From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Part 3

For two hours he was beautiful. The meeting ends and I say to myself, 'Thank G.o.d, we made it, the meeting's over and he hasn't blown it, he hasn't insulted the guy, he hasn't done anything.' So David puts his arm around the bagman, whose name may have been Pedro or Jose or whatever, and as they're walking out the door out the door David says, 'Pedro, you're a nice guy. We're going to be working together, I'm sure, and you'll see we're nice people, too. If you keep up the niceness, Jose, maybe we'll give you back Texas.' I knew right then and there we were dead.

Because there is so much craziness in advertising, you live for great lines. A funny line literally helps you get through the day. One of the best lines I ever heard was thrown when I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. We were making a pitch to the American Enka Company, which was run by a beautiful blond George Macready type, the kind who was on the other side in World War II movies. Making the pitch was Shep Kurnit, the president of the agency, Marvin Davis, a vice-president, a guy named Tully Plesser, who is a market-research man, and a couple of others, including me. Without getting too ethnic, the faces were basic Jewish and Italian. The pitch went well, Kurnit and Davis were fine, and then the blond guy retired from the room to discuss the agency with some of his people. He walked back in and said, 'The account is yours if you can produce Delehanty.'

CHAPTER.

FIVE.

DANCING.

IN THE.

DARK.

'What account guys have to do to survive today is dance. By dancing, I mean they've got to be agile, with very, very good footwork so they don't get shot down easily. You see, they've got nothing to sell. Your copywriter, no matter how young or how bad, has his book his portfolio to show. An art director also has a portfolio. Or they've got reels, short presentations containing all the commercials they've ever shot. But what does the account man have to show? Nothing ...'

The people I sympathize most with in advertising are the account guys the fellows who are the middlemen between the creative troops and the client. Account guys have to put up with the craziness of the creative people, work out marketing and campaign plans, and then sell the package to the client. Under the best circ.u.mstances, it isn't easy. Here is your clean-cut account guy, mortgaged up to his ears in Chappaqua, trying to deal with a zonked kid writer who is maybe twenty-three or twenty-four and is living in a loft in the East Village with twelve other acidheads. The account guy has to get the ad out of the kid and then sell it to the client, who is pretty tough himself. There are a lot of guys crying themselves to sleep up there in old Chappaqua because they're caught in the crazy middle.

The Hucksters wasn't all that far from the truth. It's been written up that the Lucky Strike account, when George Was.h.i.+ngton Hill was acting every bit as bad as Sidney Greenstreet, had something like twenty-one account supervisors on it in a two-year period. During that time some six or seven guys had heart attacks, several had cases of nervous exhaustion, and the last guy had a complete breakdown. Then in came Fairfax Cone, young, tough, bright, and takes over the account and holds it and solidifies it and becomes The Man, you know? And then Frederick Wakeman writes a book about it, except in the book the guy goes into Sulka, I think, and spends his last twenty dollars or so on a sincere tie. I a.s.sure you no sincere tie ever made any impression on George Was.h.i.+ngton Hill.

What account guys have to do to survive today is dance. By dancing, I mean they've got to be agile, with very, very good footwork so they don't get shot down easily. You see, they've got nothing to sell. Your copywriter, no matter how young or how bad, has his book his portfolio to show. An art director also has a portfolio. Or they've got reels, short presentations containing all the commercials they've ever shot. But what does the account man have to show? Nothing.

What's going on in advertising today the real revolution is that the younger agencies, the Mary Wellses, the Doyle, Danes, the Carl Allys, eliminate jobs. This is what is causing the upheaval on Madison Avenue. Every time you read of an account moving from an older agency like Foote, Cone & Belding, Compton, or Lennen & Newell to one of the newer and smaller agencies, jobs are eliminated. And account men are affected most of all in these moves.

Let's take TWA when it was at Foote, Cone. Here is an account billing about $22 million a year, and although I don't know the exact figures I'd be willing to bet there were about seventy-five people having something to do with the account. Again, I don't know how many people Mary Wells has on the account, but I'd be willing to bet it's a h.e.l.l of a lot fewer people maybe no more than fifty people. And doing a good job. The point is, you don't need twelve guys servicing TWA and holding their hands and fifteen guys running around wondering if their coffee is warm enough and what they can do. A Mary Wells eliminates jobs. She produces good advertising which is what the game is all about, so she doesn't need account guys jumping out of their skins every time somebody from TWA calls the office.

Let's take TWA one step farther. As a hypothetical example, let's figure TWA moves out of Wells to Daniel & Charles. I don't think Danny Karsch would have fifty people working on the account. I'd estimate that he would get by by using maybe thirty or thirty-five people: four copy and art people, two promotion copy and art, three or four in media, two or three in research, three in marketing, three in production, and then secretaries and bookkeeping people. So, from an original one hundred people you're down to maybe thirtyfive. And there are sixty-five people on the beach. What I'm getting at is that the number of people working on an account is in direct relations.h.i.+p to the quality of the work being turned out. If you can find four great writers and four great art directors, you can have yourself a fantastic campaign. And let TWA worry about its own hot coffee.

There's a very good account in town in terms of the prestige attached to it. The billing is nothing, but the prestige is terrific. This account has been with an old-line agency for almost fifty years. Well, the grandson of the founder of the business is comparatively young, maybe forty-two or forty-three, and he has come to the conclusion that maybe the people at this old-line agency don't understand his problems. Now after fifty years, this is the equivalent of a guy going to his wife and saying, 'Tootsie, I want a divorce.'

