Finding A Way Back

Sam Breakstone, as I have sadly discovered, was not real.  He did, however, exist.  He was a creation of Kraft Foods.  That may give him an edge on us.  Fictitious people, unlike living ones, have the great advantage of having a purpose.  They were born for a reason by someone who wanted them.

The question is whether Kraft will reveal any of that.

The answer is:  they already did.

In 1977, an article appeared in The New York Times announcing the start of the Sam Breakstone campaign.  The article is hidden behind a pay wall now which, seriously, is a whole other thing, but my point is that Nancy Vale kept a copy.

Below, a scan of the actual newspaper clipping:

The article, "That Sam Breakstone: What A Meanie,"  was published January 31, 1977.  What was I doing on January 31, 1977?  Just hanging out in first grade, waiting patiently for Smokey and the Bandit to be released in four months.

According to the article, Kraft reorganized its dairy companies in 1976, working it out so that they didn't compete against each other.  The marketing agency for Breakstone's, Richard K. Manoff, Inc., created a campaign that took on the competition in the 35% of the country in which Breakstone's sour cream and cottage cheese were sold.

I asked the internet for a picture of Richard Manoff
and it gave me Richard Mulligan and Dinah Manoff.  Enjoy.

Richard Manoff is an interesting guy.  He owned a successful ad agency, but in 1965, he served on the US delegation to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (that would have been at the behest of Lyndon Johnson).  He became so taken with the idea of using marketing methods to improve public health around the world, that he formed Manoff International (now The Manoff Group) to consult on using mass marketing to raise awareness of public health issues.  In 1985, he wrote a book, Social Marketing, about how to use modern marketing to help third world nations educate their citizens.  He was instrumental in getting Bolivians to accept iodized salt.

Richard Manoff is still alive and, the internet claims, still working today at 94 years of age.

We know that by the 1980s, Geers Gross was handling the Sam Breakstone campaign.  I don't know when or why that switch occurred.

Yeah, like that happened.

The article says, "[T]he Manoff gang has invented a meanie named Sam Breakstone of whom they say, 'But if Sam Breakstone weren't so mean ... his cottage cheese [or sour cream] wouldn't be so good.'"  The article uses the word "invent," leading to the inference that the ad agency knew that Sam Breakstone was not based on a real person.  Another valid inference is that the author of the article used "invent" even though nobody at the agency said it.  Newspapers aren't infallible.  The New York Times doubly so.

However, in the very next sentence, the article describes Sam Breakstone as "a man who founded his company in 1882."  This leads to the inference that the ad agency thought he was real, or at least was happy to leave some confusion on the issue.  Breakstone didn't found anything, and Breakstone Brothers wasn't founded until 1897.

The first commercials were done on Sullivan Street between Houston and Prince in New York City, just about here:


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The Times calls the turn-of-the-century storefront a "mythical milieu."  Aside from being annoyingly alliterate, it  points to the mad men knowing they were creating a falsehood.

It may not be a great article, as Breakstone is then described as "dog-kickingly mean."  In fact, it was the dog who harassed him.  Although, I'd love to see a commercial with a guy just walking around, kicking dogs.

Irwin Warren

The ad agency reveals its thinking behind the concept.  "The positioning ... is that these are the highest quality dairy products from a manufacturer who has been around for a long time."  They're right.  That is the positioning.  It's also not really true.  The Breakstone's name has been around for a long time (less than they think, but still long).  The company has changed hands again and again.  There's also no evidence that the way their products are made now (or in 1977) has anything to do with how they were made in 1900.  Nor is there evidence that Breakstone's products are of a quality different from their competitors.  And there's no reason to think that the ad agency or Kraft believed otherwise.

The creative director of the campaign was Irwin Warren.   Sadly, Warren passed away in December 2010.  He was 71.  Warren wrote ads for Major League Baseball and Volkswagen.  He also created at least the American version of the Taster's Choice couple.

The article ends by speculating that Sam Breakstone might become as big as Mr. Whipple.  Sweetly, someone in actor Michael Vale's family noted that with a hand-written exclamation mark.