Europe's Creative New Breed

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A Fancy for Feathers. John Pearce, chairman of London's largest creative shop, Collett, Dickinson, Pearce, contends that the new freshness is now rated highly by mass-market clients. C.D.P.'s reputation for aggressive copy has helped the firm to treble its billings to $24 million in the past three years. "Would you let your daughter marry a Ford owner?" asks the headline in an ad for Ford Motor Co. To plug pubs run by Whitbread Beer, the agency tried a slapstick pun: "If your wife's not happy in The Baker's Arms, maybe The Feathers will tickle her fancy."

West Germany, where advertising outlays rose 15% last year to $2.4 billion, has become Europe's largest and fastest-growing advertising market. The pace is set by a Düsseldorf agency with the unusual name of Team. The agency made its mark when a distiller gambled $60,000 to try to move several thousand cases of unsold vodka out of his warehouse. Team came up with a series of ads showing a stalwart adventurer and a bear paddling through Finnish lakes or going on African safari. The punch line: "Puschkin Vodka for tough guys." For the next three years, the distillery could not make enough vodka to meet the demand. So successful was Team's small German campaign for French-made Vittel Mineral Water ("The water that rejuvenates your cells") that the producer switched the entire account to Team from Publicis, France's No. 2 agency. Wolfgang Vorwerk, Team's general manager, boasts: "We Germans are good enough to gain a foothold on Madison Avenue before long."

Rationed Space. Charles Wilp, 37, a Düsseldorf photographer turned adman, occupies a niche of his own in Europe's new advertising era. A bachelor, Wilp looks like a tired paparazzo and invariably dresses in canary-yellow astronaut overalls, but his flair for converting unknown products into household names is legendary. To popularize a soft drink called Afri-Cola, for example, he photographed four nude black girls through a sheet of ice. Isenbeck-Pils, a virtually unknown Ruhr beer, increased its sales by 29% after Wilp's campaign treated it as the "in" brand.

Little of Europe's new advertising creativity is to be seen on television. Government-owned stations generally allot commercial time sparingly and subject messages to rigorous regulation. Accordingly, magazines and newspapers share two-thirds of Europe's advertising billings. Some major publications, among them the Sunday Times, Paris-Match and Stern, have achieved the position of rationing space among a long list of waiting advertisers.