The wife, sitting there with her fifty-year-old varicose veins, says, 'Divorce?' And the guy says, 'Yeah, it's very strange. I want a divorce to marry a young chick who's about seventeen years old and who's making a lot of noise. Right now she's about to be arrested for running nude down Madison Avenue. You know, I realize that we've lived together for a long time and you've done an awful lot for me and we've grown up together, but I want a divorce. I mean, I see something down the block that's really fantastic. I want to try it.'

You can see the desperation that's going on in the older agencies. They rant and rave at agencies like mine, like Leber, Katz, Paccione, Carl Ally, Delehanty, all the newer agencies, even Doyle, Dane, which is only twenty or so years old. In a sense guys are coming to the older agencies and asking for divorces, and then they're running out with these young chicks. And so what the older agencies do is try to act like a woman who is trying to hold onto her husband. Like a fiftyyear-old woman hanging onto the breadwinner. The older agencies go out and buy a load of cosmetics and eye shadow and they put all this stuff on and do their hair this is what they're doing when they start hiring freaky young kids at star salaries. This is the facade, they're putting on all this stuff and saying, 'Well, if this is what it takes to hold my guy I'll just hold my nose and do it.' But they wind up looking like a fifty-year-old lady who's wearing a miniskirt and dressed like a kid. They can't make it that way, but they try, and the try costs them a lot of bread.

The agency president who has just lost an account worth a million dollars to his agency is not going to be the friendly, warm guy who the day before thought he had that million dollars locked in, and he's going to transmit his feelings to his creative staff, right down to the account people. The account people know what to do tranquilizers or aspirin. Big aspirin-takers in the advertising business. Advertising is a fantastic source of revenue to the aspirin business. Librium, Miltown but heavy on the aspirin.

I've worked with guys who just pop aspirin as though they were going out of their minds. They have headaches, that lousy feeling they don't know what it is and they sit there and pop aspirin all day long. In turn, they sell aspirin. When I was up at Bates, we probably sold more aspirin for the Anacin account than any other agency in the United States in the aspirin business, and we also consumed more Anacin than any other agency, too.

A good example of having that uneasy feeling is now taking place over at Foote, Cone. Now they're a very good, very big agency that has been having tough luck and there's uneasiness all over that place. I know, because I'm talking to account executives from there. Doors are kept closed all day long. Everybody has their door closed. The account guys don't come out in the halls. That's where the shrapnel is. Guys sit in their offices. And it becomes boring. It becomes tiring. You want to go to sleep. Your arms are tired. So are your legs. A boredom factor sets in at any large agency when the luck is going bad and when everything tastes a little rotten. There's a lot of yawning and people can't quite get with it. Guys are walking around saying, 'Ah, what the h.e.l.l, this is a lousy business and I think I'm going to get out of it.'

There is a physical change in an agency when the business starts to go. I saw it at Fuller & Smith & Ross when they were starting to blow business. Not only were guys logy they actually started to get sick. Guys stay out with a bad back. They start to walk slower. Sometimes you really don't know quite what's wrong with them, but they're not healthy any more. At Bates the guys took Anacin.

What a wonderful thing for the economists to play with. There's a great case of an agency taking its product seriously.

Some of the biggest aspirin-takers that I've met in advertising are the hip-pocket account guys. Hip-pocket guys are a dying breed, but while they hang on they're wonderful to watch. A hip-pocket guy has an account in his pocket. Account guys are able to get employment contracts at agencies if they come in with pocket business. A guy with pocket business can deliver the account he's in so tight with the account for whatever reason that he owns it, it's his, n.o.body can touch it. Someplace along the line he impressed the account enough so that they'll stick with this guy for life if he just plays along. There's a guy in town who represents an entire industry let's call it the peac.o.c.k-feather industry. All the breeders of peac.o.c.ks got together and formed a Peac.o.c.k Feather Breeders' a.s.sociation to do national advertising, lobbying, and whatever.

This fellow, Al, has been working with the Peac.o.c.k Feather people for years. The Peac.o.c.k Feather Breeders' a.s.sociation wouldn't make any kind of advertising move whatever without Al's being involved. When Al started working with the Peac.o.c.k Feather account it was worth $1,000,000 in billing a year. Because the demand for peac.o.c.k feathers has not been what it used to be ladies don't wear hats any more and so on the account today bills only $300,000 a year. And Al has been moving the account around. It's been to at least three agencies that I know of.

Now it may seem that the account is vanis.h.i.+ng right before your eyes, but take a look at the economics involved. The account is still attractive enough to agencies in town so that if Al ever lets the word out that he and the Peac.o.c.k Feather Breeders' a.s.sociation are available, he'll get fifty calls, I guarantee you. Wherever he goes, he can say, 'I've three hundred thousand dollars' worth of business.' Figure that an average agency could make $45,000 on that billing in commissions and another $15,000 in production charges. So an agency could make $60,000 a year on a guy by the name of Al. Let's also say that Al goes for $35,000 a year in salary, so the agency now has Al paying for himself plus maybe $20,000 or $25,000 left over. Plus, they've got Al around most of the time to work on three or four other accounts, which is also free of charge, plus whatever he can go out and pitch. They've got it knocked. He's worth it to them. Except that they don't realize what he costs their creative image, which is considerable. Because whatever the president of the Peac.o.c.k Feather Breeders' a.s.sociation wants, Al has to deliver. Otherwise he can't live, he can't hold the account. So he screws up their image, and that's what is essentially wrong with hip-pocket accounts.

