says proudly. "I’d love to get a copy of it."
If the Screw archivists locate a copy of that issue, it is likely to hold a place of pride in Lawner’s office, where a framed photograph of Lawner’s mentor at Adelphi, marketing professor Greg Gutman, sits next to a larger-than-life size alien skull. ("That’s real," says Lawner. "Came from SoHo.")
Lawner’s maverick taste in knick-knacks is typical of Arnold’s corporate culture, which blends a staid Bostonian image with a relaxed creative atmosphere. The company moved a year ago from a downtown location to its present address near Boston’s Prudential Center, where it occupies four floors of a modern office building. One executive assistant wears rollerblades in the office, every day, to speed her trips around the long, carpeted hallways.
In an anteroom on the floor occupied by the creatives, there is an ad-hoc VW museum. In it are set decorations from various VW commercials, including the vintage chair from "Sunday Afternoon," although in real life, it does not have a foul odor.
Future
As Arnold wins new accounts, it has been gradually buying small interactive agencies and Web design firms. That type of expansion is especially important to an account such as the recently acquired Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. The company is looking to adapt its style of advertising to a younger audience. Jay Williams, a group creative director, notes that in the past, nearly all TV spots for cruise lines looked the same. "It’s been all about the big helicopter shot, and fun things going on by the pool," he says. "It never, in the past, made me want to go on a cruise. I thought it would be all old folks."
Yet, he says, that image doesn’t reflect the growing popularity of cruise vacations among younger people. "The movie Titanic had a lot to do with that," says Williams. "Because everybody knows what happened to that ship, the story opened up a lost world of elegance and romance and luxury, and that really appealed to people."
The new spots, which will be on the air next month, are likely to reflect that sensibility, he says. And, since many travelers are booking trips online, Arnold is planning an expanded Web site to give prospective cruise customers more detailed info, as well as the means of making online reservations.
The VW sites also serve more than one function: they provide information on the cars, and help curious music fans locate the music used in various spots. "Milky Way," a new ad for the VW Cabrio, actually debuted on the Web a week before it was shown on national TV, and generated hundreds of e-mails and inquiries within a week after the spot was first available for download. According to Tim Brunelle, an associate creative director who is currently working on a redesign of the VW sites, many of the main site’s visitors come back 10 to 12 times a year. "What are they doing? They must be having a good time, and we owe them some new, entertaining content, as well as information about the cars."
The choice of music for the ad—Nick Drake’s "Pink Moon"—reflects Arnold’s history of using unexpected yet perfectly apt music in its spots. Drake, a British folk singer who died in ’74 at the age of 26, is, in the words of Jensen, "a songwriter’s songwriter," one whom many contemporary musicians cite as an influence. Not coincidentally, many members of Arnold’s VW group are also musically inclined: Brunelle, a drummer, plays in a Boston band with a guitarist friend of Jensen; and Shane Hutton, a senior copywriter, sang in a band in his hometown of Toronto.
But the connection between Arnold’s creative teams goes further than good taste in music; it’s also a shared appreciation for their colleagues’ work. "The reason we’ve been able to do the things we do is because Arnold’s first VW ads were so good," says Hutton, who has worked with Tim Vaccarino, a senior art director, on the VW spots since ’98.
Despite its surging revenue, the agency remains, at heart, a Boston company with a global reach. "When Snyder bought Arnold," says Lawner, "they respected the fact that there was a unique culture, a unique approach. They have helped us expand, but I don’t think we will ever become an agency network like TBWA/ Chiat/Day. We’re not ever going to become a giant global entity. But I do think we will try to be an agency network unto ourselves, in our own way."=
