Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  Departments weren’t working well together. “Marvin Honig would kick [research head] Ruth Ziff right out of his office,” grumbled Loughrane. “Everyone saw things from his own point of view—like the New Yorker magazine cover, there’s New York and there’s the rest of the country. Marvin’s point of view towards American Greetings was ‘What do we need all these account people for? I go out there; all they want is three commercials a year; they don’t want all that other stuff.’

  “Then you talk to the account people, who say, ‘The people in Cleveland are really ticked off, because Marvin goes out and sits with the chairman and sells three television commercials, but Marvin doesn’t want to do anything else. We haven’t done any trade advertising, because Marvin is above that, and the trade is terribly mad, and Hallmark is killing us with their controlled distribution. But DDB is very lordly and snooty and won’t do any grunt work.’

  “I started to hear all these stories first hand from all these people and from client after client, about how fractionated Doyle Dane Bernbach was. DDB was not DDB, it was four or five disparate voices, clamoring for their own perspective. A lot of business was lost that way, because we were not an agency.”

  Another enormous problem: DDB was producing no advertising campaigns that people were talking about. The last one had been the James Garner-Mariette Hartley campaign for Polaroid. The agency’s free-wheeling creatives didn’t especially relish campaign work in any case. They preferred doing one-off ads, one at a time, custom-made. The one-off might become a campaign, as the gorilla had for American Tourister. Bernbach had taught, “We shouldn’t be a slave to a campaign. If an ad is better than a campaign, or the strategy, let’s run it because it’s a terrific ad.” You could, of course, do terrific ads within terrific campaigns, as for Volkswagen and Polaroid and Chivas Regal, or (gone but not forgotten) Jamaica Tourist Board and Sony. But few campaigns were that kind of great. Mostly, these days, “campaign” meant a big theme song and quick cuts of happy people.

  Paulson, a son of Compton, thought strictly in terms of campaigns. If you have a campaign and the last commercial is a bummer, it’s a bummer and you throw it away and do another one, because the campaign is still okay. But if you’re only as good as your last ad, and your last ad is a one-off, you’re heading for trouble, because nobody bats 1000.

  The creatives disparaged Paulson’s views on advertising. But here was Barry Loughrane expressing similar opinions about the agency’s concentration on one-shot ads. Even when one-offs were wonderful, he said, they didn’t help the situation. “We could go into an art directors show and win 50 awards. But nobody would ever see that advertising. Totally invisible. People remember campaigns, and we weren’t doing campaigns.”

  On top of all that fundamental trouble, there were small but telling irritants. Neil Austrian’s comments, in press round-ups of agency heads, tended to read like they’d come from the accounting office rather than from the leader of a great creative agency.

  “We have met the enemy,” Loughrane wrote at the time, quoting Pogo, “and they is us.”

  * * *

  Was the situation savable? Ask any advertising industry buff, and you’ll hear tales of expiring agencies that came back. Interpublic, from the brink of financial disaster. Young & Rubicam, from a moribund state.

  “This is a very fickle business,” said Loughrane. “You’re cold in March, you can be the hottest agency in town in April. You need a couple of ‘Where’s the Beefs,’ and $30 million goes to DDB. You’re agency of the year. It’s malarkey, but that can happen. I think it was pull-outable. If people were willing to put the company ahead of themselves.”

  Very iffy, considering what they’d learned about selflessness through the years of observing the actions of their two maximum leaders, Bernbach and Daly.

  * * *

  Loughrane left few footprints in the first year of his presidency, 1983. He became a frequent flier, checking in with offices and clients around the country, but chiefly flying to the Coast to wrap up unfinished DDB business, arrange for his move, and look out for the restaurants he owned there.

  Restaurants?! Several in Los Angeles, and one to come in Manhattan, on East 49th street, three short blocks from DDB headquarters. Having no family obligations, Loughrane had room in his life for this long-held passion. But the idea, that the great white hope put any energy into this diversion when the agency had such severe problems, bugged many. “Barry’s restaurants” would become a metaphor for “who’s minding the store?”

  Loughrane had no apologies for his sideline. Asked if the restaurants weren’t taking too much of his time and attention, he responded in his deepest baritone: “Joe Daly has his horses, and I have my restaurants.”

