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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 16, 1985)
tables. Rfr >ur lowest 5- -C ^ S =3 3 s r- S O CD » P- o 3 a Jl - 1 £ ^ ^ - <T) D rt Q_ — - CD Q f J Co-editors/Writers Cathy Riely Walter Smith Photographer Bill Hughes at ease The Battalion's Entertah ions tmertainmenf Weekly August 16,1985 is Sea-Dog & Chuck promote cafe By CATHY RIELY Co-editor N A TOWN LIKE COLLEGE STA- tion, clubs and restaurants come and go. But one restaurant has caught on where previous busi nesses have failed. Padre Cafe bucked the bad luck streak of Tecs and Rosewood Junction to become a success. And much of that success can be traced to a local advertising agency, Joe Buser and Associates. Joe Buser Jr. says David Tinsley came to the agency when he wanted to open Padre Cafe because he had worked with the agency on the Tinsley's Chicken campaign. The location of the restaurant is the primary reason for its previous failures, Buser says. Dominik Drive is a difficult street to get to and the building is kind of hidden behind Kentucky Fried Chicken. "So the color scheme really helped a lot," he says. "Painting the end of the building pink makes it glow. It stands out. Buser says another thing that helped was not to say "Padre Cafe at Culpepper Plaza." You don't want to be known as next door to someone , or across the street from so and so, Buser says. You don't want to be as sociated with the other guy, you want them to say next door to you. ' So his father came up with the idea of saying Dominik Drive, Col lege Station By The Sea. "The Dominik Drive differentiates it from anything else in the center," he says. "And it disassociates it from any restaurants in the past. The Col lege Station By the Sea is just a litle bit of good humor. We still get phone calls with people asking what body of water we're near." Buser says that with a name like Padre they kept thinking of an is land. They even originally had wanted to put the menus in bottles. "We came up with 50 reasons why that wouldn't work," he says. But from that idea they came up with the idea of people stranded on an island. And Padre Cafe's two ra dio characters were born. These two have dossiers two or three pages long, Buser says. Buser explains the characters' somewhat complicated background: "They are two fellows that have been in a boat or plane crash - we haven't decided which - prior to World War II. They have been there so long that they don't know what year it is. They don't know about the war or anything else. "One of the fellows is a crusty old sailor - Sea-Dog - who talks like Po- peye. Sea-Dog's father is an Irish merchant marine and his mother is a Puerto Rican cliff diver. The other fellow is editor of Collier's magazine -r» Charles Parsons Wentworth V. (Sea-Dog calls him Chuck). "The two of them are stranded on this island and they have absolutely nothing in common - they could not be further apart from each other - with the exception of the fact they had eaten at this restaurant called The Padre Cafe. That's what we've built the whole gag around." Buser says he gets a lot of ideas from "Gilligan's Island". One com mercial he wrote had a crate float ing ashore. "Everything used to float ashore in 'Gilligan's Island,'" he says. □ MTV's influence has spread to ad industry By CATHY RIELY Co-editor M USIC TELEVISION PUTS unknown bands in the na tional spotlight. It creates trends in clothing and hair styles. And now it influences the advertis ing industry. The advertising industry is big money. U.S. advertisers spent more than $88 billion in 1984, will proba bly spend more than $96 billion this year and will pass the $100 billion mark in 1986, according to Advertis ing Age. With all this money being spent, advertisers want to make sure their ads are effective - and agencies are paying attention to the success of MTV. It's music and visuals are cre ating new trends in advertising. Some commercials now include product information in the lower left- hand corner of the TV screen, where MTV viewers have been trained to look for song titles and band names. And some commercials have rock stars touting products, such as the Honda scooter ads with Adam Ant, Grace Jones and Lou Reed. One of these commercials uses not only a rock star, but his music. The commercial featuring Lou Reed shows clips of New York City street life while segments from Reed's hit "Walk on the Wild Side" play in the background. At the end of the com mercial Reed lounges against a Honda scooter, takes off his sung lasses and says, "Hey, - don't settle for walking." Only five words are spoken -none directly related to the product. The Honda logo appears . on the screen for a few seconds, and that's it. P RODUCING A NON-COM- mercial commercial is exactly what the executives of the ad vertising agency of Wiedan and Kennedy had in mind for the Honda ad, Advertising Age reports. They wanted to produce something closer to the style and feel of music videos. The agency hired someone who has worked with music videos to edit the film footage. Editor Larry Bridges had worked on Ricki Lee Jones' "The Real End" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It." While MTV's success has inspired advertisers to use rock stars and their music in ads, more than music video look-alikes have come out of MTV's popularity. Composer Shelton Palmer, who also owns a music production com pany, says MTV has helped music reach a creative peak in advertising today. "There is a renewed interest in the creative use of music, partially due to the influence of MTV," Palmer tells Advertising Age. "This is the most . incredible time for advertising -both see MTV page 2
