With morale high and good news abounding, Tom Gallagher slid off the screen, and a new installment in the agency’s tragi-comic presidential saga began.
* * *
In April, 1978, an outsider (again!) took high office at the agency, the usual politicking insiders having received the usual brush-off from their leaders.
Enter Paul Paulson, a man who’d just missed becoming president of Compton Advertising.
Compton?!?!
Procter & Gamble’s favorite agency. The pits, to copywriters and art directors. The hatchery of slice-of-life commercials, with mothers and daughters sniffing laundry, lady plumbers bailing out distraught housewives, sink-scrubbing wives patronizing dumb husbands. A Compton man brought in as executive VP for client services, with a clear commitment to the presidency of Doyle Dane Bernbach?
Heresy! said the creatives.
Not so to Bernbach, who gave the Paulson hiring his blessing, for the very reason that Paulson ranked high at P&G’s favorite agency. P&G, a DDB client since 1972, was a bone in the throat, a galling dilemma. Board discussions about P&G went like this one, from the May 15, 1976 meeting:
“The Chairman asked Mr. Austrian if he thought the Corporation would ever make up its investment on P&G. Mr. Austrian responded that certainly the Corporation would never make large profits on P&G but that it was still essential that the Corporation be involved with that client. Mr. Daly added that in his opinion the Corporation would not have been able to get the Bayer business if it had not previously shown its ability to handle P&G business. Mr. Kopelman stated that he had just returned from Greenbrier and that the P&G involvement with the Corporation was viewed by many people as a clear indication of the Corporation’s ability to handle package goods.”
By 1978, Bayer had departed, bringing back into currency the Madison Avenue chestnut that “Doyle Dane Bernbach can’t keep package goods clients.” For all the renewed admiration of the agency, all the internal fixing, all the world-wide growth, DDB still hadn’t shaken off that perception.
P&G, meanwhile, kept assigning the agency financially-draining new products and barely-breathing old products. The expected payoff of a major brand hadn’t materialized. Would it ever? DDBers recalled how the agency resigned General Foods in the 1960s under similar circumstances—money-losing assignments and no major brand payoff. Not now. For image reasons, DDB needed the P&G name on its client list. So the financial drain continued. As did the emotional drain. DDB creatives, watching their concepts tested into oblivion, equated working on P&G with a sentence in the gulag. More than once, Ned Doyle suggested setting up a separate agency to handle P&G, so it wouldn’t “contaminate” the rest of the agency.
Ridiculous, in Bernbach’s opinion. Spoiled children. Bernbach’s competitors for immortality in advertising—David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett—had great success with their giant package goods accounts, and the industry continued to admire their creative work.
Oh, for a Jock Elliott.
Austrian, named president when Gallagher left, couldn’t be expected to solve every problem in the place. He’d shoveled out the deepest patches of the agency’s Augean stables.
“But there was a real nervousness among the executive committee,” Austrian recalled later, “that we didn’t have, in me or anyone else at the time, a senior package goods marketer in the account group who could keep clients like P&G, and go after clients like General Foods. That my reputation and skills were not in the marketing area, and that I ought to go out and get someone” to fill the bill. The search, this time thorough and professional, turned up Paulson.
Bernbach never doubted that attitudes inside and outside the agency would change if P&G gave DDB a Tide, an Ivory, a Crisco, a Duncan Hines, a Crest.
Paulson might be the rabbit to make that happen.
* * *
“If I can put Doyle Dane Bernbach on the right track,” mused Paulson, after sizing up the way things worked at the agency, “I’ll go down in advertising history.”
But what was the right track?
To Paulson, instantly tagged “Mr. Procter & Gamble from Slice-of-Life City” by DDB creatives, the right track put the account group at the center of the agency universe. Media, research—and creative—would orbit around the account people.
Bernbach’s philosophy and the history of the agency put the creatives at the center. The advertising was what counted. Whatever the upgrading of agency services, the creatives were the magic, and were treated accordingly. They weren’t about to relinqush a wisp of their privileged status.
Paulson’s approach, the creatives believed, would turn DDB into “just another package goods agency, another Compton,” where strong account people and endless copy testing would drain the life blood out of the creative process.
Unless DDB adapted to the package goods world, Paulson countered, it would not be able to attract or hold the large clients needed for growth—General Foods, General Mills, Quaker Oats (all three were former DDB clients), and P&G. The agency would dwindle into a creative boutique.
And where stood Bernbach and Austrian in the ensuing mayhem? They, after all, hired him.
Paulson, before taking the job, had “spent a lot of time with Bernbach to find out whether he was interested in my coming aboard to try to do something to improve the professional reputation of the agency.” Not surprisingly for a Compton man, Paulson saw DDB as a place where the account people were “bag carriers,” sent off to the client to sell ads the creatives thought were right.
“Bill was, at the beginning, a very strong advocate of what I was trying to do,” added Paulson. He’d made it clear before signing on that “I was going to run the agency, or I wouldn’t come. Not just account management.”