How does a client get locked into a guy like Al? The client goes to the theater once too often with Al. He wins a game of golf from Al once too often. The client really starts to believe that Al is a good advertising man. Somewhere between the escargots and the baked Alaska the client starts to think Al is G.o.d. The client is not so smart in some of these cases. In other cases it's like absentee management. Very interesting. It's like the real top management isn't around, so the guy who is in charge of spending the money gets into bed with another guy. And I don't think there are kickbacks involved here, either. Just bad judgment.

There is a cheese account in town let's call it French Cheese and it must bill $1,000,000 a year. French Cheese's top management is in Paris. They know nothing. The people running French Cheese in New York don't know much more than the French do about advertising, but they do trust an account guy named Jimmy. Jimmy, in fact, has French Cheese stuck way deep into his pocket. He's moved the account to at least four agencies. Jimmy, of course, has to remain very, very friendly with the French Cheese guy here. They go to the theater a lot. Their wives are friends and they better be friends because Jimmy lives or dies for this account. This account means $80,000 a year to Jimmy and Mrs. Jimmy, plus a Caddie and a couple of other things thrown in. So every year, as long as Jimmy remains friendly with the French Cheese guy in New York, he's got his eighty grand. But he has to perform, no question about that. So long as he does, the account is locked. No agency could pitch that account without having Jimmy on their payroll.

Let me make it clear hip-pocket business goes on way beyond Jimmy and his French Cheese. Guys get to be presidents of agencies because they have business locked in. You control a certain amount of business, and then you muscle. You've got more clout than the next guy. At one agency where I worked it was very simple. One guy played golf with a guy who controlled the advertising for a very big automobile account. Another guy had a lock on an enormous piece of cigarette business but not so big as the automobile business. Very simple. The guy controlling the automobile business told the guy controlling the tobacco business that he wanted to be chairman of the board. And he was. The other guy settled for being president.

When I went to work at Ted Bates, I was told you can screw around with the entire place, but don't touch this particular guy. He is so close to the Fleischmann booze business that if he ever gets angry, we're in trouble. The entire agency was afraid of this guy. He had his own office, his own secretary, and he never had much to do. He was pulling down fifty grand a year and the word was, 'He's got the Fleischmann account in his pocket.' He supposedly played golf with the advertising manager and the rumor always was: 'He's the guy who's going to take the account with him if he ever leaves Bates.' Everybody was terrorized by this guy, and the funny thing was he was a lovely guy, a great guy who never shoved anyone around, never raised his voice.

There must have been a good two hundred people account executives, copywriters, art directors, and so forth walking very quietly around this guy. Right down the line, one after the other, we knew we must not screw around with this guy. Not only was he making big bucks, he put in a big expense account each year. He did everything he wanted, had people hired, had people fired, did the whole thing. Well, it lasted a year and a half or so. But while he lasted he was cla.s.s all the way.

They finally said to themselves, 'His expense account is going to put us out of business.' That's how far he was going he was literally taking money out of their pockets to the point where the account was no longer going to be profitable if they didn't put a stop to it. So they took a calculated risk, fear and all, and they decided they were going to fire the guy.

The day they fired him they found out something the whole thing was a myth. He had no control over the account, had no lock on the business. The guy had gotten his job based on the rumor that they were going to lose the account but if they hired this guy they'd save the account. In fact, the rumor was all over town. So they hired him and then they fired him. It's a beautiful story because if the guy hadn't run up such a big expense account he'd still be there. They still have the account, by the way. The guy walked out of there and started his own agency, and for weeks the rumor around Bates was that he was going to take the Fleischmann business with him. It never happened.

What's sad about the advertising business is that I could take anyone with the proper number of ears, eyes, arms, and so forth, and land him a job at any agency in the city on the theory of pocket business. I would say that your grandmother is a relative of someone who controls a lot of business and then you're in for at least a year, maybe more.

When Bates lost Mobil Gas to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, their first line was, 'We got to keep the top guys who used to be on this account simply because we're going to attract another gas company. We can land another gasoline if we have these people around. But the other guys [the little people] have to go because they don't mean anything we can't parade them out.'

One of the gas guys was moved over and put on the Wink business. The gag around the agency was that maybe Wink doesn't taste that much different from gasoline. They had still another guy who was their real gas maven. No one really quite figured out what he was doing until he quit. For years they kept this guy in his office, and he was always full of great plans. He was always pitching an account that he was very close to because he went to school with somebody. If I wanted to start all over again and people didn't know what I looked like, I could go into practically any agency and hint that I'm very tight and close to a lot of business and live there for two or three years. They don't fire you once they think you're close to business.

Once, many years ago, I went looking for work at Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles. In those days it was a very, very nervous agency. I asked to do an a.s.signment and met a copy group chief. The conversation went something like this: 'I'd like to do an a.s.signment just to show you that I can work for you. I obviously haven't got any samples in my portfolio.' He said, 'Well, I like the rough samples you have, and I'm going to give you an a.s.signment. I want you to do something on Rinso. Oh, no. Wait a minute. Rinso might hear that we're giving out a.s.signments and there might be some word around that we're in trouble on Rinso. Why don't you do it on Bulova? No! Bulova is very touchy now, and there's a little political situation.' And he's talking to a guy who wanted ninety bucks a week, who knew no one in the business. Finally, he couldn't give me an a.s.signment.

An agency president once told me, 'I start worrying about losing an account the minute I get it. The minute I sign the contract, I'm one step closer toward losing it.' At that point he's worried and his contribution to the advertising is fear. He pushes it to the people under him: 'We've got to hold, we've got to hold.' A good example of this is Yardley, which came into Bates while I was there, and at the first meeting the word was, 'We want great work, we want creative work.' Terrific! Everyone shook hands, and we opened up the booze for special occasions and had a party.

