Who Is Michael Ovitz?

by Michael Ovitz

  Coke had owned the studio for about five minutes when Don came to the boisterous premiere for Gandhi, a CAA package on its way to eight Oscars. Don threw his arm around me and said, “My God, the movie business is fun—and it’s so easy!” Uh-huh.

  Two years later, with Ghostbusters in postproduction at Columbia, we urged Don to put the movie’s logo on Coke cans for the release. But he and his team in Atlanta were extraordinarily protective of their brand. Only after Ghostbusters became a hit did Coke begin using its logo, too late for much benefit to either party. We did get them a free ad, though. Years before product placement came into vogue, Ivan Reitman took my advice and put a Coke in Sigourney Weaver’s haunted refrigerator. It never hurt to ingratiate a director with the people who paid the bills.

  At the Allen retreat in 1990, a year after Coke sold Columbia to Sony, I stopped by Herb’s condo and found him on his back porch having coffee with Roberto and Don. The talk was of Pepsi’s New Generation ad campaign, which had Roberto worried. I was sitting there quietly, sipping my Diet Coke, when Don asked me, “What would you do?”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” I said. “But as someone who watches a lot of television, I think you guys are getting clobbered in the image market.”

  It wasn’t an offhand remark. Market consulting struck me as a natural next step for CAA, as we already had an extraordinarily accurate bead on mass culture. We received concrete feedback—ratings, grosses, album sales—on a daily basis, and we knew well ahead of the crowd not only what the buyers were looking for, but what Steven Spielberg and Norman Lear and Michael Crichton were doing next. Yet as much as I liked the Coke guys and their product, I hadn’t considered working with them—until they sold Columbia and removed any possible conflict.

  Not long after the Allen retreat, Don called and said, “We want to fly you out to talk about the company.” Two days after that, he met me in the lobby of their twin tower headquarters in Atlanta and walked me into Roberto’s office, where it was always 65 degrees. At 9:00 a.m. sharp they poured a round of Coke Classic into paper cups, and for the next three hours we discussed how Coke could stave off Pepsi.

  Coke’s nemesis was Phil Dusenberry, the chairman of BBDO. Phil had reshaped the cola wars in the 1960s when he helped conceive the “Pepsi Generation,” advertising’s first lifestyle campaign, and reshaped them again in the 1980s with his “The Choice of a New Generation” TV ads. His spots with Ray Charles saying, “You’ve got the right one, baby!” were memorable and effective. By casting Pepsi as the drink of the young, Phil cast Coke as the drink of the olds.

  Coke still ruled the international market, but its North American margins were slipping, and Pepsi was catching up in supermarkets. “Five years from now,” Roberto told me, “I think we could get beat.” Coke’s advertising had stalled. Its latest slogan, “Can’t Beat the Real Thing,” didn’t move people.

  Like Roberto, I knew it was a lot easier for a brand to lose prestige than to regain it. When I was a kid, my father drove a Chevy but yearned for a Cadillac. By the time I bought him one, Cadillac had been eclipsed by Mercedes and BMW, never to regain its luster.

  But it wouldn’t do for me to come on with a hard sell. I mirrored Roberto and Don’s behavior, which was foreign to Hollywood—courtly, Southern, restrained. Don’t hype me, don’t sell me, just tell me. When I confided my plan to expand CAA into marketing, Roberto said, “What do you need from us to get started?”

  I said that first I needed time to think about my approach. Detecting Herb Allen’s hand behind the meeting, I flew straight to New York before he left the office for his 6:00 dinner. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got something and they need something, and they’re asking, ‘Does it fit?’ My suggestion is, Figure that out, and fast.”

  I called Don: “Here’s what we propose. We’ll bring a group of our executives for an all-day meeting with your division heads. We want to know their issues on the ground, what they think of their competition, what they like about your ads and what they don’t. We want to hear it all.”

  We put together a team of in-house experts in movies, television, music, and books and we combed every Coca-Cola print ad and commercial since McCann Erickson got the account in 1955. Two weeks later we met in Atlanta with ten division heads, and then we broke into small groups for no-holds-barred discussion. The meetings lasted twelve hours, the best one-day education I ever had.

