In February of 1984, I got a letter in the mail that changed my life. It was addressed from the Chief Creative Officer of the Leo Burnett Company that at the time, was the biggest advertising agency in the whole wide world. Now those were the days before conglomerate agencies, when animated critters ruled the marketing world. The letter I received was a response to one that I had written on a whim. My letter contained a plea for help along with a picture of something I created small town boredom—a foam rubber “Buddha”. You see, I was experimenting with a pattern for a Cabbage Patch Doll and made the mistake of using a stretchable material. So, what was supposed to be a tiny baby kept on growing in size to resemble a sumo wrester. The polyester filled monstrosity was given the moniker “Buddha”. I didn’t know what to do with it. So, I thought it would be funny to write a big ad agency for creative advice on what to do with it.
Surely they could help me, since they had solutions for everything from halitosis to hemorrhoids on a mass scale. Gee, my overstuffed problem wouldn’t seem so large.
I was hoping my letter would get me an invitation to visit their agency in Chicago, which was just about two hours away. Or, at least give me something funny to read while I ate my morning cornflakes.
But when I opened the letter from Leo Burnett, my world changed.
“Dear Ginger, we’ll adopt your Buddha under one condition. That’s if you come back with it to Chicago to write TV commercials.”
Blogging about it twenty years later still gives me goose bumps.
Two weeks later, I packed up my overalls, flannel shirts and sewing needles and headed to the Windy City to work as a copywriter for Leo Burnett.
My first assignments were for Velveeta, the silly putty of cheese, Rice Krispies and Eggo Waffles.
Most of my projects were for FSIs –the free standing coupon inserts you get inside the Sunday paper. Some of the bigger projects were for the freebies inside specially marked packages of cereal. These involved television production. The commercials would feature children with perfect fingers and teeth who’d discover the trinket of their dreams during their balanced breakfast.
There were Kooky Doodles, Master of the Universe Puffy Stickers, Musical Sticker Dispensers, and other gizmos more desirable than the crisped rice they were buried in! Toys kids never fought over with their siblings. Toys that defied the power of gravity and remained at the top of the cereal box instead of settling to the bottom.
While most of these prizes were made out of plastic, sometimes the free giveaway was edible. Once, the prize was a Snickers Bar. It was on this commercial shoot that I first learned about the infamous spit bucket.
Now you’re supposed to ask, “What’s a spit bucket?”
A spit bucket is the most crucial element of a commercial shoot, being more important at times than the pompous director. It is a receptacle that remains out of sight to the viewer, one that the on-camera talent spews their halfway chewed food into after each delicious bite. It’s the reason why an actor doesn’t turn green after twenty-seven spoonfuls of Wheaties, why Big Mac lovers don’t get big themselves, and why children don’t spin out of control on candy shoots.
While I saw my first spit bucket on that Snickers shoot in the early 1980’s, I’ve seen my fill of them ever since. Contents have included but are not limited to: Big Macs, sesame seed buns, slightly nibbled fries, m&ms (with and without peanuts), candy nougat, a wide variety of yogurt varieties, marshmallow bits, wheat flakes, talking cereal, and cheese sticks. Spit buckets usually are void of movie star spew. While celebrities often star in commercials, very rarely do they actually eat the food they are hawking, which is why you haven’t seen a wheat flake with the molar marks of Michael Jordan sold on E-Bay. Alcoholic beverages seldom end up in the spit bucket, since they are still forbidden to be consumed in commercials on network television.
So all the things you think are consumed never are.
But advertisers aren’t the only ones guilty of using a spit bucket.
We use them at church all the time.
I’m not saying people are upchucking their communal wafer and micro-glass of grape juice every fourth Sunday, but the messages served to us. Too often, we go to church and never digest what we hear. We ignore God’s hot buttons, from helping the fatherless to dealing with social injustice. So our world goes unchanged and we can’t figure out why the world makes fun of our faith.
It’s this spiritual spit bucket that lead to the creation of this cyber one.
Hopefully, the SpitBucket blog will get us to look at the ugly realities that the church has to deal with. Not just blog about them, but power down our computers and do something about these things. The issues will fall into three buckets (pun not intended): Urban Youth—covering the same issues you’ll find at TastyFaith.com; the Church—dealing with ideas to help the church as a whole help others; and Marketing Madness—for the times I just feel like blogging about the world of Snap! Crackle! Pop! And of course, the catch-all Miscellaneous Spew.
Your comments and posts can help others.
Let me warn you, these issues can be as ugly as a bucket full of partially chewed snickers. But dealing with them? It’s a lot more rewarding than selling cereal.
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