From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Read online

  One of the reasons for all the chaos is that, suddenly, an account can pull out of an agency. An account has to give an agency ninety days’ notice before it pulls out. I swear there are some guys on Madison Avenue who hide in the bathroom on Friday. Friday is kill day because it’s the end of the week – killing is done on Friday for bookkeeping reasons. What’s so sad about it is that the wrong guys get fired. Management calls in some poor guy and says, in effect, ‘As you know, we’ve just blown fifteen million dollars worth of billing, and your one hundred and sixty bucks a week stands between us and survival.’ It’s almost ludicrous. Agencies net 15 percent of the account’s billing, plus a little extra from things like production charges. Agency blows $15 million in billing, which adds up to like $2,500,000 to the agency and they go to the guy who’s making eight or nine grand a year and they tell him, ‘Look, things are very bad and we’re going to have to let you go.’ The guy who’s saying this, by the way, is making forty or fifty big ones a year and he’s usually safer. There seems to be a rule of thumb, written somewhere, that the guy making thirty thousand or better is much safer than the guy making eleven.

  It’s a terrible system and one of the results of it is the guy who makes that thirty or forty grand a year is a very nervous cat. Although he really is safer, he has so much more to lose. He cries a lot at night. During the day you can spot him breezing out of the agency for a fifty-minute pick-me-up from his shrink. God knows how many people on Madison Avenue go to the shrinks, but the number and percentages must be enormous. You see everyone zipping out on Wednesday afternoon, two to three, for a fix. They come back and they’re acting like real people again. They’re O.K.

  If you get into a discussion with somebody about his shrink, he clams up. Going to the shrink is not any status thing. People get very uptight about their shrinks. Oh, someone might casually remember that once, about ten years ago, he paid a short visit to a shrink, but that’s about it. The advertising guy goes to the shrink because he’s worried about losing his account. The shrink is probably sneaking off to his shrink because he’s worried about losing all of those advertising guys who shell out the bucks. So the shrink has to hold the advertising guy; the advertising guy has to hold the account. Everybody’s holding on for dear life. The day is going to come when a bunch of shrinks decide that they ought to start an agency.

  It’s not tough to figure out why there is so much fear in advertising. It’s my theory that much of the fear starts very, very casually. Let’s say the wife of the chairman of a board of a large company is sitting under the hair dryer one day and she hears a couple of chicks talking about a funny Volkswagen commercial. At dinner that night she starts nagging her husband. He’s got enough headaches as it is, what with trying to get a new line of credit that won’t be usury, and also thinking he’s developing a heart condition. Anyhow, there’s his wife whining, ‘Harry, oh Harry, why can’t your company have funny little commercials like they do for Volkswagen?’ He feels a little pain in his chest and he mumbles something at her.

  Next day, he’s out of sorts and the president of his company walks in, and the chairman says to the president, ‘Listen, Fritz, why don’t we get some advertising here? I sign a lot of bills. We spend three million dollars a year on advertising. What have we got to show for it?’ The president suddenly feels that creepy little chill and says, ‘My God, Harry, you’re right!’

  The president suddenly trots down to the advertising manager and says, ‘You know, Don, I wonder if it isn’t about time that we reevaluate our advertising. We’ve been with Winthrop, Saltonstall, Epstein and Gambrelli now for four years. They still haven’t turned out a campaign that we can be proud of and happy with.’ Now who’s going to stop passing the buck? The advertising manager, who’s making maybe eighteen or twenty grand a year and up to his ears in a mortgage in Tenafly, isn’t about to say to the president of the company. ‘You’re wrong.’ Nor is the president about to say to the chairman, ‘Now, Harry, I think maybe you’re wrong about our advertising, why don’t you take a Cert or a Tum or something and settle down?’