The next day I swear, the next day the word was out: 'We're in danger of losing the account. We've got to be very careful of the way we handle it.' So work was done and never shown to the client. Why? 'We can't afford to show him stuff like this right now.' Step one: fear. They're afraid to even show him work. So they show him what they consider safe. And safe is not what he came to the agency for.

I felt like a s.h.i.+ll in the Yardley pitch. They trotted me out and showed the Yardley people some of the work that I had done on Pretty Feet while I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. And Yardley was sold a bill of goods that I was going to be in charge of the account. All I ever did was work on one piece of the account and then the agency never wanted to show the work to the client. The people were afraid of the work and didn't even want to let the client say no to it. So they did some off-the-wall garbage and they showed it to the client and the client threw it back in their laps. I mean, it was real garbage. And they were hung. The account moved from Bates to Delehanty. Delehanty resigned it when they picked up Coty, which conflicted with Yardley. Yardley then started its own house agency and recently gave that up for Benton & Bowles and Davis, Parker and Valenti.

Accounts move around so much these days because they're not getting what they want. It's the agency's job to express what they need. That's the agency's job. The client simply knows where he wants his product to go in the marketplace. My agency just picked up a new account and the client said, 'I've had two agencies, one which insisted that everything they did was gold and I got rid of them, and the other agency which came in every day and said, "What would you like to see on paper this week?" ' My partner Ron Travisano puts it another way: 'Would you like to see something in an opentoe campaign?' An account shouldn't be treated that way. He should be guided, but he shouldn't be forced into doing anything he really doesn't want to do.

Most account guys live with fear in their hearts. I know a guy in town named Coolidge. He once was very big at an agency called Cunningham & Walsh. Big money. Maybe ninety big ones a year. He got fired from there and thanks to his good friend, Beautiful Jim, at Fuller & Smith & Ross, he zipped over to Fuller & Smith as a creative supervisor. Coolidge lives in Westport, knows the right people, he's very soft-spoken, does none of the things that people a.s.sume an agency guy would do. But he doesn't live like a human being. He's got that fear crawling in him every day. Most of these guys start the day off deciding which account is going to call them and scare them. All an account has to do to terrorize an account man is call up and say, 'Hey, can you send me some copies of the last five ads you've done for us?' and the panic spreads.

Yet this doesn't go on at Doyle, Dane. They never think they're going to lose anything. They've got a marvelous track record and they're confident. Mary Wells isn't sitting there worrying about whether she's going to lose anything. And she usually doesn't. I'm convinced of this.

Sometimes the creative people get sucked into becoming s.h.i.+lls. Let's say a guy is doing a terrific job on a cosmetic account for a small agency. Let's say further that an old-line agency has a cosmetic account that is in trouble. So, there's big fear going around. The big agency will decide to sandbag. They go out and pull in stars and offer them fantastic salaries. Who can resist? Maybe the star copywriter would like to move the h.e.l.l out of the East Village and breathe some of that good Westport air. So they can't resist. They show up and they work on the pitch to save the account. The agency was doomed to lose the account anyway. The account goes, the guy goes. He was led into a trap and slaughtered. There have been many cases of this sort of thing and it's very, very bad business.

Creative people don't have a business sense about themselves. When I went to work at Bates I had one of the first contracts in the history of the Bates creative department. No one had ever asked for one. And they've had hundreds and hundreds of people go in and out of that creative department. Creative people don't consider what can happen. Most creative people don't know their own pattern of work and they aren't smart enough quite honestly to go in and say, 'I want a contract.' I asked for and got a specific type of contract. I wanted it for eighteen months not two years, or a year, but eighteen months. I told them that after four months they were going to hate me, and I meant despise me. 'You won't be able to stand me,' I told them. 'And after another eight months, you're going to start grudgingly to like me but you would have fired me months ago if I didn't have that contract. And after that I'm going to score. If I can make it for eighteen months, I'll stay for life. If I don't make it. I'll pull out.' Which is what I did. When I was at Delehanty for only four months Shep Kurnit was out looking for a new creative director. I stayed there for two and a half years.

I find it easy to hire an art director or a copywriter, but when an account executive comes in to see me I don't even know what to ask him. I go through a session with this guy and spend most of the time reading my shoelaces. I have nothing to tell the guy, nothing to ask him. Should I ask him how he smiles? Should I ask him how do you handle yourself with clients? 'Oh, I handle myself very well.' 'Waiter, how's the liver tonight?' 'Oh, the liver's terrific today.' How the h.e.l.l does the waiter know? How the h.e.l.l do I know if the account guy is good with the account?

'What accounts have you worked on?' 'Well, when I was on General Foods, I kept us from losing the account for nine months.' General Foods has hundreds of guys on the account. And this guy kept the account for nine months! Maybe he did. I don't know. Not long ago I had two guys in my office who were from the same agency and had worked on the same account. The first guy came in and said, 'When I was on the account, I helped them introduce "soft gin."' Two hours later, so help me, another guy walks in and says, 'I was the fellow who introduced "soft gin."' Now, if one of those cats wasn't lying, then they were identical twins. And they both said they were account supervisors on the account.

