Advertising
After Pirelli
Philip Kleinman
One group of people who must have given a collective sigh of relief when the Heath government got thrown out was the planners and designers of next year's business calendars. The reason being that the late ad ministration's threatened Indecency Bill (or Cinematograph and Indecent Displays Bill as it should properly be called) would have made life very difficult for all those firms which believe their pathway to success is lined with gleaming bare breasts and comehither thighs stuck on the walls of a great variety of garages, factories and offices. Calendars intended to be displayed in such places would undoubtedly have come under the ban of the proposed Act if they had contained any obvious salaciousness, yet salaciousness is what most modern business calendars are all about—salaciousness combined in many cases with an extremely high standard of design and photographic art.
The pioneer of the calendar as a form of prestige advertising is of course Pirelli. The Italian tyre company found itself ten years ago with a publicity problem: it was not, as far as the great majority of British car-owners was concerned, a brand name of which they were very conscious. The company also didn't have an enormous amount of money to spend in Britain on straight media advertising to change this situation. So it went at it sideways. Its solution was a calendar which any businessman would be, and was, proud to own. Since the 1964 calendar appeared, Pirelli has used a series of eminent designers and photographers, including Harri Peccinotti, Francis Giacobetti and Sarah Moon, she of the soft French focus. Production costs have ranged up to £60,000 per edition and the number of copies — all given away — up to 60,000.
The calendar, specialising in the classiest kind of eroticism, was
aimed very much up-market, and the reward for all this effort came in the form of hundreds of column inches of newspaper publicity and the elevation of the Pirelli Calendar to a cult object, which people would beg, steal or pay high black-market -prices for if they weren't lucky enough to be on the mailing list.
Last year's Pirelli calendar and this year's, though remaining glossy, costly productions, changed course and were aimed more down-market — more at the garage hands at the places where tyres are sold and recommended and less at the Saudi Arabian princes who remained on the mailing list. Pirelli began to show an uneasy awareness that a lot of people were wondering whether it was in the tyre business or the calendar business. The question was finally given a definite answer last week by the company's managing director Antonio Rossetti, who said: "We feel we should withdraw."
In fact one reason why Pirelli has decided to pull out may be that quite a number of commentators feel that it is no longer at the top and that the torch which it lit has passed to other hands. At this year's National Business Calendar Awards contest, for example, the judges unanimously agreed that Pirelli's entry fell below the highest standards. Their main award went instead to a calendar revised by the BBD() advertising agency to promote US deodorant. The subtle, sepia photographs were by our old friend Sarah Moon. A special award, sponsored by Adweek, went to a box of most beautiful fifty-two calendar photographs taken by Adam Woolfitt for Kodak and designed to stand on the businessman's desk.
Neither of these calendars was, as it happens, competing in the sex stakes. But a high proportion of entries were obviously trying to 'do a Pirelli,' i.e. achieve a combination of art and eroticism which would register the names of the companies involved firmly in the public mind. Avon Rubber presented delectable gipsy nudes; Lamb's Navy Rum's girlie pictures were vastly more sophisticated and sexy than the ones the cornpany's first calendar used two years before; Godfrey Davis brought out my own favourite— a collection of erotic fantasies including nude hitch-hikers and a lovely lady defecating by the side of the road. Such things may not — ask Pirelli — sell goods, but they do get your name known, and the likelihood is that even more firms will be trying to get in on the act in 1975, always assuming that they haven't all gone broke. Let executives be thankful that the girls will still be able to thrust their charms at them from the wall beside their desk.
Philip Kleinman is editor of Adweek and writes weekly in The Spectator
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