  So that fatal telephone call is made. The advertising manager calls two or three agencies he’s been keeping his eye on and says, very casually, ‘Wonder if you fellows would like to come over and talk to us? We’ve been reevaluating our advertising and … Now we’re very happy with Winthrop etc., don’t get me wrong about that, we just thought we’d take a look at some other approaches …’

  Whammo! As soon as two or three agencies get the word, that word leaks out. I don’t know why, but pretty soon everybody in town knows it. There hasn’t been a new account change in years that was a surprise. The word finally reaches one of the advertising publications. Is it true that Ford is looking for a new agency? Well now, you’re at Thompson working on the Ford account and your life goes before your eyes. You see that in two or three months you’re going to be out of work, and in advertising when you’re on the beach it usually lasts for eight or nine months.

  For the sake of argument, let’s say the word doesn’t get out. Maybe you just sense that the chairman of the board might have talked to the president. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a meeting and you get a feeling: ‘I don’t like the way Don smiled at me when he left that meeting.’ I’ve seen guys standing around after a meeting saying, ‘Did you notice that his last words were, “I’ll see you. It’s been nice knowing you”? What did he mean by that?’ Then somebody else pipes up and says, ‘Obviously, he’s trying to scare us.’ Another guy says, ‘Fuck him, he can’t scare us.’ And you know what? It hits them. The next day everybody’s sitting around wondering how they’re going to lose that account. Still another guy says, ‘Remember looking at that guy from the account? He didn’t smile during the presentation.’ Then they start at each other: ‘Why did you talk so much?’ ‘I didn’t talk so much; you spent too much time talking to the guy who didn’t smile.’ ‘I didn’t talk that much; you screwed up the slide projector. No wonder that guy didn’t smile.’

  Now let’s take the other side of what can happen. Let’s say that the advertising manager decides to tell his agency that things aren’t going well. The opposite of when the word doesn’t get out officially; that is, the account executive is told – point-blank – that he’s in trouble, and he doesn’t have to go through all the mumbo jumbo of figuring out who didn’t smile at a meeting.

  So Don, the advertising manager, meets with the account executive and says, ‘Joe, I had a little session with the president yesterday and look, I don’t want you people to get nervous but he’s really not too pleased with the way things are going.’ The blood starts to drain out of Joe’s face and his fingers go numb. He starts to nod and stutters, ‘Well, Don, don’t worry, we’ll work something out.’ Joe runs back to the agency like Paul Revere screaming ‘The British are coming. The British are coming.’ He’s screaming, ‘We’re in trouble, we’re in trouble.’ Guys begin running around. There are dozens of meetings. The whole thing is weird to watch because when that account man comes back and they close that door and he says, ‘Look, we’re in a lot of trouble, the president of the company says our ads are lousy,’ that’s the first sign of death.

  Whichever way the word comes – directly from the advertising manager or indirectly from gossip in the trade papers or from something you pick up at a meeting – it immediately spreads throughout the entire agency. I was a mailboy at Ruthrauff & Ryan when they were on their way to losing the Kentile account. The kids working in the mailroom making sixty bucks a week knew a year ahead that Ruthrauff & Ryan was going to lose the account and they were scared stiff. And you know, the kids were right, Kentile moved out of there in like ten months. Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone today – nothing, it doesn’t exist. One of the reasons that it died was because of no communication. The mailroom knew they were going to lose accounts before the management did.

  They were an old-fashioned agency, old-line, and they just dribbled away to nothing. When I went to work there in 1955 the bi
g news was they hired a guy who ‘had a great book of names.’ I didn’t know what the hell that meant and then it dawned on me: they went and hired a guy who was more of a pimp than he was an account executive. This was the guy with a big fat address book who was going to save them. I mean, forget it, this guy knew how to get anybody in town fixed up. Blue movies. He’s got it. Blondes, brunettes or redheads, he has them. You know, I really was impressed as hell. This guy was to be the agency whoremaster. And the talk about this guy: ‘He’s going to bring us the business.’ They honestly thought a cat like that was going to save them. And there are agencies around today with a somewhat similar attitude. Glad-hand the account. Get the account tickets to the Giants’ football games. Big dinners at ‘21’ and Le Pavillon. The weak agencies, fearful of losing an account, will resort to anything to keep the account. The hot agencies, they don’t need this. What does Doyle, Dane need with a whoremaster? They’re turning out terrific work. What does Delehanty, Kurnit need with a guy like this? Or Wells; Rich, Greene? These people are professionals doing a good job.