When I talked to the two 'soft gin' guys, I was in the market for two account men. I had seen maybe thirty-five guys, and twenty of them were out of work. All right, there are twenty guys looking for a job, and I've got room for only two. They've all had jobs. Once they were important guys in some agency. Once they were the guys who really did the 'soft gin' marketing plan. They lost their jobs, and all of a sudden they have no value at all, except for a guy who might need an account man for a liquor account. Now I was looking for a wine guy, and the two 'soft gin' guys know only gin, they don't know from wine. It is much easier for an agency to hire an account man who knows a piece of business. He can jump right in and start working; you don't have to teach him. When you have a choice, you take a guy with experience.

I meet these account people on the street and I meet more people out of work than those who are working. A lot of them just don't stick to the business. A lot of them just can't come back. They're too specialized. The jobs are disappearing and the business is changing. Some of them go into the realestate business; other guys go into the graphic-arts business. Maybe they buy a boat and sail away. They just can't make it. They can't take the feast-or-famine aspect of the business. It's not romantic or glamorous, it's tragic.

The average age of the account executive is thirty-two, thirty-three, and then they start lying about their age. I had a guy in my office who was gray. My G.o.d, I practically had to help him out the door. He claimed he was thirty-eight. Well, if he was thirty-eight he's lived a great life. I mean, he really looked like he was in his early fifties. I mean, the guy was an old man.

Guys are out of work a long time, and they start to lie about their age, and that, too, is part of the fear. Good people are out of work, not just losers. This is one of the few businesses where you can be out of work and tell the world. In most other lines of work, usually you hide and don't tell your neighbors you're on the beach. If a guy gets fired, he gets on the phone and calls the first twenty people he can think of. And it's all over town that he's been fired. The kids are killing a lot of account people, too. A lot of hard-working young kids are now willing to take a crack at account work. Agencies that used to start kids in the mailroom are taking more chances and giving kids accounts after a couple of years at the agency. In the old days it was a slow process out of the mailroom to account work.

When a guy is out, he tries anything. He becomes a consultant that's the first step. He tries to get all of his friends to give him consultation work. He might look to the magazines as a s.p.a.ce salesman. He might turn up working for a printing outfit. The average account man starts making plans to start his own agency after he's fired. He says, 'Well, screw them all. I was going to start my own agency anyway.' But that doesn't work out. He can't get the bread. The account he thought he had sewn up wasn't sewn up. He's not connected anywhere, and slowly he starts to find that he's got nine or twelve months of debts ahead of him. The guy is going to be looking for a new job for at least a year. There's no wonder that an account man is afraid, knowing that if he goes, he's going to be out this long. It's natural. You've got to be afraid. You spend every day knowing that if you blow it, you're out for a year. That's what the average guy spends on the beach today. The shrinking job market is making it tough as h.e.l.l for people to find a new job quickly.

And n.o.body has that kind of money in the bank. The worst story I ever heard along these lines wasn't about an account man but a copywriter. He had been a star, and he came to see me about a job. He was in his late fifties. His portfolio was complete with samples, but they were at least eight years old. I said, 'How long have you been out of work?' He said it had been something like six or seven years, he wasn't quite sure at that point. I said, 'How in G.o.d's name did you survive?' He said, 'Well, I sold the house in Darien. I sold all my stocks and I had quite a few of them. I sold some real estate for a while and my wife and I moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn.' He was working his way backwards. Six or seven years went by without a permanent job, no office to go into in the morning. The guy had no real income for all that time. He was begging me for some freelance work. He wanted a day's work. Here is a guy who was once earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year. When they fall, they fall very hard, and everyone account guys and creative people knows that the fall down is very tough. We're in a business that is very fas.h.i.+on-conscious. I mean, what's in style this year may not be salable next year. The guy with talent from one era has a tough time adjusting to the new style.

One of the 'soft gin' guys who came to see me had been out of work for only a few days, but really he had been out for six months. He knew his agency was going to lose the account six months before. So he's had six months of looking for a job. Age fifty-two. Chances, zip. Who's going to hire him? He hints around that. 'I may have some business.' He doesn't have any business. If he had business, he would have kept it. He would have used the business to keep his job.

With the creative guys becoming more important, the account guys are having a tougher time of it. The entire structure of advertising is being disturbed. I get an account, and somebody loses a job someplace. In the large, older agencies many account executives work on only one account. In the smaller agencies one account man services several accounts. We have a handful of account executives servicing a couple of dozen accounts. That means there are a lot of account executives who are out of work because of us. For some people this could be a terrifying business, with good reason.

I've never been frightened because I always had something to show. I had something I knew how to do copywriting. And I know what it's like to be poor. I really know what it's like to be broke. It's not that terrifying. It's not that bad, it's not the end of the world. Christ, I was born in Brooklyn and I was living there up until a few years ago. I know how to get on the train and go back there. The Transit Authority has got pretty good signs showing you how to get to Brooklyn.

Part of the problem, especially with the account guys, is that they are living way over their heads. Advertising is a business that goes first cla.s.s all the way. When you get hooked on the expense-account way of life, there's a tendency to try to live out of the office the way you do in the office. This is part of it. They own boats, they belong to yacht clubs, they live in expensive houses. A lot of these guys are living very close to the edge. I would bet that most of them haven't got any money in the bank. No bucks salted away. They just about make it. And they live very high indeed.

They're living on loans. They've got big liquor bills. Big partying bills. Big school bills for the kids. Big clothes bills. Big everything. The nut is very high for these cats. That house in Rye they've got to live in Rye has got to cost them seventy-five big ones. And when you've got a seventy-fivegrand house with a mortgage this big, you don't answer the client back that fast. You know, you're not too quick to screw around. You're not too ready to do anything except pop a lot of pills and maybe run up a big bill with the shrink.

