Having worked throughout Canada as a writer, editor and journalist for 32 years, Robin Brunet now lives in Langley. He wrote the biography, Red Robinson: The Last Deejay (Harbour 2016). See review below. He has also authored a biography of advertising mogul Frank Palmer. See review below.
BOOKS:
Red Robinson: The Last Deejay (Harbour 2016) $29.95 978-1-55017-769-5
Let's Get Frank (Douglas & McIntyre 2018) $29.95 978-1-77162-181-6
[BCBW 2017]
*
Robin Brunet
Let's Get Frank: Canada's Mad Man of Advertising
Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2018.
$29.95 / 9781771621816
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
*
Anyone who watched the award-winning TV series Mad Men will be equally discomfited with the advertising industry as depicted in Let's Get Frank, a biography of Vancouver advertising tycoon Frank Palmer.
Perhaps tycoon is too strong a word. Brunet calls him a legend, another strong descriptive. Palmer, co-founder of Vancouver's Palmer Jarvis ad agency, would like them both and based on Brunet's portrait the descriptions at least partially fit.
A disclaimer is necessary here. I loathe advertising, especially the product advertising that Palmer mostly produces. I binged-watched Mad Men to avoid the 15-20 minutes of ads that accompanied each episode. My view: advertising is part of the capitalist's toolkit; it is designed to make you want something you often don't need.
That said, I realize that Palmer and Draper excelled at their trade. Of course, Palmer is not Don Draper, the good-looking star of the TV series. The Vancouver ad man's hulking frame and baldpate dismiss the physical comparison. Still, Palmer is just as ruthless when it comes to winning big accounts. And he got rich doing so.
At times Palmer dipped into his own fortune to cover costs such as the bills left behind when Woodward's store shut down years ago. He has also been generous to various causes, donating to Ronald McDonald House, the Hudson Bay's youth foundation, a police charity (he wanted to be a cop when he was young), and others. He encourages his staff to do the same.
But scoring the big corporate ad contract is what drives him most. Some of Palmer's conquests, and in the highly competitive ad world that is how they are viewed, include McDonald's, Greyhound Air, Hudson's Bay, Save-On Foods, and Jim Pattison's AirWest. The list is long.
The list of Palmer Jarvis's award-winning ad campaigns is also long and equally impressive as described by Brunet. In 1992, Strategy, an ad trade magazine, ranked Palmer Jarvis 69th among ad agencies. By 2004, after a major reboot, it was first.
Palmer may not share Draper's good looks, but he does share his calculating sense of the market, an uncanny ability that Brunet's sources describe with awe. Like Draper, Palmer is the tough, hard-drinking, woman-chasing workaholic ad executive who sometimes had a heart, but mostly had his eye on winning.
In a 2013 online column for DDB Canada, where at 78 he continues to work, Palmer quoted American football coach Vince Lombardi's famous comment "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"; (p. 24). For Palmer winning spells success and "gives me control"; (p. 20).
There's another character trait that doesn't bear comparison with Draper. The Mad Men star was a serious individual; I'll bet he hardly cracked a smile throughout the entire seven seasons. Palmer, on the other hand, is a prankster, a gag man, someone who gets his kicks out of planting stink bombs in the office or gag buzzers in a colleague's pocket.
Frank the prankster is a topic that Brunet returns to time and again in interviews with many of the top ad men in Canada. Several worked for Palmer on their way up the corporate ladder and although they admit to liking him, many of them do not recall with fondness their encounters with Frank the practical joker.
A colleague recalls being embarrassed and fearful when Palmer entered a sports bar equipped with a device that could switch off the bar's television sets. At critical moments in a playoff hockey game Palmer would secretively activate the device and the watching fans would "go ballistic."; He did this repeatedly "tears running down his face,"; while his colleague searched frantically for the nearest exit (p. 206).
It is one of many anecdotes that fill the pages of this easy-reading journalistic biography. Scholars of the industry will find no footnotes, bibliography, or index. In fact, much of the book relies on quotes from Palmer and his friends and colleagues in the ad business.
There is some attempt to look critically at the man and his way of practicing his craft. He is portrayed as kind-hearted, overly friendly at times, patient with the promising youngsters he mentors, and respectful to those who share his winner philosophy. Brunet also offers us some of the warts. Palmer's workaholism, for example, meant the home front suffered. But if it's true that all publicity is good publicity, Let's Get Frank serves Palmer well.
Some readers will come away revering the ad man's chutzpah, ingenuity, and gutsy style. Others will see an industry that a 2013 Esquire article described as being "more about interruption and intrusion than compelling narratives or a good laugh. We don't add value. If anything, we often take it away"; (p. 190).
Some readers might argue that this is not an apt description of Palmer's career, but in the world of corporate advertising today the description seems to fit to a tee.
