We fired him the next day.
Harry called me the other day asking to help get him a semiprofessional apartment. ‘Harry,’ I said, ‘I will be glad to write anyone, anywhere, anytime, that you are indeed a semiprofessional.’ ‘Thank you, Jerry,’ he said, and hung up, probably to sue somebody.
All the craziness doesn’t stay on the creative side. The account side, which is the direct link between the agency and the client, has its madness, too. The main difference is that the creative side takes advantage of its so-called creative reputation, and guys can grow beards at the newer agencies and wear see-through shirts and pants and dilate their pupils. The account side has to stay straight and narrow and wear Paul Stuart clothes and use Ban or Secret or Right Guard and bathe once a day.
The pressure sometimes gets to the account guys, however, and when they flip out it’s something beautiful to watch. I know a bunch of account guys who once had to make a trip to Batavia, Illinois, to visit the people who run the Campana Company. The Campana Company happens to be very big in the menstrual business: they make a little item called Pursettes. So here is this group of New York agency sharpies winging it in Batavia, Illinois, which, I guarantee you, is maybe one step below Des Moines. They spend the morning talking about the marketing plans of Pursettes and then they all go out to lunch. They’ve heard of martinis out in Batavia and the guys from New York load up – a bit too much. Back from lunch, the president says he would like everyone around the table to sit for a while and brainstorm about other uses that Pursettes can be put to. Expand the business, explore new markets, conquer new horizons, that sort of thing. The guys from New York are sitting there in a haze and one guy pipes up, ‘Hey, how about using Pursettes as torches for dwarfs?’ When you’re living in Batavia and you get fired by the Campana Company, there’s not many other places you can go to, so the tendency in Batavia is to downplay the cracks about Pursettes. The New York guys all break up at the idea of dwarfs using Pursettes as torches, but the president of Campana frowns and everybody shuts up.
They get through the brainstorming session, and the next item on the agenda is a tour of the plant. You can’t get out of Batavia without a tour of the plant. With the president leading the way, they drift through the factory and suddenly the group comes across a very strange, very strange-looking thing. The president proudly explains that this thing is an artificial vagina, in fact its name is the syngina, and naturally, it tests how good Pursettes are. The guys from New York are looking at these synginas and they’re biting through their lips to keep from laughing. The president keeps carrying on about how good these synginas are and finally one New Yorker says, ‘And if you’re real nice, they let you take the syngina to dinner.’ Here are guys collapsing on the floor of a factory in Batavia, Illinois, the president turning white with rage, the advertising manager petrified with fear, the agency guys still too stoned to worry.
I once worked for a vice-president of an agency whom we called The Klutz. The Klutz always managed to sit through a presentation and screw it up at the end. We used to make a book on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him – his name was David – ‘Please stay away from the presentations if you can’t stop insulting people.’ David would say, ‘I’m going to behave, I’m really going to be a nice guy.’ He had this awful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around.
One day we’re pitching for the Tourist Bureau of Mexico account and the bagman for President Alemán of Mexico shows up to hear the pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top tamale himself. The pitch went on for a hell of a long time, something like two hours, and David was a marvel. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. ‘He’s great,’ I said to myself, ‘he’s behaving like a real gent. I’m sorry we bugged him before the meeting about his behavior.’
For two hours he was beautiful. The meeting ends and I say to myself, ‘Thank God, 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 José 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, José, 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 circumstances, 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 Washington 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 assure you no sincere tie ever made any impression on George Washington 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 mo
ving 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 hell 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 relationship 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 façade, 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 hell, 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, nobody 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 peacock-feather industry. All the breeders of peacocks got together and formed a Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association to do national advertising, lobbying, and whatever.
This fellow, Al, has been working with the Peacock Feather people for years. The Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association wouldn’t make any kind of advertising move whatever without Al’s being involved. When Al started working with the Peacock Feather account it was worth $1,000,000 in billing a year. Because the demand for peacock 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 vanishing 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 Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association – 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 Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association 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 God. 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.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 8