The account man is in the only business in the world where he gets hired, is paid a lot of money for four or five years, and then at one point he's told he's not worth anything any more because they've lost the account. You know, if you go into any other business in the world and you last five years or so you're going to live there forever. You go to work in this business and if you last for five years the chances are you're going to be fired the next day. Seniority means nothing. This is not the railroads. There's too much money at stake. These guys know what happens when they lose a job. They've got no place to go for a year or so. I mean, they can't send their wife out to work, they're past all that.

It hits everybody in the business, not just the account executives. I know a very good art director who's been out of work for eleven months. And he's good, in fact he just won an award at a show. The guy is fantastic. He was making $40,000 a year but now he says he'll 'negotiate.' That means $25,000 a year. He's making too much money. I could get some crazy kid to come in and start at $7,000 a year and keep raising him up and up and after five or six years, if I could hang on to him that long, you couldn't hire an equivalent art director for $50,000. I've got one art director who's twenty-two, and I just hired an eighteen-year-old. The twenty-two-year-old is like an old man next to the eighteen-year-old, who really is far out. These kids are cheaper, they work harder, they're less problem. It's a matter of simple economics. And they show: out of schools, off the streets, out of the woodwork. G.o.d knows where they come from. It's the kids who are really revolutionizing the advertising business today. It's the kids with nothing to lose. The kids are pus.h.i.+ng ahead, mainly because they communicate to consumers like we've never communicated before. In a couple of years 50 percent of the population is going to be under the age of twenty-five. When we reach this point the kids in advertising are going to take over completely.

CHAPTER.

SIX.

THE.

CREATIVE.

LIFE.

'Now advertising is a small business, with a lot of gossip, and there are a lot of guys sitting around in their offices with not too much to do, so when they hear a funny story or a crazy line they sit and call each other up to pa.s.s it on. I became known as the Pearl Harbor guy at Panasonic ...'

There are talented people all over New York today who are capable of turning out advertising that doesn't drive people crazy and does sell the product. Problem is whether the people can sell their advertising to their agencies and their accounts. Within every big agency there's a pocket of good people who for some reason manage to save the situation, make the advertising and do it well. Within every agency. When I went to Bates my team was, I modestly believe, that quality pocket of advertising. We turned out some excellent advertising at Bates. In one year, we literally turned the Panasonic Electronics account around.

It took some doing. My t.i.tle was Creative Supervisor when I went to Bates. But I was part of the zoo. Bates had to form a zoo so that they could take their clients to it and show me to them: 'Hey, look, he's creative, he's won awards, he dresses funny, he does all those mystical things that you hear about.' What they were saying was: 'Like we're in on it, we know exactly what it's all about. Don't worry, baby, you're going to get the same kind of work that you've been reading about other people getting.' Somebody once described it as Operation Judas Goat. I was supposed to come in there and pull in a lot of people from the outside. The idea was that other writers and art directors would look at me and say, 'Gee, if Della Femina is going in there, maybe it's worthwhile. Maybe I ought to take a shot at it and forget all about those crazy hammers inside people's skulls pus.h.i.+ng aspirin.' I had something of a reputation among creative people in town for doing good work. At that point they might want to try a place like Bates. So the notion was that hiring me was going to upgrade their entire image. This is the way they planned it. It was not the way I planned it. The first thing I decided to do was to make a declaration of my intentions, sort of to say, 'Look, this is what it's going to be like and I'm not going to put up with most of the pompous c.r.a.p that goes through the agency.'

The first day they had a meeting on the j.a.panese electronics company, Panasonic, and there must have been six or seven guys there: the account supervisor, the account executive, the executive art director, and a couple of others. I figured I'd keep my mouth shut for a few minutes, like it was my first morning in the place. One guy said, 'Well, what are we going to do about Panasonic?' And everybody sat around, frowning and thinking about Panasonic. Finally, I decided, what the h.e.l.l, I'll throw a line to loosen them up I mean, they were paying me $50,000 a year plus a $5,000-a-year expense account, and I thought they deserved something for all this bread. So I said, 'Hey, I've got it, I've got it.' Everbody jumped. Then I got very dramatic, really setting them up. 'I see a headline, yes, I see this headline.' 'What is it?' they yelled. 'I see it all now,' I said, 'I see an entire campaign built around this headline.' They all were looking at me now. 'The headline is, the headline is: "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor."'

Complete silence. Dead silence. And then the art director went into hysterics, like he was. .h.i.tting the floor. To him it was funny. One of the account guys who was smoking a pipe well, his mouth opened up at the line and his pipe dropped all over him, and he spent the next five minutes trying to put out the sparks. The rest of them looked at me as if to say, 'G.o.d, where are we, what did we do?' They looked very depressed. I was pretty pleased. I thought it wasn't too bad a line. Later in the day I repeated the line to the guy who hired me, did the same bit for him. The feeling wasn't spontaneous as all that the second time around but it served its purpose. I know why I do these things: it sets the pace, it really tells people who I am, what I feel.

Now advertising is a small business, with a lot of gossip, and there are a lot of guys sitting around in their offices with not too much to do, so when they hear a funny story or a crazy line they sit and call each other up to pa.s.s it on. I became known as the Pearl Harbor guy at Panasonic.