  Now sometimes an account takes advantage of all this fear of losing an account. TWA is the classic example. In 1967 TWA was at Foote, Cone & Belding, and they were doing a pretty good job on the account. Most of the airlines are losing money hand over foot, not because their advertising is good or bad, but because the Government has screwed up the business so. The airlines live on Government handouts and subsidies and on airmail contracts. And the Government tells the airlines where to fly. Give me an airline that the Government says must fly to Buffalo and I’ll show you an airline losing money. I mean, nobody goes to Buffalo. Anyhow, someone gets itchy at TWA and they decide that maybe what they need, besides a couple of routes to Hawaii, is some new advertising. So they call up Foote, Cone and say, ‘You’re a swell bunch of guys, Foote, Cone, but we’re not that happy …’

  I guess TWA at that time was billing $22 million. Do you understand what that means to an agency? Any agency? Something like $4 million a year in income. Well, the panic spread through Foote, Cone like wildfire. I was a creative supervisor at Ted Bates at the time and the calls started coming in. Copywriters, art directors, creative people – the big scare was on. That afternoon I met a girl from Foote, Cone in a restaurant and she said, ‘It’s true, it’s happening. We’re going to lose it – in a day or so.’ She was petrified. She was making forty grand a year as a writer and TWA was the only account she was working on, and she had to find a job fast. She had a whole list of people she was going to see about a job.

  What happened in those next few weeks was the second most public rape since the Sabine women got it. Never before in the history of advertising were so many guys taken at the same time. TWA really did a first-rate job. A lot of very smart, very wise guys got taken. The whole thing was a big flimflam.

  TWA was looking for freebies – presentation of agencies’ work without paying the freight. To get the freebies they went to nervous agencies – Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample; Benton & Bowles; Ted Bates. And they were such nice guys they even let the poor bastards at Foote, Cone compete for their own account. William Esty, N.W. Ayer, Sullivan Stauffer, and even McCann-Erickson were in there, too. They went to the old-line agencies who were beginning to feel the pinch from the new agencies coming up. Now these old-line agency fellows are not dummies; they’re sharpies.

  I don’t know how many guys called TWA and said, ‘We want in on the presentation,’ and I don’t know which ones were called specifically by TWA and told, ‘We’d like you in on this.’ TWA was pretty smooth, too. They never would come out and say go out and spend $40,000 or $50,000 on a commercial. No, they would say, ‘We’d like to see some examples of your work, the work you would be doing for us.’

  TWA never said, ‘Don’t spend the bread.’ They just smiled and sucked everyone in.

  They didn’t get any response from outfits like Doyle, Dane. Or Ogilvy. Or Mary Wells. Agencies like these show possible new business what they’ve really done in the past and let it go at that. If anyone ever asked Doyle, Dane for a sample campaign, Doyle, Dane would say, ‘We don’t play that way.’ They turn out great work; they win awards every year from their fellow workers. They’re good and they know it.

  All of a sudden this thing snowballed, snowballed right out of sight. Everyone started out by saying, ‘Well, we’ll give them a few sketches, maybe a handful of roughs.’ Then another guy would say, ‘Well, look, you know we’re up against those guys at Bates. You know what sharpies they are. Let’s go for a little more than a sketch. Let’s go look for a shot.’ And the next guy says, ‘Well, look, if we’re taking shots for a print ad, we just can’t walk over there with a storyboard. You know how tough it is to show storyboards.’ And another guy says, ‘I know a guy who would shoot this commercial for twenty thousand dollars.’ Guys suddenly went into business working on the TWA account without having it.

  Long about then a skinny kid named Jim Webb with a lot of hair was out on the West Coast starting out as a songwriter. If this kid knew what chaos he caused in New York, he’d break up. One of the songs he wrote was called ‘Up, Up, and Away’ and it’s got lines in it like ‘Wouldn’t you like to fly/in my beautiful balloon?’ and stuff like that. Well, a chase develops for the commercial rights to this song. A group called the Fifth Dimension had recorded it, and it was very big about then. The infighting over that song! Also, the word leaked out that TWA hated their current song and this one seemed ideal. Anyhow, Foote, Cone somehow latched onto it, but as soon as the others heard that Foote, Cone had a song, then everyone else had to have a song.

