The Aflac Attack

Diane francis column for NY Sun Tuesday June 27



In the 1970s, Linda Kaplan Thaler refused to take off her clothes onstage as an actor in a road show production of "Hair" and was fired.

She taught music for awhile but soon began writing jingles for advertisers after her father introduced her to friends in an agency.

She ended up working for 20 years at J. Walter Thompson and others until 1997 when she launched her own company out of her Manhattan brownstone.

Now her company, the kaplan thaler group, inc., is the fastest growing agency in the United States with $1 billion in billings and 175 people. Among her many blue-ribbon clientele these days is Clairol, Aflac, Trojan, US Bank and Revlon.

Her secret, in a world where people are bombarded with 5,000 messages daily, has been to bring together her worlds of advertising and entertainment.

"It's about the e-factor, the entertainment factor," she said in a recent interview with The Sun. "People will follow the funny. We are _an ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] culture and we are an entertainment culture."

She said humor has always been an important part of selling. Stock market brokers always opened their daily client calls with a new joke. Now advertisements must be funny to be memorable. Music is also key. She and her husband are both accomplished musicians _and composers which has helped her create entertaining presentations to clients, known as "pitches", which are designed win their business.

"We had to pitch Panasonic for a shaver and realized that the message _ould be that guys don't like to shave. So eight of us sang a parody _called `shaving sucks' and the client hired us," she said. "We call advertising the theatre of persuasion."

One of her team's most entertaining and enduring campaigns involved an obscure Georgia insurer called American Family Life Assurance Co. The agency came up with a duck as a mascot which quacked the company's _acronym "Aflac". Sales and consumer awareness jumped immediately. _"We've staged quack attacks on shows, delivered live ducks to hosts," _she said. "Actor Ben Affleck brings up our campaign and that he's _subject to quack attacks on talk shows. He's done so many bad movies he ends up talking about the friggin duck to change the subject about _his career."

Besides being funny, ad agencies must multi-task more than ever.

"We used to do a 30-second TV spot and a couple of print ads for clients," she said. "We still do that but now we have a second job and a third job and a fourth job. Today we will produce a 30-second and 15-second television ad; a 60-second radio and 30-second radio ad; billboards; print ads; online banners; webisodes [entertaining vignettes for websites]; content integration [product placement] and brochures."

Her firm is a reflection of herself, an eclectic mix of backgrounds, and employs musicians, actors, artists, a stand-up comic, novelists, potters and painters.

"We use the entertainment industry model. There are no titles, no _layers, no vice presidents," she said. "We swarm, with our various skills, around a project, like writers on a show. We gather, brainstorm, go away then gather again."

This is the best framework for what she believes is the next _"convergence" in the industry which is that agencies and their clients _are becoming content-providers. This is also an outgrowth of what's known in the trade as "product integration" or "product placement" but goes beyond paying a producer money to use a certain brand of car or cola in a movie made for TV.

For instance, her firm and a sister agency called Mediavest (both are _independent units with The Publicis Groupe, the world's fourth largest _agency holding company) worked with writers and producers of a show called "What I Like About You" on behalf of Clairol's Herbal Essences.

"The show's episode was about a contest to pick a "Herbal Girl" and the main character competed. There was Herbal Essences signage everywhere throughout the program and ends with the star watching a Herbal Essences commercial," she said. "We have someone in Los Angeles doing these deals."

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Kaplan Thaler, a diminutive and sunny mother of _two teenagers, is funny herself. _"I had my first child at 41 years of age and my second at 44 which _makes me the only woman I know who gave birth to grandchildren," she _said. "Kidding aside, this business is in a state of flux but if you _keep your humor, and your kids are fine, nothing can bother you."