  Weary but exhilarated, I returned to L.A. and told my partners we were moving ahead. Haber was all for it, but Ron didn’t say much. I knew he was already imagining our artists calling him to complain: What the hell are these guys doing? They should be working for me. It was a legitimate concern. And there was this, too: by venturing into an arena where we had zero experience, we could be setting ourselves up for a big, fat, public failure.

  But I thought Ron was missing the bigger picture. My epiphany came a few days later in Brentwood, after I put the kids to bed. I was in my home office, checking TV Guide to see what was on, and it hit me: The same Coke commercials aired on all of these shows. Traditional ad agencies cooked up seven or eight spots per client per year, and each one played morning till night: “One sight, one sound, one sell.” But the TV audience was now as fragmented as the rest of American society. Seinfeld or Letterman aficionados weren’t the same people who followed daytime soaps or the NBA playoffs. Friday-night sitcoms skewed younger than Saturday Night Live and much younger than ABC’s Sunday Night Movie. Why not trade the shotgun for a rifle—why not customize ads for each group? My first big idea for Coke was to make different spots for 60 Minutes and The Simpsons.

  Our challenge was to restore Coke’s cachet with young people, but first we needed to get and hold their attention. Infrared TV remotes had invaded the American household. Viewers clicked to a new channel when ads came on, or went to the kitchen or the bathroom. My kids ran off to another room to play. So Coke’s commercials had to tell stories the way movies did, only much faster. They needed to entertain. Advertising wasn’t subatomic physics. Make commercials fun to watch and viewers would embrace them. From there I worked back inductively. Ad campaigns had three essential components: raw ideas, creative types to develop them, and technicians to produce the finished spots. The first two were CAA’s stock in trade and the third could be hired by the job. While outsourcing was frowned upon by ad execs (who raked in extra revenue by keeping everything in-house), film studios often outsourced their trailers. Why couldn’t Coke do the same?

  Ads were expensive because Madison Avenue bankrolled its own commercial houses and then marked up each fee by as much as 18 percent. CAA could undercut them by going straight to the talent. Our directors worked on big, draining movie projects. Many of them would jump at the chance to make a miniature film with total freedom for a six-figure paycheck.

  I grabbed a legal tablet and jotted down our manifesto:

  Holiday relay race.

  More commercials.

  Demographically stimulated.

  No “one sight, one sound.”

  New music, new graphics.

  Hire creative people.

  The next morning I called Don and Roberto and said I had something, “and you’re either going to love it or hate it. My guess is you’ll love it, but it’s high risk, high reward.” Inoculation, pure and simple. Then I flew to Atlanta and, in Roberto’s icebox of an office, made my pitch for CAA to produce two dozen Coke commercials for what McCann charged for seven or eight. My thinking was to roll out a few spots at a time, each set tied to a season or holiday. “Think of it as a relay race,” I said. The summer was about heat, the beach, refreshment. In September, a back-to-school feel. Then family gatherings for Thanksgiving; snow and holidays up to Christmas; hope and resolutions for New Year’s; love and companionship at Valentine’s Day; family themes again for Easter.

  Second, each spot would be tailored to a demographic niche on the networks�
�� schedules.

  Third, we’d blend people from movies and advertising to create a new kind of commercial, a mini movie.

  Fourth, Coke would pay CAA a consultancy fee of a million dollars a month, plus expenses and outsourcing costs, but we wouldn’t charge supervisory markups on other people’s work. If we got the account, they’d pay us a fair price for the ads we did.

  Fifth, we’d set our own ground rules. That meant no market research, because we trusted our taste more than we trusted focus groups. (Nontraditional agencies like Chiat/Day, which downplayed research as they devised daring campaigns like 1984 for Apple, were rising fast.) Once the commercials were finished, Coke could say yes or no—but they couldn’t ask for changes. And we expected Roberto and Don to attend our presentation along with Doug Ivester, who was next in line for Don’s job. I liked dealing with executives who could say yes; every intervening layer added another potential no. “I don’t want your research guys interpreting our spots for you,” I said.