*
Ron Verzuh is retired national communications director for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. His books include Radical Rag: The Pioneer Labour Press in Canada (Steel Rail Publishing,1988), several monographs, and numerous articles on subjects ranging from trade unionism and politics to travel, literature, news media, film, and food. His essay "The Reddest Rose: Trade Unionist Harvey Murphy: appeared in The Ormsby Review #19 (September 22, 2016).
BOOKS:
Red Robinson: The Last Deejay (Harbour 2016) $29.95 978-1-55017-769-5
Let's Get Frank (Douglas & McIntyre 2018) $29.95 978-1-77162-181-6
[BCBW 2017]
*
Robin Brunet
Let's Get Frank: Canada's Mad Man of Advertising
Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2018.
$29.95 / 9781771621816
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
*
Anyone who watched the award-winning TV series Mad Men will be equally discomfited with the advertising industry as depicted in Let's Get Frank, a biography of Vancouver advertising tycoon Frank Palmer.
Perhaps tycoon is too strong a word. Brunet calls him a legend, another strong descriptive. Palmer, co-founder of Vancouver's Palmer Jarvis ad agency, would like them both and based on Brunet's portrait the descriptions at least partially fit.
A disclaimer is necessary here. I loathe advertising, especially the product advertising that Palmer mostly produces. I binged-watched Mad Men to avoid the 15-20 minutes of ads that accompanied each episode. My view: advertising is part of the capitalist's toolkit; it is designed to make you want something you often don't need.
That said, I realize that Palmer and Draper excelled at their trade. Of course, Palmer is not Don Draper, the good-looking star of the TV series. The Vancouver ad man's hulking frame and baldpate dismiss the physical comparison. Still, Palmer is just as ruthless when it comes to winning big accounts. And he got rich doing so.
At times Palmer dipped into his own fortune to cover costs such as the bills left behind when Woodward's store shut down years ago. He has also been generous to various causes, donating to Ronald McDonald House, the Hudson Bay's youth foundation, a police charity (he wanted to be a cop when he was young), and others. He encourages his staff to do the same.
But scoring the big corporate ad contract is what drives him most. Some of Palmer's conquests, and in the highly competitive ad world that is how they are viewed, include McDonald's, Greyhound Air, Hudson's Bay, Save-On Foods, and Jim Pattison's AirWest. The list is long.
The list of Palmer Jarvis's award-winning ad campaigns is also long and equally impressive as described by Brunet. In 1992, Strategy, an ad trade magazine, ranked Palmer Jarvis 69th among ad agencies. By 2004, after a major reboot, it was first.
Palmer may not share Draper's good looks, but he does share his calculating sense of the market, an uncanny ability that Brunet's sources describe with awe. Like Draper, Palmer is the tough, hard-drinking, woman-chasing workaholic ad executive who sometimes had a heart, but mostly had his eye on winning.
In a 2013 online column for DDB Canada, where at 78 he continues to work, Palmer quoted American football coach Vince Lombardi's famous comment "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"; (p. 24). For Palmer winning spells success and "gives me control"; (p. 20).
There's another character trait that doesn't bear comparison with Draper. The Mad Men star was a serious individual; I'll bet he hardly cracked a smile throughout the entire seven seasons. Palmer, on the other hand, is a prankster, a gag man, someone who gets his kicks out of planting stink bombs in the office or gag buzzers in a colleague's pocket.
Frank the prankster is a topic that Brunet returns to time and again in interviews with many of the top ad men in Canada. Several worked for Palmer on their way up the corporate ladder and although they admit to liking him, many of them do not recall with fondness their encounters with Frank the practical joker.
A colleague recalls being embarrassed and fearful when Palmer entered a sports bar equipped with a device that could switch off the bar's television sets. At critical moments in a playoff hockey game Palmer would secretively activate the device and the watching fans would "go ballistic."; He did this repeatedly "tears running down his face,"; while his colleague searched frantically for the nearest exit (p. 206).
It is one of many anecdotes that fill the pages of this easy-reading journalistic biography. Scholars of the industry will find no footnotes, bibliography, or index. In fact, much of the book relies on quotes from Palmer and his friends and colleagues in the ad business.
There is some attempt to look critically at the man and his way of practicing his craft. He is portrayed as kind-hearted, overly friendly at times, patient with the promising youngsters he mentors, and respectful to those who share his winner philosophy. Brunet also offers us some of the warts. Palmer's workaholism, for example, meant the home front suffered. But if it's true that all publicity is good publicity, Let's Get Frank serves Palmer well.
Some readers will come away revering the ad man's chutzpah, ingenuity, and gutsy style. Others will see an industry that a 2013 Esquire article described as being "more about interruption and intrusion than compelling narratives or a good laugh. We don't add value. If anything, we often take it away"; (p. 190).
Some readers might argue that this is not an apt description of Palmer's career, but in the world of corporate advertising today the description seems to fit to a tee.
*
Ron Verzuh is retired national communications director for the Canadian Union of Public Employees. His books include Radical Rag: The Pioneer Labour Press in Canada (Steel Rail Publishing,1988), several monographs, and numerous articles on subjects ranging from trade unionism and politics to travel, literature, news media, film, and food. His essay "The Reddest Rose: Trade Unionist Harvey Murphy: appeared in The Ormsby Review #19 (September 22, 2016).
