Yes, of course, as part of the “we can’t live in the past” strategy. Mrs. Bernbach didn’t buy that. “What they should have said was, ‘He was ours, and what he stood for is what we will continue to stand for.’”
Eventually, too late, they did.
* * *
The slighting of Bernbach’s memory at the 1983 shareholder meeting ripped it for the Bernbach family. Evelyn and her sons, John and Paul, sat down and discussed their feelings about the matter.
They concluded that Bernbach’s “reputation, his standing in the industry,” said John, “were not inextricably linked to the agency. That his reputation surpassed the agency.”
Such psychological distancing of the Bernbachs from the agency was dangerous business, given that the family owned 914,910 shares (after two stock splits) of Doyle Dane Bernbach, about 16 percent of the company.
There would be plenty of heartburn over that in the months ahead.
22
Tobacco Road
“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.” —Bill Bernbach
Looking back, many DDBers set as the moment that their agency died, the Christmas party of 1982, when CEO Neil Austrian buoyantly announced that Doyle Dane Bernbach had won the Philip Morris Parliament cigaret account.
A stunned and deadly silence fell over the celebrants in the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom. Austrian sensed the thud at once and moved quickly on to the next piece of business. The gloom persisted. Within minutes, Austrian knew that his vision of an agency re-charged by the voltage of a Philip Morris account had been a massive and irreversible misjudgment.
The then-unspoken response to his news was: Bernbach died, and we grieved, but we’d known for months that he was dying; we didn’t expect the agency’s moral fiber to die with him. Afterwards, people said: this wouldn’t have happened if Bernbach were alive.
But Austrian had good reason to believe that Bernbach’s presence would not, in the cigaret caper, have made a difference.
* * *
No single point about Doyle Dane Bernbach had made its people prouder than the agency’s refusal to handle cigaret advertising. The entire profession stood taller for this principled stand on a product harmful to health.
In academia, business professors, constantly sifting for examples of companies that choose ethics over greed, often cited Doyle Dane Bernbach as proof that business and morality were not incompatible. Cynical college students were impressed. After all, tobacco companies spent dazzling sums of money. And DDB wouldn’t even consider accepting a pipe tobacco account, lest the purity of its viewpoint on cigarets be tainted.
One often heard the phrase played back: Doyle Dane Bernbach—that’s the place that refuses to do advertising for cigarets. It spilled over from the advertising trade press to the general business press, into books and magazines of all stripes.
The anti-cigaret stand had become as integral to the agency’s image as was its creativity.
Maddeningly, cigaret companies were increasingly buying up the kinds of businesses that Doyle Dane Bernbach wanted and needed to grow: beer and soft drinks especially. And the owners wouldn’t listen to any agencies that treated their primary business as a menace to the health of Americans.
* * *
Doyle Dane Bernbach’s historic stand dated from the report of the U.S. Surgeon General, on January 11, 1964, which stated unambiguously that the “health hazards” of cigaret smoking “far outweigh all other factors” in causing lung cancer.
Ex-smoker Bill Bernbach, three-packs-a-day smoker Ned Doyle, and non-smoker Maxwell Dane, lunching at their regular table in the northeast corner of the Algonquin Hotel’s Rose Room, talked about their reactions to the report. Bernbach, whose father had died of throat cancer, felt most intensely and personally rancorous toward purveyors of tobacco. Doyle kept right on smoking. But he agreed with his partners that they should never again accept cigaret business.
They’d taken some Philip Morris business back in 1958, introducing Alpine Cigarets with a pool of warm, funny commercials. Like many introductory brands, Alpine didn’t survive. Nor did the agency-client relationship, which foundered on the rocks of creative interference by the client.
“They’d insist on seeing the logo in six different sizes,” recalled Doyle. “We couldn’t work that way.”
The agency hadn’t had a cigaret account in the United States since Philip Morris left in 1961. But its young Dusseldorf office was, at the time of the Surgeon General’s report, in the midst of an introduction of a new German cigaret, Bremen. Nobody in the home office informed Dusseldorf of the founders’ discussion and intentions. The wounds of World War II were far from healed, and both Bernbach and Doyle made quips that revealed a lack of concern about safeguarding the health of Germans.
The founders didn’t plan to announce a policy on cigaret accounts; it came spilling out at a press conference in Los Angeles.
Bernbach, in the West on Ohrbach business, met with the press on February 6, expecting the usual questions about the agency’s great campaigns. And because there would be a public stock offering later in the year, publicity in this affluent part of the country could help build a market for the equities.
What the agency didn’t expect was a news story that would go clear around the world. The wire services disseminated the version in the Los Angeles Times, with its catchy lead: “’I don’t believe you should advertise cigarets. They’re bad for your health. You’re just selling sickness, and I don’t want to be responsible for it.’