But he agreed to start with account management, to rebuild that department with stronger, more sophisticated marketing types, who would give clients confidence that their needs, in a constantly changing world, were understood.
“Because if you have weak account people, clients don’t respect them, and then what happens is the creative guy rises or falls every day. If they love the ad, it’s a good day. If they hate it, it’s a bad day. And that’s no way to manage a relationship over the long run. Nobody produces great stuff every day.”
Bernbach seemed to support Paulson for a long time. They lunched together at least once a week, most compatibly, for both were total advertising men, dedicated to the business of selling the client’s product. Neither doubted that the differences in their approaches could be reconciled.
Certainly Bernbach appreciated Paulson’s view of who had done what, historically, to make Doyle Dane Bernbach great.
“In my experience,” said Paulson, “Doyle did the posturing. ‘If they don’t like it, to hell with them.’ But Bernbach was the guy who’d go in and listen to the client and if the client didn’t like something he would suggest other ways. Most of the clients felt Bernbach was on their side. That what he was trying to do was in their best interest. And he solidified the relationships with clients, and provided the leadership within the agency, and gave a clear-cut direction to what the agency produced.”
Bernbach appreciated Paulson, too, for the exemplary way he fit the oft-preached (and alas, oft-breached) qualifications for becoming a DDBer—nice, and also talented. In fact, every description of Paulson, then and later, by admirers and detractors, opened with the words, “He’s a nice man.” And Bernbach, as we have seen, needed “nice.” (Once, having approved a piece of work brought him by an art director widely loathed as a sadistic swine, Bernbach said to his secretary, “He really is a nice man.”)
Paulson had a gentle manner, and twinkling eyes, and didn’t tower over Bernbach. He wasn’t a loud-mouth, or a drinker, or a womanizer. Solid, stable, reassuring. A truly nice man.
And Austrian’s position on Paulson? Who can say? Not until much later did agency people figure out that Austrian’s decisions and support were based on whatever he’d heard from the last person he talked to.
* * *
“The day I arrived, Marvin [Honig] said he was going to quit,” Paulson remembered, “because, he said, ‘The account guy from Compton is going to be president. . . . ’” Honig didn’t make good his promise for a year and a half. Until then, he did everything possible to undermine Paulson. He succeeded. But in doing so, he brought down a great deal more, including his own position at Doyle Dane Bernbach.
* * *
That Paulson strengthened the agency’s account staff was generally conceded. In fact, his recruits would later be wooed by the Ogilvys and Young & Rubicams—a reversal of historical proportions in adland. “He seduced a lot of good account people,” noted one observer, “and the bait he held out was a better DDB.” Which meant, a DDB with account people at the center.
They were known as “the new breed,” and “Paul’s team.”
“A lot of veteran DDB account people who genuinely liked Paulson as a person, and liked his manner of running things, felt at the same time, ‘There’s nothing I can do to get on this man’s team because I don’t have an MBA, or I’ve been around here for fifteen years, and he’s only interested in younger hotshots with MBAs,’” recalled Dick Kane.
Call them “the old breed.” Some had considerable clout, and all of them drifted into Marvin Honig’s camp.
Honig never missed an opportunity to crack snide jokes about MBAs and about research, in small meetings, or at gatherings of the entire staff. Drip, drip, drip. It worked like anti-Semitism. Soon, any irritant within the agency was attributed by the brain-washed troops to the rising tide of MBAs. Top management, including MBA Neil Austrian, laughed somewhat uncomfortably at Honig’s unrelenting MBA jokes, and did nothing.
True to DDB management style, Paulson had won the job and then received no support to do what he’d been hired to do.
In April, 1979, he was named president of the agency, as had been promised. That in the teeth of a threat by Honig and Roy Grace to leave if it happened. So, didn’t Paulson’s promotion tell the creative department that “this is the way it’s going to be?”
“Yeah, but you’ve got to back it up,” Paulson said later. “What was happening was that Marvin wouldn’t put good people on most of the package goods accounts—-a lot of subversion and a lot of Mickey Mouse stuff going on. Maybe Bill said, ‘We’re going to do it,’ but they didn’t enforce it. What you really had to do was say to Marvin and Roy or anybody else, ‘Look, this is the way it’s going to be, and if you’re uncomfortable with it, you’ve got to go somewhere else.’
“We were our own worst enemy. I’d talk to people I knew—such as General Foods, which we were pitching—and I’d say, ‘It’s a new operation, we really are interested in building a business and in professionalism.’ And then at cocktail parties guys like Marvin and Roy and others were saying, ‘That’s all bullshit. Paulson is off doing his thing, but we’re still a creative shop, and screw those guys.’
“So the General Foods, etc., people would say to me, ‘Maybe you think it’s a different operation, but we’re hearing it’s really the same old operation, even worse. The inmates run the asylum over there.’