  Roberto said, “How many CAA people would you be using?”

  I said, “Five or six, tops.” Which must have sounded like science fiction, because McCann Erickson had more than three hundred staffers on Coca-Cola.

  “Michael,” Don said, “I think we’re ready to shake some trees around here.” He sounded sincere, but I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. Hiring CAA would destabilize Coke’s long relationship with McCann and its parent company, the Interpublic Group, and, like everyone at Coke, Don had close relationships at McCann. He was particularly close to his drinking buddy John Bergin, the McCann vice chairman who’d come up with Coca-Cola’s last strong slogan, “Coke Is It!,” in 1982.

  Around Labor Day, Coke hired Peter Sealey and made him its first global marketing director. A former marketing chief at Columbia Pictures, Peter was a pro who knew that his job depended on a fresh approach to the company’s $600 million annual ad spend. He was our champion from day one. But despite Peter’s efforts, and my weekly calls to nudge things along, Don and Roberto waffled for more than a year.

  * * *

  —

  Then, in the fall of 1991, in a statement the press called “the September surprise,” Coke disclosed that it had hired CAA as “worldwide media and communications consultants.” As Peter told the New York Times, “American culture broadly defined . . . has become the culture worldwide. We are in a global village and CAA represents the single greatest source in understanding that culture.” I flew to Atlanta for Roberto’s benediction—which was disappointingly vague. “We need a new direction in our advertising,” he told me, “and I’m glad we’re discussing what that might be.” At big companies, nobody wants to own a new idea before it’s clear whether or not it’s a stroke of genius.

  After someone complained to the Screen Actors Guild about our apparent conflict as agents and producers, we told the New York Times on background that CAA “would not be directly involved in producing commercials.” The issue with SAG was moot because we’d never planned to use our clients in front of the camera. In those days, any big actor doing commercials was presumed to be washed up. Expectations have since relaxed considerably, but at the time putting Sean Connery or Jessica Lange into a Coke ad would have been like pimping them on the street.

  Coke’s announcement made us comfortable enough to hire a creative director. We chose Shelly Hochron, a studio marketing exec whom we’d seen do a great job with Stand by Me, even though it had no stars, and with Reds, even though Warren Beatty refused to do publicity. As an outsider to advertising, she hadn’t internalized rules from the Don Draper era. And Peter Sealey, her old boss at Columbia, regarded her like a daughter.

  To keep the peace for the time being, Peter announced a tripartite alliance: Coke would define the mission, CAA would generate the ideas, and McCann Erickson would produce the commercials. It was baloney and Peter knew it: we weren’t going forward without total creative control. McCann later leaked a story to Adweek that we had broken the pact and were “actively recruiting writers, directors and producers to create the Coke ads independently.” True, except there was no broken agreement: Peter preapproved everything we did.

  McCann wasn’t giving up its best account without a fight. They poached Gordon Bowen from Ogilvy & Mather and told him to put us in our place. But Gordon got buried in the firm’s infighting. When he asked if he and John Bergin could work out of our Beverly Hills office a few days a week, I hesitated, leery of roosters in the hen house.

  Bill Haber said, “Invite them in.”

  “Why take the chance?”

  “Their company will never let it happen.”

  So I invited them in, even prepared a nice-sized office for them—and Bill’s hunch turned out to be dead-on. John Dooner, McCann’s president, vetoed Gordon’s request, fearing we’d steal their secret sauce.

  It never crossed his mind that they might learn anything from us.

  * * *

  —

  In 1992, as Don Keough neared retirement, Phil Dusenberry turned the screw by backing Ray Charles with the Uh-Huh Girls, a sensation in their own right. Pepsi sales in supermarkets drew within two percentage points of Coke.

  Patience, as I’ve noted, is not one of my virtues. I told Herb Allen, intending that he pass it along, that “we really want to do this campaign. But if Coke can’t commit, we’ll try our hand with someone else.” Within days I heard from Don. Were we up for a shootout with McCann Erickson? A shootout was two or more agencies doing pitched battle in the same room. I didn’t like the sound of it. While I was game for a fair fight against McCann, I worried this was a face-saving put-up job, and that politics would cost us the account.

