Jingle: Swissair “Heidi Wouldn’t Lie” (1968)
If you sell a country, you have two choices: bikinis or cuckoo clocks.
Cuckoo clocks are expected. Everyone knows Switzerland has cuckoo clocks. Egypt has pyramids. Canada has trees and mountains. Brazil has Carnaval. Bikinis turn national stereotypes on their ears. Sometimes the Swiss wear bikinis. Egypt has modern cities. Canada has beaches. Brazil has golf.
This is the story of how one airline went from cuckoo clocks to bikinis and back again.
This campaign comes from a time before most airlines aspired to global networks. If you flew Swissair in 1967, you were either flying to Switzerland or from Switzerland. You probably weren’t merely flying through it. Airlines today tend to portray a certain neutral, international cosmopolitanism to appeal to global business travelers. But this campaign — aimed mostly at leisure travelers — embraced Swissair’s Swiss-ness.
According to James Marshutz, then the manager of Campbell-Ewald’s New York office, Americans perceived the Swiss as “quiet, efficient, pleasant, straightforward, science-oriented and mostly honest.” So when C-E created a new campaign for Swissair, they made it Swiss to the point of caricature.
The star of the campaign is Heidi, the orphaned child from Johanna Spyri’s novels. She was played by Shirley Temple in the 1937 movie. All of the campaign’s print advertising features the same illustration of Heidi cuddling her goat and the slogan “Heidi wouldn’t lie.”
It may be a little misleading to consider the music featured here a “jingle.” It didn’t really have lyrics. Instead, this music was used in radio and possibly television advertising as a bed for a male voiceover that made promises about Swissair service. At the end of every spot, an innocent child said, “Heidi wouldn’t lie.” Here’s an example of one of the spots:
This campaign, and its Helvetian heroine, belong firmly to the cuckoo clock school. It’s almost as if Egyptair chose King Tut as its spokesman, or as if Air Canada were fronted by Dudley Do-Right. Except more charming.
It didn’t last. In 1970, the founder of Interpublic, Marion Harper, teamed up with two creatives from Doyle Dane Bernbach to found Harper Rosenfeld Sirowitz (or Rosenfeld, Sirowitz & Harper — the order of the principals in the name seems to have shifted over time.) Their first account was Swissair. And in their first ad, for any client, ever, they turned the cuckoo clocks on their heads.
It’s fair to say that ad, with its bikini-clad blonde and its banner headline proclaiming that “Heidi lied,” was as much an ad for the new agency as it was for Swissair. Ron Rosenfeld and Len Sirowitz had been at the heart of advertising’s “creative revolution” for more than a decade at DDB, and this ad has all the hallmarks of DDB’s style. It was designed to shock you out of whatever preconceived notions you might have about Switzerland.
The pendulum between cuckoo clocks and bikinis swung quickly. Rosenfeld, Sirowitz held onto the account for only two years, then lost it to Waring & La Rosa. Their first campaign, in 1972, featured a St. Bernard with a barrel of brandy around its neck.
Swissair was once again unapologetically Swiss.
Airline: Swissair
Title: “Heidi Wouldn’t Lie”
Agency: Campbell-Ewald, New York
Written By: Unknown
Sung by: Unknown
Year: 1967
Lyrics
La la la la la
la la la la
la la la la la
la la la la la la
la la la la la
la la la la
la la la la la la la la la.
La la la la la
la la la la
la la la la la
la la la la la la
la la la la la
la la la la
la la la la la la la la.
La la la la la
la la la la
la la la la la la la la.
(spoken) Heidi wouldn’t lie.