What's red, white and tan with shifty eyes, a sly smile, pointy ears and a voracious appetite for cash?
It's the Nibbledebuck. Thanks largely to two young creative minds from Belleville, the cute critter has been munching money for 45 years. And it raised the bar in the St. Louis advertising community.
"In 1964, most bank advertising was boring," said Wayne Schlosser, then 30 and one of the young bucks at Gardner Advertising in St. Louis. "It was all giant numerals and percentages until this cute little critter took a bite out of the market."
For about three years, the Nibbledebuck was everywhere.
"It was on 60-foot wide billboards," said Schlosser, now 78 and retired. "It was the first thing you saw when you came across the bridge. It was really something."
It was on animated TV spots, newspaper ads, notepads and thousands of children's banks. There was even a giant Nibbledebuck in the lobby of the bank.
Schlosser and T. Marshall Rousseau, both graduates of Belleville West High School, were part of a team of five or six assigned to come up with a new campaign to tout the many services of the First National Bank of St. Louis.
"The challenge was to go after people who had trouble saving," said Rousseau, now 76 and living in Florida. In 1964, he was a copywriter for Gardner. "I was just fiddling around with words when I came up with 'Nibbledebuck.' I didn't have the traits of any animal in mind. But it would have a very long tongue that could find its way into your pocket and take money from you."
It was up to the rest of the team to bring the critter to life.
"I was the visual guy" as art director, Schlosser said. "I knew they wanted to make a piggy bank. So, I got together with (painter) Steve Shelton to design it."
Schlosser coordinated the Nibbledebuck colors.
"We molded the character out of modeling clay on a wire frame," Schlosser said. It was the modeling clay his father-in-law, Dr. Homer Brethauer, used in his dental practice to take molds of teeth.
"We had some rejects," Schlosser said with a laugh.
But they knew the Nibbledebuck was a winner. So did the First National executives.
Up went the 60-foot Nibbledebuck billboards that dominated the St. Louis skyline. Out came the ceramic children's banks. And ads with Rousseau's crisp copy.
Schlosser and other team members were sent to California to work with renowned animators Hanna-Barbera ("the Yogi Bear people") to come up with TV commercials. Schlosser "roughed up" story boards and the animators set the Nibbledebuck in motion.
"They were impressed that anything this good could come out of St. Louis," Schlosser said.
In the lobby of the main bank in downtown St. Louis, a 5-foot-tall Nibbledebuck was on display in a 16-foot square cage.
"He was nibbling real dollar bills crumbled up on the floor in front of him," Schlosser said. "Customers got a big kick out of it. Some of them tried to blow the money out of the cage, but they were taped down."
Recognition for the Nibbledebuck campaign came pouring in. It won art direction awards from St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles and Advertising Age magazine. California's CA (Commercial Art) magazine proclaimed it "one of the freshest, creative financial campaigns ever."
Schlosser worked for Gardner for 12 years, designing high-profile accounts for Anheuser-Busch, Ralston Purina, Pet Milk and Jack Daniels. For more than half a century, he designed award-winning campaigns and corporate identity programs and has donated his public relations talents to more than 55 agencies and organizations in the metro-east and St. Louis.
He retired in 1996 but continues to donate his services to the community organizations.
Rousseau left Gardner in 1968 to become advertising director at Stix, Baer & Fuller and moved to Florida in 1973 to continue his career. He is currently interim director of Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.
During a recent interview, Schlosser showed off his own Nibbledebuck bank, still in mint condition.
"There are still a lot of them out there," Schlosser said of the banks. People tell me all the time about theirs."
People like John Schreiber, president and chief operating officer of Commerce Bank in the St. Louis region:
"I was just 13 years old when the campaign began, but the Nibbledebuck creature made such an impression on me that I can still picture it running across the TV screen eating dollar bills as though it were yesterday."
Though the campaign was not targeting a 13-year-old kid with no money, it made an impression on Schreiber.
"What it did influence, however, was my awareness of the bank and my interest in going to work for them some ten years later, where I spent the first 14 years of my career. I was able to acquire a Nibbledebuck "piggy bank" along the way, which is still with me today adorning a prominent spot in my office."
That makes Schlosser happy.
"It's good to know the Nibbledebuck is not extinct."
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