James Travis’ TV ad helped re-elect Reagan

Published 12:00 am Saturday, May 14, 2016

James Travis, the advertising executive who assembled the team behind the highly successful “Morning in America” television commercial that helped propel President Ronald Reagan to a landslide victory in his 1984 re-election campaign, died Sunday at his home in Chester, Connecticut. He was 83.

The cause was complications of heart disease, his wife, Marty, said.

For the 1984 campaign, Reagan’s advisers saw the need for a new media strategy. In 1980, the challenge had been to convince voters that their candidate was more than a former actor and pitchman for General Electric. The resulting ads, emphasizing Reagan’s years as governor of California, had the flavor of a résumé. The strategy worked, but both Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were reported to consider the ads “static and uninteresting.”

This time around, Michael Deaver, the White House deputy chief of staff, turned to Della Femina, Travisano & Partners, a New York agency known for offbeat campaigns like Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara’s radio spots for Blue Nun wine and the Meow Mix commercials with singing cats.

His first choice for the job, Jerry Della Femina, the agency’s founder, sometimes described as “the madman of Madison Avenue,” failed to win White House approval, for unexplained reasons. On his way out the door, Della Femina recommended Travis, the agency’s president, for the job.

The Tuesday Team

Travis, an affable, relaxed Midwesterner, made the cut and quickly assembled a dream team that he described to The New York Times as “all the best in the business, terrific and fast.”

It included copywriter Jim Weller and art director Ron Travisano, from his own agency; copywriter Hal Riney, from Ogilvy & Mather’s West Coast office; and creative directors Tom Messner and Ron Berger, from Ally & Gargano. Among the team’s advisers was Roger Ailes, now the chairman of Fox News.

Under Travis’ direction, the Tuesday Team, named after the day on which voters would cast their ballots, came up with a commercial known officially as “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” The candidate himself did not appear in it. Instead, it served up apple-pie slices of Middle American prosperity and plenitude, bathed in a soft, golden light: a fishing boat heading out to sea, a farmer plowing his field, a family moving into a new house.

“It’s morning again in America, and, under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder, and stronger, and better,” Riney’s voice intoned as the commercial progressed from dawn to dusk. “Why would we ever want to return to where we were, less than four short years ago?”

When the commercial was shown to Reagan for the first time in the White House, he said, “Am I really that good?”

Early years

James Dunton Travis was born July 31, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After earning a bachelor’s degree in speech communication from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1954, he went to work for Colgate International. On Madison Avenue, he worked for Warwick & Legler and Young & Rubicam before joining Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller as a management supervisor.

In 1970, he was hired by Della Femina’s growing firm and put in charge of advertising for Schieffelin, an importer of wine and spirits. The company’s portfolio included Blue Nun, an undistinguished German wine that caught the public’s fancy after a humorous campaign in which Stiller and Meara exchanged rapid ad-libbed remarks.

“I noticed a little Blue Nun next to the fruit compote,” Stiller said in one spot. “It’s probably Teresa Pensibini,” Meara answered. “We always knew she had the calling.”

Travis later supervised the Meow Mix campaign.

“His great value was that he could talk to creatives, and they liked him,” Della Femina said in an interview Wednesday. “He brought people together.”

Della Femina soon sent him to run the company’s Los Angeles office, which he built into a sizable agency. There, he put together the team that produced a series of commercials for Isuzu cars and trucks featuring Joe Isuzu, a blatantly mendacious fictional dealer, played by actor David Leisure.

In 1986, Travis left the Della Femina agency to help start Hal Riney & Partners, but not before negotiating the sale of his old agency to White Collins Rutherford Scott, a British company, for $40 million. “I said, ‘Jim, you’re amazing,’” Della Femina said. “’I wouldn’t pay $40 million for us.’” He was president of the new agency until retiring in 1990.

Travis’ first marriage, to actress Nancy Dussault, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, the former Martha Gilmore, he leaves no immediate survivors.

Legacy

The Tuesday Team made dozens of television and print ads for the 1984 campaign. In “The Bear,” the Soviet threat and the need for a strong American military were dramatized by a bear prowling the woods, with the tag line: “Isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear — if there is a bear?” In “Train,” cheering crowds greeted Reagan as he arrived at a campaign whistle-stop.

It was “Morning in America,” however, that remained the signature spot, ranked by advertising historians among an elite group of opinion-shaping commercials led by “Daisy Girl,” the commercial for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964. That commercial showed a small girl picking petals from a daisy when a nuclear blast fills the screen with a mushroom cloud.

Other top political ads include the Willie Horton ad used against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign and the 2004 ad for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign showing John Kerry repeatedly shifting direction while windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket.

“Ads work when they connect with an impression that’s already out there,” said David Schwartz, the chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, where he organized “Living Room Candidate,” an exhibition devoted to campaign ads. “This was the right ad for that time: People wanted to believe that four years after the Carter years, the country was on the rise again.”