I was ignoring the phone that wouldn't ring for three weeks when it rang. I let my secretary, Roxie; answer it so she would have something to do besides crack her gum.
"Balls," she said, handing me the phone.
"Balls" I asked, taking the receiver.
"That's right," repeated the voice over 2,500 miles of AT&T. ?I've made about a zillion golf balls with a new process and I can't even give em away.?
Which was a shame because he wanted to sell them in the worst way. The worst way is without a marketing plan with a purpose for buying the ball. The guy was an egghead from Princeton, a plastics engineer from the better mousetrap school of thought. He had made a better golf ball and now it was his creditors beating a path to his door.
"Can you help me out" pleaded Dr. Calvin Wolf, which was the name of the chemistry whiz guy. "I hear you're a marketing miracle worker."
"Sure, damn right, I said. "Call me in six months and I'll see what I can do."
" No. Now. Please, I got enough dough left in the till to fly you to Princeton Chemical Research's New Jersey tomorrow and pay your fee. Take a look at my golf ball factory, talk to my board and convince us that we haven't blown $8 million bucks."
A day later I was in Princeton watching a Rube Goldberg machine out of Star Wars putting powdered plastic under 700 tons of pressure. Out came a thousand solid golf balls a minute, each of which would out-play and out-last the old wound three-piece rubber golf balls at a tenth of the cost.
But how do you get golfers, traditionalists and brand loyalists to a fault, to try a new kind of golf ball when you can't get the product into the stores? All I needed to do was pull an ad out of my fundament that would revolutionize the billion-dollar golf ball industry.
Hours earlier, on the flight over the fruited plain I had an idea so outrageous that it scared me. It had come to me in a gag line from Rowan and Martin?s Laugh-In, a TV comedy show of the 1960s. I don't discuss half-baked ideas with clients. I needed to buy some time.
"Mr. Cotton, you're our last hope," the Chairman said to me two hours before my red-eye back to L.A. "Do you have anything for us?"
"If I think of anything, I said, It'll cost you another round trip ticket and a night at the Marriott."
I used my 5-hour flight to sketch out the ad that would save PRC and introduce the one-piece golf ball to a skeptical golfing public. Forty-eight hours later I was back in Princeton with finished ads on a covered easel.
