EGN NEWS DESK
Ilon Specht, who rebelled in opposition to her patriarchal male colleagues at an promoting company by writing a profitable tv industrial for L’Oréal’s Preference hair colour product that carried an everlasting message of feminist empowerment, died on April 20 at her son’s residence in Barrington, R.I., close to Providence. She was 81.
Her son, Brady Case, stated the trigger was issues of endometrial most cancers.
It was 1973. Ms. Specht was a copywriter on the McCann-Erickson (now McCann) company in Manhattan. L’Oréal was utilizing Preference, a comparatively new product, to problem the market dominance of Clairol’s Nice ‘n Easy. The company’s crew had a month to create a marketing campaign to interchange one which had been canceled.
“We have been sitting on this large workplace and everybody was discussing what the advert needs to be,” Ms. Specht advised Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker in 1999. “They needed to do one thing with a lady sitting by a window and the wind blowing by means of the curtains. You know, a type of faux locations with large glamorous curtains. The lady was a whole object. I don’t even suppose she spoke. They simply didn’t get it.”
“They” have been the lads who needed a conventional advert, whose expectations she spurned. Cursing to herself in anger, she wrote the industrial in about 5 minutes.
“I take advantage of the most costly hair colour on the earth,” the advert started. “Preference by L’Oréal. It’s not that I care about cash. It’s that I care about my hair. It’s not simply the colour. I count on nice colour. What’s price extra to me is the way in which my hair feels. Smooth and silky however with physique. It feels good in opposition to my neck. Actually, I don’t thoughts spending extra for L’Oréal.”
Ms. Specht recited these phrases from reminiscence when she was interviewed for The New Yorker. Then she arrived on the tagline.
“‘Because I’m’ — and right here Specht took her fist and struck her chest — ‘price it,’” Mr. Gladwell wrote.
But whereas the marketing campaign was permitted, two variations of it have been shot: the one which Ms. Specht grew to become identified for, and a second, pushed by her male colleagues, wherein her phrases have been rewritten and delivered by a person as he strolls in a meadow with a lady who appears adoringly at him. She stays silent save for a giggle.
“Actually, she doesn’t thoughts spending extra for L’Oréal,” he says, “as a result of she’s price it.”
That model (which by no means ran) was all flawed, Ms. Specht stated in “The Final Copy of Ilon Specht,” a forthcoming brief documentary directed by Ben Proudfoot.
“This was not for males,” she stated, “however for girls and for different human beings.”
“I’m price it” has been used, and tweaked (as “You’re price it” and “We’re price it”) for many years in advertisements and branding by L’Oréal. The first individual to say the phrases in a industrial was Joanne Dusseau, a mannequin and actress. She was adopted by, amongst others, Cybill Shepherd, Meredith Baxter, Kate Winslet, Andie MacDowell, Gwen Stefani and Beyoncé.
“‘I’m price it,’” Ms. Winslet stated in a L’Oréal promotional video in 2022. “It feels fairly good to say it. ‘I’m price it.’ It’s magic, that phrase.”
In a full-page advert that ran on May 5 in The New York Times’s Style part, L’Oréal Paris and McCann Worldgroup paid tribute to Ms. Specht.
“Her highly effective phrases challenged the wonder business’s requirements from the within,” it stated partly, “and impressed girls to acknowledge their inherent worth.”
Illene Joy Specht was born on April 19, 1943, in Brooklyn. Her father, Sanford, owned a furnishings retailer. Her mom, Annette (Jacobs) Specht, labored with him.
Illene began faculty at age 16 at Syracuse University, then transferred to U.C.L.A. when her household moved to Los Angeles. She was expelled, alongside together with her roommate, after her roommate’s boyfriend was discovered of their dorm room.
Ms. Specht was nonetheless a youngster when she started working in promoting, first as a secretary after which as a copywriter. By then she had modified her title to Ilon — a type of rebranding, her son stated. She labored on the businesses Young & Rubicam and Jack Tinker & Partners and was finally employed at McCann-Erickson, the place she had been employed solely a short while earlier than she began engaged on the L’Oréal advert.
“She had quite a lot of private integrity,” Michael Sennott, a McCann-Erickson account govt who labored with Ms. Specht on the L’Oréal marketing campaign, stated in a cellphone interview. He added, “Either you’ve gotten writers who can mimic the present pattern or the present pattern is who they’re. She actually represented what was happening in society, significantly with girls.”
She left McCann-Erickson round 1974 for Jordan McGrath Case & Partners.
As inventive director for that company, Ms. Specht oversaw campaigns for purchasers like Life cereal (one advert, that includes a number of youngsters, included the phrase, “Unless they’re bizarre, your children will eat it”) and Underalls, the pantyhose model, which promised girls no panty line and had the tagline “they make me appear to be I’m not wearin’ nothin.’”
She rose to govt vice chairman and govt inventive director however left in 2000 after the company was acquired by Havas Advertising.
“She wasn’t a part of the group that engineered the sale and noticed it as a betrayal,” Mr. Case stated in an interview.
Ms. Specht opened an antiques retailer in Ojai, Calif., however held onto her residence on the Dakota in Manhattan, which she had bought in 1976.
In addition to her son, she is survived by a stepdaughter, Alison Case; two stepsons, Timothy and Christopher Case; two grandchildren; and a sister, Meredith Schiller. Her marriages to Burton Blum and Eugene Case, a founding father of Jordan McGrath Case, resulted in divorce.
In “The Final Copy of Ilon Specht” — which tells the twin tales of the L’Oréal advert and Ms. Specht’s loving relationship together with her stepdaughter — Ms. Specht is proven in a mattress, debilitated by her sickness, as she talks in regards to the message of her industrial.
“It’s about people, it’s not about promoting,” she says. “It’s about caring for individuals. Because we’re all price it or nobody is price it.”
