Red, White and What a Deal!(Brief Article)

Cindy Gallop didn't need market research to see the mood of the country had changed. The week of September 11, her advertising agency, Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty, was putting the finishing touches on a campaign for the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald. But when a fireball tore through the World Trade Center, it took the lives of nearly 700 of Cantor's 1,000 employees. Instead of rolling out ads, Gallop's staff helped man Cantor phone lines, comforting survivors. "It made us particularly attuned to how everybody feels," Gallop said. "The context of advertising has changed. And we're still taking the temperature."

Everyone on Madison Avenue is struggling to find a new voice. The edgy sense of humor, irony and glib materialism that played so well off the late boom era now seems hopelessly out of date. As marketers prepare for December, a month that usually produces 30 percent of yearly sales, they face a multitude of quandaries. Is the salesman's soft-shoe appropriate in a time of national mourning? Can one ignore September 11, and go on as before? If you embrace the moment, how to avoid the appearance of exploiting tragedy for commercial gain?

In the days following September 11, most companies pulled ads out of respect--and confusion. Behind the scenes, debates raged about how to hit the right notes. At Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia, marketers decided to shelve a six-month-old "Life tastes great" campaign. "Post September 11, we were taking stock of consumer attitudes," says Coca- Cola spokes-man Robert Baskin. "We found that the advertising would have been insensitive. Life no longer tasted good to many in our audience." Coke found, however, that consumers were receptive to themes of national unity. So Coke went back on the air with "We live as many. We stand as one."

Coke had stumbled upon an age-old truism. In times of national crisis, patriotism and national unity sell--up to a delicate point. The use of the flag as a sales tool can be traced to America's Civil War, says Cecilia O'Leary, a professor of history at California State Monterey Bay and the author of "To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism." After hundreds of thousands of war deaths, the flag became an emotional symbol to a nation in mourning--and was exploited by pitch-men for everything from whisky to widgets.

The backlash was inevitable. Between 1897 and 1905, 31 states passed anti-flag-defamation laws. Those laws are now best known as ...