  You can’t believe the Mickey Mouse stuff that went on at Bates during all this. I don’t know what was doing at the other agencies, but at Bates it was crazy all the way. Doors were locked. Delivery boys used to show up with food orders from the delicatessen and couldn’t get in – all Mickey Mouse. I remember one of the biggies running down the hall with a record cover – this guy was making maybe one hundred grand a year – and he’s saying, ‘This is the song, this is the one that’s going to get us the account.’ There was false elation that was almost sick. There was this absolutely positive feeling that we had it locked.

  Well, everyone presents. Who knows how much money was spent on everybody’s presentations? Upward of a million dollars would be my rough guess. Anyhow, everyone presents, and here’s Foote, Cone with this beautiful song, which they’ve changed now to ‘Up, Up, and Away – TWA,’ and here’s everyone else with real commercials, real print ads, the works. This kid Webb wrote a hell of a song and after looking at all of these presentations, TWA lets all the Sabine women have it. ‘Nice work,’ they say, and then they say, ‘Foote, Cone, you’ve done such a hell of a job that we’re going to keep the account with you.’

  At Bates, when they learned what happened, it was like V-J Day, except that they were like the Japs, falling on swords. Unbelievable.

  About six months later there was some kind of shake-up at TWA. A new guy with a lot of clout moved in and he decided that despite ‘Up, Up, and Away – TWA’ the account really didn’t belong at Foote, Cone. So beautiful Mary Wells, who had just finished painting all the Braniff Airline planes fuchsia and colors like that, walks in – and off with the account. No formal presentation, nothing. Maybe she showed them a fuchsia plane, but nothing more. And she got it. To get the account and avoid a conflict of interest, she had to resign the Braniff account. And the president of Braniff is her husband.

  George Lois, who used to be at Papert, Koenig and Lois and then started Lois, Holland, Callaway, is minding his own business and pretty soon there comes Braniff, fuchsia planes and all. It’s not that all of advertising business is crazy, but there are times, there are times … And it is the craziness that leads to the nervousness that leads to the real fear on Madison Avenue. The TWA story must have driven twenty guys to drink, and it isn’t all that unique a situation. There will always be nervousness wherever big money is at stake. And above everything else, Madison
Avenue is big money.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  GIVE ME

  YOUR

  DRUNKS,

  YOUR

  WEIRDOS …

  ‘Advertising is the only business in the world that takes on the lamed, the drunks, the potheads, and the weirdos. You can’t make it as an account executive with a reputation for being a pothead, but you can probably last in the copy business or as an art director if your pupils are a little dilated. Eccentrics are drawn to the business and welcomed into it. Your best grade of eccentric is normally found on the creative side, among the copywriters and art directors …’

  We get a great number of nutsy guys. Let’s say that there are hundreds – maybe thousands – of guys in this business who, if they were working for Bankers Trust right now, would have found themselves committed. You know, their boss would have sat back and decided, ‘This guy is really going,’ and he would call the guy’s wife up and say, ‘I think it’s time we committed him because, you know, he’s doing strange things.’

  Take a good friend of mine, Ned Viseltear, for example. He’s really a legend. And yet he managed to get good job after good job.

  Ned once worked for Grey Advertising for three hours. He had been hired as a copywriter and he goes into work at nine in the morning. Because Grey is a very straight-arrow kind of place, Ned shows up at work on the first day right on time – nine o’clock. He meets some people, fills out all the forms you have to fill out on the first day on a job and then around 12:15 he goes out to lunch. He had a date with someone at Daniel & Charles. Well, they had a nice lunch and the guy from Daniel & Charles says, ‘Why don’t you come to work at Daniel & Charles as a copywriter?’ They get down to specifics and Ned is offered a job – better than the one he’s got at Grey. So he goes down to Daniel & Charles, meets Danny Karsch, the other owner of that agency and the chairman of the executive committee, accepts the offer at about two in the afternoon.