(Vice-President, Copy Supervisor, Doyle Dane Bernbach Inc.)
chuukyuu What do you think is the difficulty in working on campaigns for Banker's Trust? How did you overcome the difficulty?
Mr. Lee The difficulty is that by law banks are very similar to each other. So that you have the problem of selling a service that is very similar to the competitors' services. It's not easy to visualize the differences. So an account of this nature calles for the excercise of a great deal imagination.
But I think I have done some of my best work for the bank because it forced my art director, Lester Feldman, and myself to think through many, many ideas very carefully before committing ourselves to anything.
We overcome the basic difficulty by realizing that there was a totally unexplored area in bank advertising. Information. Most people don't know very much about banking. So instead of making inflated claim about how great Bankers' Trust is, we explained how to balance your checkbook. It I must say so myself, doing this in an one minute television commercial is no small achievement. And doing this has given Bankers' Trust the image of a bank that is very helpful to its customers. As in fact, it is. Perhaps more so, as a result of the advertising. You can walk into Bankers' Trust and get an officer to help you find the mistake in your checkbook balance.
chuukyuu Among your works done so far, please name two that you like best, and tell us why you like them and some episodes concerning the works.
Mr. Lee One of my favorites is a commercial we did for the Democrats in 1964. What we did was film one of Barry Goldwater's fantasies. The fantasy of sawing off tne Eastern Seaboard of the United Stats and letting it float out to sea. It was lovely. It made an advertising point about the candidate with humor rather than shrillness.
Another favorite is one I did with Lester Feldman for Bankers' Trust. We called it "Raniny Day" and it's a commercial about saving. We've found that many people sit up and listen when this spot comes on. They enjoy it. It's run for years and still seems to be as fresh as it was when we first did it.
the commercial for the Democrats in 1964
Bankers' Trust "Raniny Day"