“We had junior copy people who, after hearing client comments on their work, would say, ‘I’m not changing this; I’m not changing that.’ It was total anarchy. The worst was the arrogance from people who had nothing to be arrogant about. Because they worked at Doyle Dane Bernbach, they thought they were blessed with a talent that could do no wrong.”
The Stroh client complained to Paulson that the creatives brought in ideas that seemed all wrong for their beer drinkers, and they’d never come to focus groups to listen to their customers talk about beer. “What the hell does he [the client] know?” the creatives responded when Paulson told them of the complaint.
Stroh left.
American Tourister’s new management agreed that DDB’s gorilla campaign was right for selling the durability of their luggage. But would the agency please try a fashion approach? Roy Grace did a storyboard.
“A gorilla coming down a runway with sneakers and velvet. You wonder, what the hell is that all about? We lost credibility, and we lost the account.”
So it went.
“I was naive,” Paulson reflected, later. “I remember a call from a friend who asked what I was going to do with those insiders who did not get the presidency of DDB. I told him I meant to work with them. My friend said, ‘You should fire them at once, or they’ll undercut you, they’ll politic against you, they’ll be lying in wait for you to fail.’”
He was the political innocent who didn’t have the stomach that Daly had for the Machiavellian game.
To his more accomplished antagonists, he was the easy target in a vigorous game of “Kill the stranger.”
* * *
Marvin and Roy would leave—that was the constant threat. One heard it (as I’d heard it from a worried Bernbach) expressed as though they’d merged into one person, MarvinandRoy. They’ll leave if we make Paulson president. But what can we do? We promised him the presidency.
When Paulson hung in despite the laughter at the MBA jokes, despite the “subversion and Mickey Mouse stuff,” Honig walked—in September l979, five months after Paulson’s ascension to the presidency.
The surprise was: Roy Grace did not leave with Honig. Instead, he took possession of Honig’s job and title, Executive Creative Director, plus 30,000 shares of agency stock, acquired with financial help from DDB.
It’s unlikely that anyone was more surprised than Honig.
Three months later, Honig returned to DDB, having found no better agency job in the meanwhile. Austrian asked him back to work on IBM, “the second biggest mistake I ever made,” Austrian later rued.
In bringing Honig back, he put into play a deadly new rivalry, between Marvin and Roy, those good close friends, now cloven forever.
* * *
Grace hadn’t become executive CD to preside over the dissolution of the creatives’ empire. Honig’s walk, and Grace’s rise, changed nothing in the imbalance of power. The original promise to Paulson that he would run the whole agency dissolved in the agency’s increasingly murky vapors.
Through 1980 and 1981, the situation deteriorated. The agency polarized into pro- and anti-Paulsonites. Under those two umbrellas, factions and fiefdoms spawned. Creatives grouped generally under the anti-Paulson umbrella, but there was no unity in the department. Grace, Honig, Levenson bad-mouthed and undercut one another. Account managers split into Paulson’s camp and Austrian’s camp.
“The place became like a bunch of separate agencies,” recalled Dick Kane. “Groups didn’t care much about the progress being made by other groups, as opposed to pulling together as one agency. They weren’t cooperating with one another. They were interested in the contribution their own group was making versus any other group. Hoping the other groups would do less well to make them look better.”
Procter & Gamble people got the drift. Any hope of a Tide, a Crest, a major brand, evaporated. Nor did Paulson manage to land any other large piece of new business. Another non-rabbit.
Austrian stepped up his search for a merger partner.
Account Gains and Losses, 1982 (the year of Bernbach’s death)
In:
Cigna
Litton Industries
Murjani
Philip Morris (Parliament cigarets)
Out:
American Tourister
Lehman Brothers
Paine Webber
Pan Am
Procter & Gamble
Sherwin-Williams
Stroh Beer
18
What’s in a Name?
“It is with literature as with law or empire—an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
Bill Bernbach reached his arm up and over the shoulder of tall, New England-handsome John O”Toole, as they walked out of the Sky Club, the elegantly traditional, exclusive dining cl
ub on the 56th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building.
“John, we have to make this happen,” said Bernbach.
“Bill, you’re damned right,” replied O’Toole.
They’d talked through lunch about the planned merger of their two advertising agencies, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Foote, Cone & Belding. O’Toole felt a sense almost of awe. “Talking to Bill about it . . . he was a man that I’d idolized from the time I’d been a copywriter in Chicago.”
Bernbach had never admired the creative work of Foote, Cone & Belding, an agency that produced vast quantities of competent but unmemorable advertising for a long string of clients, only one of whom came quickly to mind: P. Lorillard. Maker of cigarets.
Cigarets!
Yet Bernbach profoundly longed for the consummation of the merger. Visibly wasting from the effects of leukemia, he was, more impatiently than ever, in the grip of the “obsessive desire to . . . take care of one’s own.” This merger, Neil Austrian had convinced him, would ensure the financial future of Doyle Dane Bernbach. And that meant Bernbach’s children and grandchildren.
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