Lockheed had identified 23 government contracts it wanted to win. And
not only win, but keep funded. Our target audience was small: members
of Congress. The idea was to link a current aerospace or defense
program, by analogy, to a similar technological turning point in
history. The implication to the Congressional target audience was that if we
don't keep the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Trident II, or the F-22 funded and
built by Lockheed, the very fate of American civilization would be at
stake. Seriously. Politicians think like that. Or they used to.
When I joined the team as copywriter at McCann Erickson, they had already sold a three-ad campaign to Lockheed. It was pretty standard aerospace fare, with banal headlines like "We can see the future from up here" and a picture of the earth from space. They wanted me to just fill out the rest with a little bit of fluffy "vision of the possible" copy.
But I had an inspiration that first night to do something that hadn't been done before in aerospace/defense ads. I stayed up all night working on the first three, one on the Advanced Tactical Fighter, one on the International Space Station, and one on DOD's proposed Milstar communications satellite system. I relied on my nerdy obsession with history and thought about who we were talking to, those politicians who liked to see themselves as pivotal actors in history.
The concept was to use historical examples where a technological edge had made all the difference in the survival or demise of a nation. The ads were copy-heavy and, instead of using images of airplanes and spaceships, used contemporary images of the historical events in each lesson. Not your expected aerospace ad. But I imagined a Congressman (our primary audience) reading these and seeing their own role in history as they voted for or against the funding of one of these programs.
I was so excited about this idea the next morning when I brought the comps in to show the account director, Dave McAuliffe. I explained my reasoning: how they were aimed at key members of Congress specifically (we had a list of committee-members). He looked at them for the longest time without comment. Then, without looking up, he said, quietly, "These are f***ing brilliant!." He got on the phone with the client and told him that, even though we had sold them on a campaign, we had something else we wanted to show them. We were to go out to Calabassas to Lockheed headquarters that afternoon.
The people at Lockheed were thrilled. They had never thought of advertising that way. Even the CEO, when we presented the ads to him, was excited. They immediately tasked us with creating 12 ads in total, each pitching a specific contract, and they also immediately increased their corporate ad budget four-fold (from the original three to twelve ads to run in Time, The Economist, The WSJ, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Aviation Week). Overnight, Lockheed had become the LA McCann office's biggest, most profitable account.
Though considered copy-heavy, the campaign earned the year's highest Starch Scores (for recall and readability) in the magazines it which it ran (Time, The Economist, WSJ, Business Week, Aviation Week).
It was even featured in a special show on advocacy advertising in the SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY.
But the real test was that after running the campaign for three years, LOCKHEED WON 19 OF THE 23 CONTRACTS IT TARGETED --and all 12 of them featured in the ad campaign.
Not that it was just the advertising. Some damn good engineering had something to do with it, too.
But in the third year of the campaign, the then-CEO of Lockheed, Dan Tellup, hosted our ad team at a special dinner to celebrate the winning of those 19 contracts and the continuation of congressional funding of them. Sitting next to him, he told me that he brought copies of the ads in with him to personal meetings with key members of congressional committees and the Defense Department, using them as aids in persuasion. He said that these politicians loved being reminded that they were are at the fulcrum of history.
So, enough of this tedious backstory. Get to the ads that made historical difference...
The first ad in the series compared the importance of funding the Advanced Tactical Fighter (the F22) with the introduction of the new technical innovation in the West during the middle ages, the lowly stirrup. It implies that small advances in technology can determine the fate of civilizations. (Click on ad to enlarge to read copy.)
The second ad compared the unilateral decision by 15th Century Ming Dynasty to halt all international trade and stopping of scientific inquiry, turning what was, at the time, the most powerful nation in the world into one of the weakest with the potentially equally consequential decisions for the United States to stop funding the International Space Station
.
The third ad in the campaign made an historical analogy to the Royal Navy's tactical advantage in flag signaling during the Napoleonic Wars to the importance of funding a global military satellite communications constellation, Milstar. Ads from the campaign were even cited and quoted by people in the media. And the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, in an address to the graduating class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis,read a quote from one of the ads he had torn from his inflight magazine.
A fourth ad emphasized the civilizational significance of continuing funding of the Hubble Space Telescope with the prehistoric importance of Stonehenge to human understanding. Evidently, from first hand reports by Lockheed's then CEO to me at a dinner party, this ad really made an impression on key Congressmen who had been wavering on voting on further funding, since the Hubble was over budget and behind schedule.
This ad emphasized how the technological advance of coding language was a continuation of the ancient invention of hieroglyphics five thousand years before.
Comparing the importance of the logistical span of Roman Roads to the maintenance of that empire to the importance of making sure the U.S. and NATO's airlift capability is funded and kept modern.
Another ad, unexpectedly comparing the cleverness and superiority of Zulu tactics during the British colonial war in 1879 against those indigenous people in South Africa, makes an object lesson about the importance of electronic warfare in the late twentieth century. This ad was also complimented by a targeted radio campaign in the Washington D.C. area.
Radio: The Zulus and Electronic Warfare:
And who would've thought a battle fought 575 years in the past would've had a relevant lesson to politicians today about the importance of funding strategic defense. If only the French had realized this in 1415, the history of Europe might have been radically different.
And another pivotal historic moment relating to modern defense policy and procurement. Napoleon's 1805 decision not to invade his nemesis Britain, even though he had a vastly superior army, because of the strategic deterrence of the superior Royal Navy. I used this as a lesson to keep the United State's strategic deterrence, the Fleet Ballistic Missile System, enhanced by the then-new Trident II, funded and moving forward.
This ad made a Biblical metaphor, the Tower of Babel, to the importance of funding Lockheed's advances in systems integration, both in the defense and civil spheres. So many members of Congress love Biblical analogies.
The last ad in the three-year campaign, summing up the importance of history in making momentous decisions by politicians.
