An interview with Mr.Robert Elgort(1)

Robert Elgort
Young & Rubicam, Inc.
Vice-President, Associate Creative Director(1970)

chuukyuu Among your work so far done, name the two ads that you like best and tell us the reason why.

Elgort With your indulgence, I should like to name three. The Landlord and Funeral Commercials for the Give a Damn Campaign and the Mistakes Commercial for Mayor Lindsay.

I like the Landlord Commercial because it takes a dry statistic-the fact that almost half of all nonwhites are forced to live in substandard or over-crowded housing-and relates it to an experience that everyone of us has had at one time or another. That of going to look for an apartment.

Like all the commercials we did for the New York Urban Coalition, it's honest. It isn't philosophical or ideological. It avoids a lot of phoney theatrics.
And that's got to be part of its strength.

My second choice, the Funeral Commercial, is probably the most powerful commercial I have ever done. We did it during the second year of the Give a Damn Campaign. The mood of the city had changed.
People seemed to be trying to forget that the riots in Newark, Detroit and Watts had ever happened. So we responded by pulling out all the stops in a blatant attempt to shock people and remind them that the job is still undone.
Again, it's based on a fact. And while it's not like the Landlord Commercial,
it makes its point. Conditions in our ghettos are so bad, a lot of black babies die.

My third commercial is the one where Mayor Lindsay admits his mistakes.
As far as I know, it's a political first. That is, it's the first time a politician had ever admitted his mistakes in public. And even though it's a simply produced commercial, it is unquestionably the most effective piece of advertising we did for the Mayor.
This is a good place to point out that I worked with Tony Isidore and Marv Lefkowitz on all three commercials. Tony is a writer and Marv is an art director and we've always made a pretty good team. I couldn't have written these commercials without them.

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