Two years after opening her own boutique advertising agency, Linda Kaplan Thaler’s shop was one of 15 pitching Dan Amos, CEO of American Family Life Insurance, for his company’s business. After spending upward of $100 million on advertising, American Family had only three percent brand awareness. It had given Kaplan Thaler reams of information that defied being distilled into a 30-second commercial.
Finally, she asked Amos, “What keeps you up most at night?”
Amos replied that his own relatives and friends could not remember the name of his company.
At their next meeting, Kaplan Thaler and her creative team would present Amos with a concept so ridiculous that Amos would not even test it. It would go on to make advertising history and make the company’s name unforgettable.
Kaplan Thaler is a legendary figure in advertising, having helped create some of the most memorable commercials and earworm jingles of the past several decades, including “Kodak moments” and the jingle “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid.” In 2016, she became the first woman to receive advertising’s most prestigious honor, the Clio Lifetime Achievement Award.
Toys R Us I Don’t Wanna Grow Up – 1991 Commercial (Uploaded to YouTube by Entertainment Goes Pop TV)
But you don’t have to work in advertising to learn from Kaplan Thaler. She has a lot to share about living your best life in her new memoir, My Life in 30 Seconds. “I actually started writing this book about 20 years ago,” she said. “I started thinking about these interesting people I’ve met and experiences I’ve had. I realized there was something to be learned from each of them.”
In crafting her memoir, she said she drew on her skills “taking mounds of sometimes useless information along with important research and distilling it down to a 30-second message. And I said, ‘I bet I could do this with my own life, and maybe the lessons I’ve learned could be a benefit to readers.’”
Take, for example, the challenge of increasing awareness of American Family Life Insurance. Kaplan Thaler and her team struggled with this for three weeks. Then, her art director Eric David came into her office, repeating the company acronym, Aflac, in a high-pitched voice. “I sound like a duck quacking, right?” he said. “What if a duck is quacking the company’s name?”
Kaplan Thaler’s response: “That’s so stupid, it just might work.”
Amos was less than enthused; he was thinking along the lines of something more emotional, one-on-one, a father-son kind of thing. But she was convinced enough to use $30,000 from the agency’s own coffers to create a test of the concept. When the testing company called to share the results, she was told that it was the most memorable advertising ever done in the insurance category.
The duck, initially voiced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried, catapulted Aflac to 96 percent market awareness, and the campaign is a Harvard University marketing case study.
Aflac Commercial Featuring the Voice of Gilbert Gottfried (Uploaded to YouTube by menocu87)
What can we learn from the Aflac duck? “Always make room for goofing around,” Kaplan Thaler writes in her memoir. “That’s where the best ideas are hatched.”
One recurring theme throughout the book is a strong work ethic and bringing your best to the table. Kaplan Thaler writes of collaborating with Stevie Wonder on a project. Asked what was her biggest takeaway from the experience, she recalled they worked around the clock “because that’s the way he works.”
“I worked with him on lyrics and he worked on the melody. There was one bit of harmony he kept doing over and over. I actually fell asleep and woke up a half hour later. He was still working out that harmony. I said, ‘Stevie, it sounded good two hours ago,’ and he said, ‘Not there yet, but it’s getting there.’”
Lesson learned: “Once you’ve done your absolute best, go back and make it better. The journey to get there is the most fun,” she says.
The ad campaign that most affected her career trajectory, she says, was writing the Toys R Us jingle while she was at J. Walter Thompson. It was her first national jingle. James Patterson — yes, that James Patterson, the bestselling author — was her mentor and had worked on creating that now iconic line.
“I knew it had to be a jingle,” Kaplan Thaler says. “I felt that line really communicated a feeling that when you walk into Toys R Us, you felt like a kid again. Patterson agreed. After several people — some of them prominent Broadway composers — submitted disappointing jingles, Kaplan Thaler took a crack at it. “I didn’t think it was very good,” she says, “But my art director said, ‘Let me play this for the client; I can’t stop singing this song.’”
A week after the ad debuted, Patterson told her that while having breakfast at Logan Airport, he heard his waitress singing the song. “He said, ‘You may have a hit on your hands.’”
She did, though not everyone was amused. “I did get mail from angry parents,” Kaplan Thaler says. “One woman said that she always told her son that he wouldn’t grow up if he didn’t eat his vegetables. And her son sang, ‘I don’t want to grow up….’”
Kaplan Thaler is the co-author with former business partner Robin Koval of four bestselling business and self-improvement books, including The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness. That philosophy is another recurring theme in her memoir. “If I leave people with one lesson,” she says, “it is to stop networking and start nice-working. Start connecting more. Every connection can lead to places you can’t imagine.”
Advertising was a male-dominated industry, but Kaplan Thaler says she was fortunate to have a gender-blind mentor like Patterson. “I never experienced any of that prejudice,” she says.
When she started her own agency with just six employees, she made it clear that “winning” did not include accepting kickbacks, undercutting a competitor, or stealing ideas. “Robin Koval and I decided we would do things differently. We were going to lead not by intimidation but by making employees feel recognized. We aspired to Harry Truman’s motto: You can accomplish anything in your lifetime as long as you’re willing to not take credit,” she says.
Within the first three years, theirs was the fastest- growing agency in the country and was also considered one of the 10 best agencies to work for.
Kaplan Thaler has an answer to those who say it takes balls to be a leader: “Wait ’til you come up against a few good eggs.”
Kaplan Thaler’s life and career are so rich that she has wonderful stories that didn’t even make the memoir. She hired actor Christopher Reeve to direct a commercial for the Red Cross. This was after Reeve’s tragic accident that left him paralyzed. “This man was so incredible and so gracious,” she says. “He called me one night to ask if I knew any directors he could speak to because he wanted to do the best job he could. I was about to give him a phone number, but then I remembered he would not be able to write it down. I asked him if he wanted to ask his assistant to write the number down, and he laughed. He said, ‘Linda, if there is one positive thing to come out of all this, it’s that I’ve gotten very good at remembering phone numbers.’”
Kaplan Thaler travels the country as a motivational speaker, but while you can take the woman out of advertising, you can’t take advertising out of the woman. Naturally, she recorded a 30-second jingle for her book: “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry at all the stories that are in it / Plus some bite-sized wisdom you can learn in half a minute.”
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