  I said, “Don, this is an elective for us—you came to me. Now you want us to compete for what I thought we already had.”

  “Look,” he said, “it’s different at a public company. You guys are in the driver’s seat, but there are some twists and turns along the road. Come here in October and show us your stuff.”

  Stifling my frustration, I told him we’d be there.

  To support Shelly, we hired the former number two creative guy at Chiat/Day, Len Fink, as her partner. Len had a deft feel for both urban and middle America. We met several times to assuage his doubts about our long-term plans, and then we offered him a 50 percent raise. (We later tripled both his and Shelly’s salaries into seven figures.) Bill Haber jumped into the project with both feet. We added a mailroom trainee named Jonathan Schreter and sent him to an art bookstore with $3,000. The five of us convened in our creative room to rip out hundreds of pictures—from Monet and Magritte to Lichtenstein and Thomas Hart Benton—and tack them up for inspiration.

  Within a few weeks we had three hundred raw concepts. Half made it to the storyboard stage, where Len and Shelly drew each scene in sequence. Eventually we narrowed it to the twenty-four spots we’d present to Coke. Though at times we felt puny compared to McCann, we had some advantages, too—no bureaucracy to zap our riskier ideas, no protocols to smother us.

  We didn’t want safe ads. We wanted great ads.

  * * *

  —

  Three months before the shootout, we reconnoitered with the enemy in Georgia to watch McCann submit slogans. Gordon Bowen suggested “A Spark of Life,” which Don and Peter had previously rejected. Astoundingly, John Bergin trashed the idea and proposed “Always Coca-Cola” instead. McCann’s top creative people were knifing each other in public!

  When I saw that Don liked “Always,” I said, “That’s great, let’s use it.”

  Don said, “You really think it’s great?”

  “It’s fantastic.” We bent over backward to seem friendly toward McCann. (We had to keep Interpublic onboard to implement Coke’s global media buys.) I was agnostic about “Always” as long as we governed everything else. We cared only about the visuals’ entertainment value—the slogan was an add-on.

  I ca
lled Quincy Jones and asked him for the best unknown songwriter he knew. He gave me a twofer, the team of Jon Nettlesbey and Terry Coffey. They composed a two-bar theme and mixed it with a range of beats: country and western, middle of the road, urban, Latin, classical. To score points with Don, we ended each spot with our “Always Coca-Cola” theme song.

  The October shootout was our title fight. McCann owned the legacy relationship, so we couldn’t just beat them on points—we had to knock them out. I bought Armani suits for Shelly and Len, who’d be presenting. We packed white shirts and bright ties for a uniform look, like Hoffman and Cruise taking on the casinos in Rain Man. The day before the event, breaking CAA’s no-daytime-fly rule, I scheduled a noon departure on Coke’s Gulfstream IV. When we boarded in Van Nuys, Peter Sealey was on the plane to greet us. He so wanted us to win that he spent the flight prepping our team about Coke’s internal politics.

  We checked into the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton and were chauffeured to Coca-Cola for a dress rehearsal. Rather than practice word for word, I sailed through my remarks with lots of yada yada yada so as not to get stale. Shelly and Len checked the setup for their graphics and skimmed through bits of the commercials. We left for dinner at the hotel and were in bed by 10:00. The next morning Haber and I went to the gym. The five of us met for breakfast and a final run-through before changing into our freshly pressed suits. We looked and felt unbeatable.

  We arrived fifteen minutes early. Up front were two tables for the combatants and a third for the Coke executives, with several rows of seats in back. Haber and I sat at CAA’s table with Shelly and Len standing to our right. Roberto, Don, Peter, and Doug Ivester took their stations. Eleven a.m. came and went with no sign of McCann. Ten minutes later, two dozen disheveled ad people filed in. Next to our lean, mean team, they were corporate bloat personified: a mistake. After flying commercial out of JFK at 7:00 that morning, they were hungry, tired, wrinkled, and generally out of sorts. Not springing for a night’s lodging in Atlanta: another mistake.