Do Better Ads

     The world-conquering message would have an unlikely creator. “We all hate advertising,” said Roger Bentley, an Ammirati Puris Lintas big thinker named creative director for Iridium, when he spoke to gateway representatives. “Ninety percent of it doesn’t work; it’s just an interruption.” Mr. Bentley, who once made soft-drink commercials that ran successfully to the divided cultures of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, aspired to create the last 10% of advertising “that works by touching people here.” At a bar later, his hand moved from his heart to his beer, and he wondered about the reach of the satellites above: “Could I call the space shuttle with one of these phones?”
      The next day, at APL’s New York headquarters, Mr. Bentley

wrestled with more earthly concerns. “You’ve got to crack Saudi Arabia for us,” said APL’s Mideast representative, R.P. Kumar. “No legs, nothing that looks like liquor, everyone very dignified.”
      Mr. Bentley rocked back in his chair. “Is there a time when they put on traditional dress, with robes and daggers?” he asked. Mr. Kumar mentioned the traditional Arab conclaves called majlis.
      “Majlis.” Before he could finish caressing the word, he was bombarded with calls about Iridium matters from London, Germany and Japan.

      Upstairs, meanwhile, his international creative teams surrounded themselves in global sensation. Music seeped from a laptop computer as Thai copywriters sat amid piles of magazines, books by Buckminster Fuller, odd Japanese packages and videos -- “Blade Runner,” “Being There,” “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They were picking through the world’s cultural bone yard, looking for ideas; the task spilled into a “war room” papered with rejected slogans such as “One world, one phone.”
      In an experiment, he paired an Iridium phone with a gorgeous model and had her stand on a New York street corner while the ad people observed passersby. The boys at the Rome meeting who had criticized the phone would be shocked: Their “huge,” 3/4-pound phone was a hit. “Lawyers and Wall Street people walked up to her,” Mr. Bentley recalled later. “Normal people didn’t. It looks like it can talk to a satellite.” They also showed the phone at fancy restaurants and got effusive reactions.
      That convinced Mr. Bentley the phone belonged in the ads, and APL basically ran a contest, with all its world outposts submitting campaign ideas. APL Japan offered a bit in which a South Pole penguin phoned a North Pole polar bear. The Italians tried “Iridium World,” a cartoon version of opulence, where first class had 90% of the airplane and champagne always flowed. New York came up with the winner: a series of mysterious photographs and slogans designed to both flatter and frighten the powerful. The night before Mr. Bentley presented the images for approval to the gateway executives, he slept for 45 minutes; a young copywriter, Peter Kain, was found at dawn asleep on top of a photocopier that held one last ad. Some of the photos in the campaign came from art galleries and were printed on a gold mesh that looked like the golden foil on spacecraft. “If you’re going to own the world,” read the words alongside one exotic cityscape, “you’ll need a phone that can follow you around it.” Other ads showed an Iridium-deprived mogul unable to find key executives while businesses collapsed. Mr. Bentley found a laser specialist who could beam Iridium’s Big Dipper logo onto clouds and buildings. There would be no explanation. “We want people to start to ask ‘Why?’ “ Mr. Bentley said to gateway representatives. “We recruit the audience to be participants in the marketing effort.”

      In March, gateway executives gathered to judge the finished effort at the satellite-control facility of Thai Satellite Telecommuni-

cations Co., an Iridium investor. Outside, the heat was like a giant fist.“Think about these ads in an emotional way,” Mr. Bentley told the jet-lagged executives, stacking before them images of golden deserts and exotic empires.“ ‘The person at the hotel making minimum wage is your only link to your office.’... We want to go directly to that anxiety.” He whipped through other facets of the campaign–the lasers, TV, print, possible plugs from government leaders, deals with Internet search engines. Ads would be regionally varied, but with a universal theme: The thrill–and anxiety–of global success. “Someone travels to Osaka from Portland–they’ll see an ad that looks the same, even in a different language.” (As many as 20 in all.) His listeners, themselves disoriented travelers dreaming of changing the planet, were rapt. Mr. Bentley concluded. They cheered.