ADVERTISING: The Kooksters

The suggestion had a middle-of-the-cocktail-party logic: Why not have a quadripartite whiskey festival, featuring Canada, Scotland, the U.S. and Ireland? “There are international conferences, congresses, and conclaves for most of man’s endeavors, enjoyments, and art forms; except whiskey. And we (The Whiskey Distillers of Ireland) have often wondered why.”

Thus begins the latest paean to Irish whiskey by a pair of offbeat West Coast admen named Joseph Weiner, 43, and Howard Gossage, 42, who have floated to prominence clinging to champagne bottles, beer kegs, brandy snifters and, of course, fifths of Irish. In the process they have broken almost every advertising rule in the book. Their ads are casually illustrated, almost never done in color, and they can pussyfoot around a subject so quietly that the reader sometimes has trouble telling what the ad is about. What they do have is fun, an aged-in-the-wood humor that tickles readers and rings up billings of $1,000,000 a year from clients who give them some 20% of the gross, compared to the usual agency fee of about 15%. Says bearded Joe Weiner: “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them.”

Salmon in the Square. The two first teamed up in 1957. Gossage, who had run a successful campaign for Australia’s Qantas airlines as a vice president of San Francisco’s Cunningham and Walsh, became the firm’s writer and thinker; Weiner, who had his own small agency for eleven years, handled the business details and helped kook up the campaigns. For one of their first accounts, Oregon’s Blitz-Weinhard brewery, they placed an ad in The New Yorker that read: “Keep Times Square Green! A modest reforestation proposal from Oregon’s largest and only brewery as a fitting prelude to Oregon’s glorious 1959 centennial celebration. Just picture what reforestation will do for Times Square! Cool and green, teeming with game, salmon swimming up Pepsi Cola sign to spawn.”

It had practically nothing to do with beer, but thousands of readers blitzed Blitz with pleas for trees, gave the company a word-of-mouth circulation far beyond the cost of the ad. They pushed California’s Paul Masson brandy by poking fun at bourbon (“Kentucky is a great place for breeding horses”) and vodka (“If you can’t see it, taste it, or smell it, why bother?”), helped their client boost champagne and brandy sales 46% in two years.

Scouts in the Whiskey. By mid-1958, The Whiskey Distillers of Ireland, who wanted to make a bigger dent in the U.S. market, were in the fold. Weiner & Gossage started an Irish campaign that featured ads ending in midsentence, sniffed at the Brazilian coffee bean (because Irish coffee obscured the burnished flavor of Irish whiskey), extolled St. Patrick’s Day in Mexico City. In the interest of scientific experiment (“Irish whiskey research in nature’s laboratory”), Gossage dreamed up the Irish Geophysical Year, to be held in McMurdo Sound.

So many letters (each personally answered) poured in to Ireland’s Whiskey Distillers that Gossage claims to have “established an important new industry in Ireland—writing letters to America.” Says he: “If you write in and say you don’t drink Irish, we may send your name to a man who does. It will be like the buddy system, like boy scouts helping each other to swim.” Irish whiskey sales in the U.S.? Up 60% in the first nine months of this year, to 30,000 cases.

Last week Gossage was lolling in a manor house south of Dublin, writing a book on advertising, paying social calls on Prime Minister Sean Lemass, and casting about for new clients for the W. & G. kooky jar. “We never solicit business,” straight-faces Joe Weiner from San Francisco, “we wait for business.” But he was not laying odds that another large chunk of the Green would not come under the spell of Adopted Leprechaun Gossage.