“The man who voiced the opinion doesn’t represent the surgeon general’s office; nor does he occupy a lofty ivory tower, removed from the daily grit of business and commerce. He’s William Bernbach, president of Doyle Dane Bernbach Inc., advertising agency. He was recently selected by his fellows as ‘The man who contributed most to advertising in 1963. . . .’”
The German client read the story and fired the agency before Doyle could fly over to resign the account personally—the only part of the affair that he rued.
Doyle Dane Bernbach had never since, to the knowledge of its people or the industry, entertained the idea of advertising cigarets anywhere in the world. (Somehow, a Kool cigaret – Snark sailboat promotion created by a DDB subsidiary fell through the cracks of perception.) And now, nearly 19 years later, when not only lung cancer but every respiratory illness, every circulatory problem had been linked to smoking, when emphysema had ruined Ned Doyle’s health, when tobacco companies diversified to survive because of a growing abhorrence of their product, when legislation threatened every kind of cigaret advertising and promotion, Neil Austrian unwrapped, as a Christmas gift to the agency, the Parliament cigaret account.
* * *
In his role as elder statesman, Ned Doyle often warned that “an account too easy to win is just as easy to lose.”
The Parliament account was Austrian’s for the plucking.
It was held out to him by his Old Greenwich friend and neighbor, James J. Morgan, executive vice president for marketing, Philip Morris U.S.A. Accepting the prickly prize would be the equivalent of crossing the first barrier to the heroic challenges ahead, the quest for Philip Morris’ two great and troubled beverages, Miller Beer and Seven-Up. With his boundless self-confidence, Austrian set out to build support in the upper reaches of the agency.
The Miller/Seven Up prospect would form half of his platform. The other half would focus on Bernbach’s attitude toward cigaret advertising in the last year of his life. There was irony in that. Just weeks after Bernbach’s death and the decision to move out from under his giant shadow, to mention his name as seldom as possible, Austrian found himself invoking Bernbach constantly. After all, he could truthfully say that Bernbach had accepted the concept of cigaret advertising by backing the proposed merger, several months before his death, with Foote, Cone & Belding.
* * *
>
That had been another time of strange silences, of hushed conversations, of protective feelings based on assumptions about what Bernbach’s responses would be. One participant recalled that “everybody at DDB who was involved in the negotiations knew that cigarets were in FCB, but nobody ever came out and said it, until, finally, at the end, they said to Bernbach, ‘Bill, do you realize if we go through with the merger, FCB has Lorillard business?’”
Bernbach’s consistent response had been: “At the time I said we would not handle cigarets, I fully expected that the entire industry would follow me, that advertising for cigarets would finally become outlawed, but that has not been the case. I no longer run this company; the company is being run for the shareholders by new management, and I think it’s new management’s decision on whether or not this company handles cigarets.”
The biggest shareholder, by far, was Bernbach.
New management, meaning Austrian as CEO, took Bernbach’s meaning, and said that if the merger went through, FCB’s $100 million in Lorillard business would not be resigned. A few old-timers shook their heads, but so much about the proposed merger perplexed them that they didn’t stop to sort out the implications of the tobacco decision.
Had the board looked at the Lorillard account as a barrier or conflict? Mac Dane was asked, a few years later. “Not when it’s that size,” he drolly replied.
The merger failed to go through, and Bernbach died, but the board’s shift on cigaret policy held. It had happened while Bernbach lived. That was the reality. Few wanted to believe it, and in time that fact vanished from the legend.
* * *
The real debating point, when Austrian asked for support of his managers, was, “Is it too soon after Bernbach’s death?” Even if Bernbach himself had accepted the change, oughtn’t more time pass before the agency sprang this on the industry?
The press will kill us, predicted the agency’s public relations manager, Cary Bayer, a hard-digging and deadly-accurate former trade press reporter. Wait a little, he advised.
It’s now or never, responded Austrian.
Then in my opinion, don’t take it, said Bayer.
Dick Kane, who as the agency’s personnel director knew best how potential recruits and staffers viewed DDB, argued long and passionately against accepting any cigaret at any time in the future. The agency would be “getting in on the tail end of something that is going to go away—the advertising of tobacco.” And in doing so, it would be tossing out an asset that distinguished it from all other agencies—the perception of Doyle Dane Bernbach as the one agency with real values.
“I don’t think you folks realize the impact this is going to have on people in the agency,” Kane added. “The overwhelming percentage of people will look at this as just another step in the deterioration of Doyle Dane Bernbach.”
“Take the business,” said the majority of the shrimp board, the cheese board, and the operating committee.
“Take the business,” said Ned Doyle.
On the international, or shrimp, board, Mac Dane, Paul Bernbach and Bob Pfundstein abstained. Only one member voted against it—vice chairman Ted Factor. On the New York, or cheese, board, the strongest voices against were those of Bob Gage and Helmut Krone, both unreformed smokers.
Ironically, Parliament would soon be the only account that Gage could get himself assigned to at the agency his talent made famous. His would be the last in a long string of ads and campaigns presented to, and rejected by, the Philip Morris people.
