Mal MacDougall On the Spot

MacDougall was a newly minted Harvard grad when his first ad for BBDO Boston almost bombed on the Today show. In the almost five decades since, MacDougall, 68, has served as a partner at two shops and as president/creative director of SSCB/Lintas and Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos in New York. Along the way he introduced Diet Coke with the tag, "Just for the taste of it," and coined Heineken's "Come to think of it, I'll have a Heineken." Now cd at Christie MacDougall Mitchell Bodkin in New York, he has not forgotten what he learned from that first brush with disaster. Q. What work are you most proud of?

A. The introduction of Diet Coke. That campaign created more customers than any other campaign I did. The campaign also changed the way people look at diet drinks. We brought men into the diet franchise.



What do you think of soft-drink ads today?

Pretty dreadful. Cola advertising has always had its ups and downs. I frankly think Diet Coke advertising has been a disaster. Coke was bad for a while, but it may be getting better. A new soft drink launched by Pepsi Cola on the Super Bowl, Sierra Mist, they were pretty hot. I loved the dog and the fireplug—it was funny. Advertising has to be more than funny, but in soft-drink ads, it's appropriate.



Why has Diet Coke been a disaster?

When I introduced it, it was going to be a celebrity drink. To me, Diet Coke should've been People magazine in a bottle. It was the simplest marketing idea in the world: If you look around at all the important people in the world, they have a Diet Coke in their hand. This could have been a no-brainer for a great advertising campaign that could've lasted 20, 30, 40 years. Forever. And they blew it monumentally. But that's just because I'm bitter—I walked away from that one.



What's the last work that made you think, "I wish I'd done that"?

I'm always saying, "I wish I'd done that." The Apple campaign with real people honestly swiping the competition in a simple, straightforward way is great advertising.



Tell me about your ad debut.

It was a live [Polaroid] commercial with Dave Garroway on the Today show. I had written an outline for it, and the client was there beside me. Jack Lescoulie was supposed to take a picture of the monkey J. Fred Muggs and open the back of the Polaroid and pull out a picture. They had rigged the camera so there was already a good picture there. But somebody had forgotten to put the picture in. So Dave Garroway said, "Well, the great thing about this camera is, if it doesn't come out the first time you