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Red Robinson: The Last Deejay (Harbour $29.95)
Review (2017)
Usually cited as Vancouver's first rock 'n' roll deejay, Robert Gordon 'Red' Robinson was born in Comox on March 30, 1937. He started his career in radio by contributing to Al Jordan's afternoon show for teenagers on CJOR in 1953. They made contact after Robinson phoned into the show impersonating Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart who was visiting Vancouver at the time. Red Robinson's first program, called Theme for Teens, has been described as the first scheduled radio program for rock 'n' roll in Canada. As soon as he graduated from high school in 1954, Robinson became an on-air host, befriending major artists who came to play in B.C. and frequently serving as an emcee for the likes of Elvis Presley (1957) and The Beatles (1964). Here Steven Ferguson responds to Robin Brunet's biography, Red Robinson: The Last Deejay (Harbour $29.95).
As Robin Brunet makes clear in his biography, Red Robinson is still a beloved hero in Vancouver, as much a part of his city as Gassy Jack or August Jack Khatsahlano. To emphasize that Robinson is much more than a relic, Brunet opens the story with Red Robinson attending Michael Bublé's wedding.
The glory years of Red Robinson are now almost alien. When Bill Haley and the Comets were singing Rock Around the Clock, before Elvis, rock and roll wasn't just dangerous, it kept parents up at night worrying about their children's future. In those days, as we learn from Robinson's encounters with the likes of Roy Orbison (after a gig in Port Alberni), celebrities and musical performers could often be found in the backseat of a disc jockey's car as they went speeding down a highway to catch a ferry.
In those days, buying an album by a black artist like Fats Domino, or Little Richard could mean having the cashier pull it out from under the counter in a paper bag, so people on the street couldn't see what you were buying.
After Brunet introduces Robinson as an important and loved man, he goes headfirst into Robinson's early career, sprinkling the names of countless celebrities, only to veer further back to Robinson's upbringing. Robinson didn't know his father while growing up with his siblings in near-poverty. But there are few tears shed about his tutelage in the school of hard knocks. Instead Brunet shows how Robinson's innate good humour, optimism and sense of adventure got him going forward, always fueled by his trademark enthusiasm.
Robinson disclaims the notion that he brought rock and roll to Vancouver. He was there at the right place, at the right time. His fallback position is humility, but contemporaries and friends such as music agent Bruce Allen (Bryan Adams) are quick to place a lot of the credit on Robinson's shoulders for bringing a nascent B.C. music business into the mainstream.
There is more to this portrait than a rehash of Robinson's disc jockey encounters with celebs. We also learn about his stunts, such as the time he was broadcasting live from the bottom of Burrard Inlet in a dive suit-and hardly anyone took notice.
His foray into broadcast television, as a sort of alternative to Dick Clark's American Bandstand, led him to a gig with a Portland radio station which, in turn, led to him getting drafted by the U.S. Army. His enrollment in Advanced Infantry Training (and his superior officers encouraging him to pursue a military career) are sides of Robinson's story that the average teenaged Beatles fan would not have known.
Robinson returned to Vancouver and stayed the course. His love of the city is palpable; and it trumped grandiose career ambitions or possible salary increases from afar. That's the charm of this biography: Robinson is a man filled with life and love, and never speaks disparagingly about anyone. (Renowned and beloved sports broadcaster Jim Robson is revered for his similar appeal.) There were some who cheated him, or treated him unfairly, but Robinson's respectful nature apparently didn't allow for him to engage in petty vendettas or slights.
But Robinson is not averse to telling it like it is, or was. Even though he was instrumental in the ad campaign that paved the way for the opening of the first McDonald's in Canada, he has no hesitation in criticizing the company. Increasingly Robinson made his living in the advertising business, buoyed by thousands of friendships and contacts he'd made in the radio and entertainment business. According to Brunet, his honest and respectful nature was an unusual set of traits amongst the large business peddlers and Robinson has kept his integrity in tact.
Brunet closes with accolades and honours acquired by Robinson, but more compelling are the closings at the end of each chapter, in Robinson's own words, as he reminisces about the people he has met. To read those reminiscences from what is so obviously his own voice is a real treat. His respect and awe of these various people shines through as he revels in his meetings with the likes of Steve Allen, Leonard Nimoy, Johnny Carson, The Beatles, Elvis all the way up to Bublé.
Robinson is quick to point out he's not literally the last deejay. The book's title is meant to express that the energy, the connectivity, and the radio business itself is in its death throes. In the old days, deejays were local celebrities; now playlists are compiled by bots.
Robinson compares the demise of his profession to his grandfather's work on steam engine locomotives on Vancouver Island. He does not express indignation at the changing times, but there's a sense of sadness knowing something important is being lost.
978-1-55017-769-5
Steven Ferguson (BCBW 2017)