Oct. 1, 1964 - Not all the broken hearts over the Phillies’ faltering pace in baseball’s exciting National League pennant race are in Philadelphia.
Sadness as deep as anywhere in the City of Brotherly Love reigns on West 55th Street. The headquarters for avid Phillies rooters in New York is — or probably was — the office of Pesin, Sidney & Bernard Advertising.
The agency had prepared a series of ads for Bayuk Cigars, Inc., tying in Phillies cigars with the baseball team, the Phillies, winning the pennant. The pennant was safely in the grasp of the Phillies on Sept. 1, when the campaign was conceived. They were 5½ games in front and going strong.
It is now a month later, and the Phillies are in third place — 2½ games behind the league-leading Cardinals.
The agency, showing a resilience that the baseball Phillies unfortunately haven’t shown, has adjusted their campaign to meet the situation. Their victory ads read “Phillies loves the Phillies.” The more up-to-date ads the company has prepared read, “Phillies still loves the Phillies and vice versa.”
The copy now, instead of relating cigars with championship baseball, is sympathetic to the Phillies team. “So what if you didn’t go all the way,” it reads. The copy then follows a theme that Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch wouldn’t agree with. It compliments the team for leading the league for 130 days, thrilling supporters with victories, chilling them with losses, and in general making life interesting.
It closes with the old Brooklyn Dodger war cry of “wait until next year.”
The approach of making debacles appealing has worked very successfully for one baseball club, the Mets. It may work well for an ad campaign.
Harry Pesin, president of the agency, said today that every morning for the last month the agency’s staff has opened the papers not to the business page, but to the sports page.
“Every day, we kept saying, ‘Well, they can’t lose another.’ But they did.”
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