I wouldn't say that things went downhill for me at the agency after that first meeting. It really started to go to h.e.l.l at Bates after my first creative review board meeting. One of the reasons that copywriters and art directors go crazy is creative review boards. Creative review boards are, first of all, the device of a very large and a very old-fas.h.i.+oned agency. It's made up so a lot of guys who are over sixty can feel as though they're part of an agency. A lot of these guys, they have nothing to do and they sit there. They're professional second-guessers, and they sit there and they want the chance to-review the creative product. If somebody were to ask me what are the physical characteristics of a creative review board, I would say they are made up of guys with red noses and blue veins. And like they sit there and they look like they're just about to have a coronary. They have this beautiful flush, most of them are gray and they're maybe twenty to thirty pounds overweight. These are the guys who have survived to the point where they now make seventy-five, eighty, one hundred grand a year without doing very much. They show up at the office at 10:00 a.m. Maybe. They spend a couple of hours shuffling papers around on the desk and calling people up and making their lunch dates. They're very concerned with their lunch dates. G.o.d forbid they should ever get caught without a lunch date. They wouldn't know what to do. They make their lunch date. They show up at '21,' which is the place they all go to, and they spend another two or three hours a day there at lunch.

They never talk about advertising. That's a funny thing. These cats talk about advertising only at creative review board meetings. They get back to their offices around three o'clock and maybe they'll call a meeting for no good reason and comes 4:45 they grab the train and go back to Rye or Chappaqua where they all live. They all live in the same valley as far as I'm concerned the Valley of Death. Man for man, creative review boards are probably responsible for more waste in advertising than anything else. The Comptons have them, and the Thompsons, and the Bateses, and the Foote, Cones, and the Fuller, Smiths and just about every one of those old-line, heavy, overstaffed, fat agencies. The joke of the business is that an agency like a Compton has a creative review board. So they get together once a month, these killers, and they review.

Why should a Mary Wells have a creative review board, or a Doyle, Dane, or a Delehanty? They know they're good, they don't need any board to tell themselves so. The evidence is in their fantastic growth and in the awards they win each year for their work. I don't believe that people should have their writing reviewed.

Now the creative review board at Bates was a new deal. Bates hadn't had one before. A first for them. And to their credit I must say that they had some younger people in it. It wasn't just the red noses and the blue veins. With one or two exceptions, they had some very young, very untalented people whom they put on the board. It's amazing how you could be that young and that untalented.

I had been at Bates for five or six months when the word got out that I was going to be the first guy reviewed by their new creative review board. And that bugged me. After they told me that I was it, I said, 'O.K. Here are my golden rules. I will not defend anything that I have done. All I will do is show you what I have done and answer your questions. I'm not here to defend myself.'

I did have stuff to show. I had the Panasonic, I had Royal Globe Insurance, which was doing pretty well, and I had some other things that my group had produced. The Royal Globe television commercial we had done was very dramatic. The viewer was put in the driver's seat at night and for sixty seconds all you saw were blinding headlights. We were a group. They used us like a special squad to be brought in whenever something went wrong. Whenever somebody was about to lose an account, whenever there was a new business pitch, my group Ron Travisano, Frank Siebke, Ned Tolmach and I would be called in. But Bates was getting a little uptight about the group and they were looking forward to their creative review board session.

The night before the meeting I really didn't know what to do. I was sitting at home saying to myself, 'I've got to do something, I've got to find a way to show them exactly what I think of the meeting.' And then it hit me. I'd walk in there with a tape recorder and tape the entire proceedings.

I showed up the next day to face the board, which was made up of about seven guys, whose average salary was maybe $80,000 a year. One guy there, the Creative Director of the World that was his t.i.tle and it meant Creative Director of the Bates World was making maybe $120,000. The other guys weighed in at $80,000 and $90,000, and there were a couple of lower-echelon guys able to grab off only $70,000 a year. I was by far the lowest-paid guy in the place. I mean, there must have been close to a half-million dollars a year in salary there.

As I walked in, one guy had to be a wise guy and throw a line: 'Well, have you got the crown of thorns ready for him?' And they all laughed. Then I put the little tape recorder down on the table. They quit laughing and immediately all eyes just went to the thing. I said, 'I've got my ads pinned up and like I said before if you have any questions about the quality or type of advertising I'll be happy to answer anything you want. But before we do that I would like to turn on the tape recorder and record this session.' Before I turned it on I said, 'If there's anyone in this room who objects to being taped I'll be very happy to leave it off.' And everyone just kind of shuffled and said nothing. So I turned it on and said, 'O. K., let's have some questions.'

Nothing. One guy cleared his throat and hemmed and hawed, and said, 'Well, I notice you use a black background on that ad for Royal Globe.' All the while he's watching that Concord tape recorder work. It wasn't even a Panasonic recorder. I said, 'That's right, we felt a black background would be better.' More nothing. And then babble, pure babble, all babble. Two solid hours of babbling. They were terrified, and I know it, and it's beautiful, and I'm sitting there and talking and just answering any question they want, but they're not asking any questions. One guy talks about pro football. Guys start talking about anything they could think of and all the while they're staring at the machine, they couldn't keep their eyes off that machine. Ned Tolmach, who was sitting next to me during the entire meeting, was watching this whole beautiful scene with amazement.

And finally, after two hours of nonsense, I said, 'You know, gentlemen, I don't think there is anything else that you want to ask me, is there?' They're still looking and one of them says, 'No.' So I shut the tape recorder off and I say, 'Well, thank you,' and we walk out. As Ned and I walked out of the room I turned to him and said, 'Ned, do you think it worked?' Ned said, 'I don't know if it worked, but boy, are they f.u.c.king stupid people up here.' 'Could it be that they're just stupid?' I asked. 'I don't know,' he said, 'I just can't figure it.'

