Al Palladini is all over the Toronto headlines these days.

There is a big new Ontario toll highway that suddenly won’t open until spring, and Al Palladini is busily defending that debacle in his role as provincial transportation minister.

What amuses me is, Al Palladini is mythical. Al Palladini is a creation of advertising, in exactly the same way as the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Green Giant and the Maytag Repairman and the Energizer Bunny and that odious lady who is trying to mop up the entire world with Bounty paper towels.

In case you live outside Toronto or in a fog, let me review the Al Palladini story. Al Palladini (you have to say the whole name together, like Boutros Boutros-Ghali) used to be a car dealer, running a sleepy little place in the Toronto boondocks called Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury. That was before advertising changed his life.

One day a couple of decades ago, a young Rick Moranis was working as a copywriter for chum radio, and he fell in love with the sound of ‘Al Palladini.’ He built a car dealership campaign around that name.

Moranis would go on the air as Al Palladini’s mother, speaking in a phony falsetto, and say things like, ‘My son Al Palladini of Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury runs the best dealership of any dealership in Toronto called Al Palladini’s Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury.’

The commercials were inane, they were sophomoric, and they were very, very, very, very funny. They made Al Palladini a household name. There is no question in my mind that Al Palladini would not have had a one per cent chance of being a hotshot politician today if it weren’t for those wonderfully memorable commercials. (Sort of like Ronald Reagan and Bedtime for Bonzo.)

Now. I have two viewpoints to make on all of this.

1. When is this industry ever going to do the great campaign saying, ‘advertising works!’

Al Palladini is just one example of how advertising can build a name. Another more recent example is Veronika Hirsch, the mutual fund fallen starlet. How about Dave Thomas of Wendy’s? Earlier in the same category, Colonel Sanders.

And there are several athletes – Larry Johnson and Penny Hardaway, to name two – who are far better known to the American youth market through their shoe commercials than from their basketball exploits.

And faces become famous and profitable through advertising, too. Think of all the supermodels, from Cindy Crawford on down. Mariette Hartley couldn’t buy a film role until she became James Garner’s ‘wife’ for Polaroid. The fast-talking guy for FedEx made millions on the convention circuit. Clara Peller was just an anonymous little old lady until she walked into a studio and said, ‘Where’s the beef?’ Then she became a rich and famous anonymous little old lady.

Advertising does workand as Al Palladini proved, not always with big budgets. But I’m not sure how deeply we admakers believe that. We put our heads down and struggle with our own narrow assignments, while ignoring the success stories around us. Or else we’d do a better job of convincing our clientsand the world.

2. Al Palladini was something very important to this business. He was a courageous client.

Al Palladini deserves his advertising-driven success, because he was the one who approved that campaign. And God knows, he had plenty of reasons not to. The campaign didn’t talk price. It didn’t talk fuel-injection, or side-release air bags. It didn’t quote consumer satisfaction surveys. Worst of all, it made fun of him. (In Canada!!!)

I’ll also bet he didn’t focus-group it. Al Palladini just trusted his gut, figured the spots might be funny, and said okay. And the campaign changed his life.

Advertising agencies should present their clients with a short paragraph, saying almost exactly what the stock-market people do. It should say something like this:

‘You are about to make an investment, and you are entering a territory filled with a great deal of risk. It is possible to minimize that risk, but if you do so, you will likely achieve low rates of interest. Conversely, if you opt for high risk, you may go down in flamesbut it is the only chance you have for huge reward.’

John Burghardt, formerly president of a national advertising agency, now heads his own communications firm in Toronto. He can be reached at (416) 693-5072; fax (416) 693-5100.