The last campaign that Bob and I did at Wells, Rich, Greene before starting our own agency was a controversial one.

In early ’73, Hush Puppies hired the agency and asked for the guys who did the Alka Seltzer campaign.  Their business was hurting and they were looking for some kind of breakthrough to make them relevant again.

Their unique pigskin shoes were famous for being soft and comfy to wear.  People loved the feeling, but the styles were nothing to write home about. In fact, they were pretty dorky.  This was a particularly thorny problem because they wanted to target a younger, hipper customer.

Bob and I felt we couldn’t just focus on the softness and comfort.  We had to find a way to make people look at the shoes in a different way.  The term “disruptive” didn’t exist then, but our instincts told us we needed to be a little outrageous.

One day, as we were batting ideas around, Pasqualina picked up one of the Hush Puppies sitting on his desk and said, “It’s just a nice dumb shoe.”  The expression “Dumb Shoe” struck a nerve with me.  It wasn’t pretty, it was just a nice dumb shoe that did the job.

We began to draw comparisons to the VW Bug.  Doyle Dane Bernbach was irreverent enough to call the car a “Lemon” in one famous ad.  And they ran another ad that said, “Ugly is only skin deep.”  We felt there were parallels here.

“Hush Puppies are not a fancy shoe, or a phony shoe.  They’re just a nice dumb shoe.”  We felt it was a disarming way to communicate with our young audience.  Give the shoe a kind of anti-status status.  And if they bought into it, after awhile this dumb shoe might start to look good.  Kind of like a VW Bug looks good.

Bob and I got excited and began scripting a campaign using multiple vignettes to create repetition for the line.  People from all walks of life (no pun intended) would hold the shoe up to camera and say cute things:  An elderly man brags to camera, “I was wearing Hush Puppies before anybody knew they were dumb.”

A pretty girl turns to her boyfriend and says, “Gee, that’s a dumb shoe.”  And he proudly says, “Thank you.”  My favorite line featured the Japanese actor, Pat Morita, before he became famous for The Karate Kid.

In those days, Japan was the China of today — a place famous for making cheap stuff.  So, in this scene, Pat portrays a Japanese shoe manufacturer standing next to a Japanese associate who was very big and bald.  Holding the shoe, Morita says to the camera, “We can make it cheaper…but I don’t think we can make it dumber!”  Then they both crack up, which made it hysterical.

Everyone at the agency, including Mary Wells, was excited about this campaign, but understandably very nervous.  How do you tell a new client you want them to spend $10 million to call their product dumb?  You tell them the Mary way.

On presentation day, the President of Hush Puppies and his VP of marketing came to the agency and they were escorted into the big conference room.  Mary and our creative director, Charlie Moss and two of our account people greeted them and then Bob and I came in with the storyboards under wraps.  Before we showed the client a thing, Mary got up and spoke in a very emotional tone.

“You have come to us and entrusted us with your brand.  We take this very seriously.  You have told us that you have a serious problem and we’ve confirmed it with our own research.  You need a big idea or you wouldn’t be here.  The campaign we’re about to show you is controversial, of that there is no doubt.  But it’s a big idea…the right idea…and if you have the courage to run it, it will turn your business around — I guarantee it!  (Wow, an ad campaign that came with a guarantee.  This was Mary at her best.)  And then she gestured our way, “Howie…Bob…”

I did a quick setup about how you can’t fool young people.  If you want to sell them something, you have to disarm them and speak their language.   And then, we revealed the line, “Hush Puppies, The Dumb Shoe.”  I think I saw the president’s jaw drop open.  But he didn’t get up and leave.  We went through every board and every vignette and we heard a few chuckles in the right places.

Then, it was decision time.  Mary stood up and said, “This is important, give yourself some time to talk.  We’ll wait outside.”  Following Mary’s lead, all of us agency people left the room and hung out in the hall.  We held our breath as we waited…five minutes…ten minutes…fifteen minutes.  Then, the door opened and we rejoined them in the conference room.

“Mary” the President of Hush Puppies said, “We know how to make shoes, not advertising.  This campaign makes us very nervous, but that’s probably a good thing.  You’re the experts and if you say it’s going to work, well…hell…let’s go for it.”

It was another great moment for the agency, for Mary and for us.

We flew out to LA to shoot the campaign with Stan Dragoti as our director.  He took our funny stuff and made it funnier.  But my favorite spot of all turned out to be an unscripted one.  On all of our storyboards, Bob had drawn an end frame that showed their signature dog with the long droopy ears sitting proudly next to a Hush Puppy shoe.

We thought it would take us about fifteen minutes to shoot this shot.  It took over an hour.  Every time Dragoti called “action”, the dog started acting like a dog.  He would stand up, put the shoe in his mouth, drag it across the frame, bite it, shake and wiggle it…and the whole time, the camera kept rolling.  At one point, a grip reached in to put the dog in his place and you could see a big tattoo on his forearm.  It was priceless.  We had to make a spot out of this.

When our friend Steve Karmen, the king of jingles, wrote the perfect piece of music, we cut an additional spot (no extra charge) with the dog as hero.  It was like a 30 second living logo that was a celebration of the shoe.

The campaign caught on quickly.  The expression “The Dumb Shoe” had some people scratching their heads, but everyone was talking about it.  And that gave the product the buzz it needed.  Stores that had rejected Hush Puppies as an outdated brand, suddenly saw it as relevant again.  The campaign helped sell the shoes into stores and helped them sell out.  Mary had come through on her guarantee.

And that was the last hurrah for Pasqualina and me at Wells, Rich, Greene.  Three months later, we left to open our own agency and pursue our dream.

We had come into the agency seven years before as Young Turks.  And we left doing the old soft shoe.

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