As I was walking down the hall and approaching my office I could hear the telephone ringing. I broke into a run and grabbed the phone and it's the $120,000-a-year Creative Director of the World. 'Jerry,' he says on the phone, 'can you come down to my office and bring that tape recorder?' And I said, 'Bring in my tape recorder?' 'And bring the tape, too.' I said, 'But there's nothing on the tape. It's useless to me now. But I'll run it over again if you want.' 'Just bring the tape, Jerry.'

On my way to the Creative Director of the World's office I met four of the guys in the hall who were in that creative review board meeting. One of the $75,000-a-year biggies I'll call him Kent is standing right there in the hallway, blocking my way, and he's looking even more nervous than he usually looked, which was pretty nervous anyhow. 'Jerry,' Kent said, 'why'd you bring that tape into the meeting?' 'Oh,' I said, 'I just like to hear my voice.' Kent is really against the wall because he doesn't quite know where he fits in the advertising business. 'You probably can't hear my voice on that recorder,' he says. I said, 'Come on, Kent, come on, I know it was you speaking.' He couldn't even take it as a joke. 'Oh, no,' Kent said, 'I know my own voice. I know when I talk and I can tell if I have my voice on a tape recorder.'

I pa.s.sed by another office, a guy named Marks, and he vaulted over a little marble coffee table he had in his office and flew into the hall. 'Why'd you do it, Jerry?' Marks asked. 'To hear my voice,' I said, and I was getting a bit tired of saying it, too. 'It's a very bad business,' he said, and turned away. Finally I got to the Creative Director of the World and there were the rest of the creative review board.

'It turned me off,' said one guy. 'Why did you do it?' asked another. The Creative Director of the World said, 'Will you hand it over, please?' They really were quite disturbed. As I walked out of the office I couldn't resist saying, 'Gee, I think this should be a practice in all of your creative review sessions. You know, I think it would be fantastic if you installed a videotape set so that you could tape these things and have them running for the rest of the people in the agency. It would be very helpful.' One guy, a good friend of mine, said, 'It will be a long time before we tape any other review session and it will be an even longer time before you come back to the creative review board.'

Well, what's the story here? Fear. Basically, these guys have never, never been on record before. The noncreative people who work in the creative department are so used to lying to themselves that they can write these guys were afraid of the tape recorder. It represented truth. These guys had been kidding each other all their lives, and like this tape recorder meant something. The tape recorder could put them away. The tape recorder was truth; they couldn't deny truth and they couldn't live with it. They could carry on, but they couldn't face that little thirty-dollar tape recorder. Some of these people are so adept at kidding themselves and everybody else that they're professionals at it.

They never held another creative review board meeting at Bates at least not while I was there. That session with me ended it. And the word got out in the agency, 'Did you really do it?' And I said, 'Of course I did.' The story picked up the entire creative department. Everybody in the creative department felt Wow! we've got something going here. It was like a victory for a lot of guys who had been getting killed by the noncreative creative experts.

Sometimes the pressure on the creative people isn't as obvious as a review board. It can get subtle, very subtle. A one-on-one kind of thing. I worked at an agency where there was a guy whom I referred to as the Mount Everest of Fear. He worked for the vice-president, the man named David whom we called The Klutz, and to this day I've never met a more fearful guy. I was really just a punk kid then, I couldn't have been more than twenty-five, and David used this man the way the Green Hornet used to use his trusty valet Cato. I would walk into David's office to show him an ad, and David would always drive me insane because he would always come out and say, 'I don't like it.' He never said, 'I don't like it because ...' Just 'I don't like it.' And I'd say, 'Come on, David, you must have a reason for not liking it. There's got to be something there that you can put your finger on.' Good old David would shake his head and say, 'Jerry, this just doesn't make it.' Then he'd say, 'All right, I'm going to prove it. I'll call in Cato and let's see if Cato likes it.'

He trusted Cato. Cato would come into the office and stand around, just like a buzzard, hovering over the ad. David always had a secret way of looking at Cato to tell Cato whether he really liked or hated the ad. David would say, 'Cato, what do you think of this ad?' I never could get the key word but Cato always could read David. Cato would look at David and read his face and say, 'You're right, David, it doesn't make it.' Or David would call him in and say, 'Cato, what about this one?' Quick as a flash Cato would pick up the sign and say, 'Hey, David, that's a great ad.' Then David would turn to me and say, 'You see, Jerry, I told you, it's a great ad.'

One day I showed David an ad and he hated it, so he called in Cato, but evidently forgot to flash the signal. Maybe David would twitch his eyes, but this time he must have forgotten. David asked Cato what he thought and zap, Cato blew the signal. David was standing there and Cato's trying to pick up the signal. But no signal. 'Well, David,' Cato started to say, and then he stopped. Meanwhile, David was getting impatient and kept saying, 'What about this one, Cato?' Cato is fumbling. 'Let me read the headline again,' he said. He's reading the headline, and he's looking at David trying to get some kind of playback and David's standing there and no playback is showing up. The guy's whole life was going before him. I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

I couldn't stand watching this guy die any longer, so I finally said, 'Cato, listen, David hates this ad. Thinks it stinks.' It was like rescuing a drowning person. Then Cato went into his act. 'Of course,' he said. 'Now the problem with this ad is the layout and ...' All he needed was to know how David stood on the ad and then he was able to fly.

I really don't think creative people are afraid of losing their jobs at the whim of the agency, but there is one thing that drives them up the wall: fear of losing their talent, their abilities. Everybody I know feels this pressure. Is this ability something like magic? Will it ever just disappear? Will the day come when you sit down and suddenly you don't feel the same thing working in you the way you used to? You can't write any more. The words don't go together.