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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
After pondering the "cultural meat values" of Peparami, the only question remaining is: What are these guys smoking?
Sep 29, 1999 | Over a late-summer dinner, Robert Deutsch, the cognitive anthropologist, describes his circuitous journey from underpaid policy savant to Madison Avenue oracle. "The Max Planck Institute has a position called Visiting Foreign Fellow," he begins. "But about four and a half months before I was going to do that, Konrad Lorenz had heard me give a talk at the Herbert Marcuse Institute, which is part of the Max Planck Society, about my work. They invited me because they had heard a talk I'd given in France, analyzing the present political situation in South Africa. Now, keep in mind, up until that time I'd spent about 80 percent of my time in the field, living with primitive cultures in New Guinea, Amazonia and the Kalahari."
At this point, both sides of a 60-minute tape have been filled, and we have only gotten as far as 1978. Politely, I ask Deustch if he wouldn't mind skipping ahead to the early '90s, and the anthropologist kindly obliges. "At that point," he says, "I was slated to go back to UCLA Medical School, which has an Institute of Bio-Behavioral Science." By coincidence, he says, the Account Planning Group, the national association of ad-agency strategists, was holding its annual conference in Los Angeles that year. "They said, 'We want Bob Deutsch to give a talk on the nature of the mind,'" Deustch recalls. "I said, 'I'm not interested.' I had never thought of working with advertising agencies. I had never thought about how I could work with advertising agencies."
The ad execs, hungry for Marcuseian tidbits, somehow managed to bring Deutsch around. "I gave the talk," Deutsch recalls. "And part of the audience said, 'What the hell is this?' But the other part said, 'Wow. Come with me. Help me, please.'" Deutsch leans back in his chair and smiles broadly. "Chiat was the first," he says. "Saatchi was the second. And it just took off from there."
Deutsch was eventually snagged by DDB-Needham Worldwide, which last year hired the consultant at a salary reputed to be in the mid-six figures. "During my first meeting with a client [at DDB], I was introduced by a very high-level person," he says. "He told the client, 'This is Dr. Bob. He's our Greek chorus. He sits out there on the meta-stage. He yells at us. Applauds us. Comments on us.' Which I think is a beautiful way to say it. Because that really is what I do best."
To be sure, being a Greek chorus, not to mention sitting on the meta-stage, carries awesome responsibilities. From time to time, Deutsch says, he must admonish his clients that his job is not merely to move merchandise, but to broaden the world's available knowledge concerning human behavior. "I'll give you an example," he says. "A couple of years ago, Chiat asked me to help them think about fast food. I said, 'I'm not interested in fast food. But I am interested in the first word. Fast. So if you'll allow me to help you understand why this culture is so fast, I think I could deliver to you everything you need to know about fast food. Without ever addressing the issue of, uh, fast food.'"
The consultant then rolled up his sleeves and got down to work. "We started looking at what in human experience slows down time," he says. "And we started looking at the drive-through window as a ritual event in an anthropological sense."