“First they loved it, then they fired the agency,” recalled Gage. “I never ran across people as tough as these people. They don’t smile; they don’t do anything.”
Jack Dillon, Gage’s copywriter: “You’d think we’d gone there to ask for a loan.”
Parliament, heralded as a $10 million account, left the agency two-and-a-half years after arriving, without a single ad ever having reached the engraving stage.
So that, as Mac Dane later commented, “We lost stature in switching our policy, but we never got any real revenue out of it. The wages of sin were not that good.”
And Austrian could look back after leaving the agency and describe the reaction to his announcement in the Waldorf Grand Ballroom as, “Oops! There goes the agency!”
As for the real prize, the opportunity to compete for other Philip Morris products—well, that was a fresh, new, astonishing disaster of its own.
23
Return of the Native
“Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Barry Loughrane—at 49 showing the wear of a man long-divorced and generally at home away-from-home in bistros and restaurants—had taken over the presidency of Doyle Dane Bernbach in December 1982, destined to be the last of the “great white hopes” in the fabled agency’s final precipitous decline.
Joe Daly thought Loughrane walked on water, said high insiders. From the time Daly first hired him in 1959, he’d introduced Loughrane as “my kid brother.” The Irish connection didn’t hurt.
Loughrane ran his accounts well, and was supervising fourteen of them by 1972. Then, disappointed that Daly didn’t respond to a long memo he wrote on agency problems that needed fixing, Loughrane left to manage Mary Wells’ newly-acquired Gardner Advertising in St. Louis. Loughrane’s departure had jeopardized the Uniroyal account and opened the door to Jim Heekin’s ill-fated arrival.
Daly and Austrian had lured Loughrane back in 1978, to run DDB’s West Coast operations. In his just-under-five years there, DDB-West grew from one office billing $30 million, to four offices billing $70 million.
Somewhere along in the Paul Paulson years, Austrian began talking with Loughrane about returning to New York. The agency would divide its accounts into package goods and the rest. Paulson would continue running the former, with MBA-type people, and Loughrane would head up the rest. Loughrane rejected the concept as ruinous. But Daly and Austrian continued to see him as their back-up card in the event that Paulson self-destructed. Which he did.
So, enter Loughrane, to the great relief of Austrian, now CEO, who would give fuller attention to what he did better than anyone—financial and acquisitions.
“An account man who can work with Roy Grace,” the word went out about Loughrane’s return. Good news to the weary troops.
Roy Grace retrospectively viewed Loughrane’s appointment in a different light: “He was crossing the street and got hit by a Brink’s truck.” Meaning, the money he got at the end.
Austrian, bruised in later battles over personal gains, would look back in anger and confide to friends that Loughrane’s appointment was “the biggest mistake of my life.”
* * *
Loughrane had in fact taken the job reluctantly, aware the agency was “in deep shit.”
“I thought, there was no soul, no spine, no togetherness. We didn’t really have a point of view. We had a bunch of all-stars who weren’t playing on the same team. In creative, Grace and Honig and Levenson wouldn’t even talk to one another. And they tended to say not particularly appetizing things about one another, not just within the hallowed halls, but to anyone who would listen in the public media. And they would relish the opportunity to do so.”
Each of the three had “his own little band of warriors who wouldn’t work for the other guys, so you had a lot of down time, and you couldn’t really run departments properly.” Same on the account side, with three top account group heads jockeying for power and undercutting one another.
“Each had high visibility. Nor was it like you could come in and fire somebody that was a nincompoop and give the rightful job to where it belonged and be heralded as ‘Somebody finally did that.’ It wasn’t that. It was one guy was wearing blue and one guy was wearing grey and one guy was wearing brown. That didn’t make one good, bad, or indifferent.”
At the end of 1981, Pan-Am had done to DDB what it had done a year earlier to its prior agency, dumped it to go with an old friend. Bernbac
h’s old friend, William Seawell, had retired as chairman of Pan-Am and been succeeded by C. Edward Acker. To DDB’s surprise, Acker turned out to be an old friend of Mary Wells and her husband, Harding Lawrence. And so, irony of ironies, DDB’s triumphant replacement account for American Airlines, the original spur for merger talks with Mary Wells, wound up with . . . Mary Wells.
The important Stroh account had left in 1982, as had the award-winning American Tourister account. Shortly before Loughrane arrived, the agency had finally resigned Procter & Gamble, not because of the consensus in the off-campus meeting, but rather because of clashes between P&G’s restrictive conflicts policy and DDB’s growing international package goods business.
So there was less business in the New York office. “But they’d hired all these package goods whizzes, and Neil said, ‘We’ll keep them all around and we’ll get business for them.’ But that never happened. And so the good ones were leaving and the lesser ones were hanging on for dear life, and of course when things start snowballing like that, it’s very difficult,” said Loughrane, looking back.
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