  * * *

  With Loughrane often out of town, the “deep shit” in the New York office deepened through 1983. Polaroid, a client since 1954, a company built on inventiveness and DDB advertising, assigned some pieces of its business elsewhere, and said it wanted no more of Joe Daly, or the team that had created its best campaigns—Bob Gage and Jack Dillon. Clearly, the entire account was in jeopardy. What signal would Polaroid’s departure send to the advertising community? What defection could be more painful? Not even Volkswagen’s.

  Volkswagen’s account head, who locked in the business after the agency moved him and it to Detroit, constantly threatened to steer it out of DDB unless his increasing demands were met. Another hostage situation, and on DDB’s most famous account!

  The bonanza of Atari Videogames began to dry up, along with the category.

  Victor Technologies, a San Francisco client, filed for Chapter 11, leaving the agency stuck for $3.3 million.

  Scratching for monies to pad earnings, the agency terminated the staff-wide pension plan. Meanwhile it was coughing up huge sums to fund incentive programs for “key” people, many of whom would stay only until the plans matured, then take the money and run. In ways, so unlike Mac Dane’s DDB, that the agency nibbled at benefits for the low-paid help and couldn’t do enough for the highly-paid in the ’80s, it perfectly fit the Reagan years.

  Signs of creative deterioration appeared. A full-page DDB house ad in the 1983 Agency Yearbook consisted of just one word, apart from the obligatory identification. One single, large-type, insipid word: “Hi!” (Perhaps anticipating the Quayle years?)

  The line outside of Neil Austrian’s office, of bleeders and pleaders, sycophants and jesters, all pushing to get in on the goodies, got longer. And everyone with a modicum of power was threatening to leave the agency unless . . . .

  Austrian’s penchant for making promises led him, in the summer of 1983, to appoint Marvin Honig as Vice Chairman and Creative Director, DDB-U.S. “As a result of the re-structuring,” explained an official release, “Roy Grace, Chairman and Executive Creative Director of DDB-U.S., will share the ‘final word’ responsibility for the agency’s creative product with Mr. Honig.”

  Invitation to disaster! But no one could have foreseen the form the disaster would take.

  Grace, a physical double for Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and as unpredictable as any Middle Eastern ruler, took revenge into his own hands. Angry at Honig’s Lazarus-like return to power, and eager to let the world know that he, Grace, remained more equal, he invited New York Times ad columnist Phil Dougherty to his office for an interview. He told no one in advance. Not Austrian, not Loughrane, not public relations.

  He made his points with Dougherty. Then Dougherty stood up to leave. As a by-the-way, he asked Grace whether DDB had really resigned, or been fired by, Procter & Gamble ten months earlier. Grace spoke his mind. Dougherty, a reporter with little tolerance for inflicting damage, held out a safety net.

  “I assume this is off the record.”

  “Oh, no. I said it,” responded Grace.

  “You’re sure it’s okay if I print it?” Dougherty asked, offering one last chance.

  “Yes, I said what I said.”

  So Dougherty printed it. And the Grace blast
at P&G in the New York Times became another instrument in the wounding of the agency, the single most damaging episode of 1983.

  * * *

  Dougherty’s September 7 column quoted Grace’s remark that he had been “pushing very, very strongly for us to resign the business.” That P&G wants creative work, but doesn’t let its agencies do it. “They’ll tell you you can do anything you want to do. So you submit a campaign, and three months later you wouldn’t recognize it.” That DDB lost money on the account every year because P&G insists on so much additional work. Etc.

  Madison Avenue’s Code of Silence prohibits the trashing of clients. Roy Grace had done it to the largest national advertiser, and in the New York Times! The agency’s clients might well wonder what would one day be printed about them. As for prospective clients—well, the potential damage was incalculable.

  How the event played out reveals much about the state of the agency at that time.

  All eyes focused on Neil Austrian—no trace of Barry Loughrane in this tale, he being elsewhere. Austrian’s phone kept ringing; horrified account managers stopped by his office with advice. “Fire Grace at once. Call a press conference to announce it. Let our clients and the advertising community know that we won’t tolerate such out-of-control actions.” Grace’s camp followers stopped by his office to compliment him for “telling the truth, at last.” But Grace knew he’d hit the fan. And a regular international board meeting was on the calendar for the following day.

  He did what high-level DDBers with tough problems often did. He called Ned Doyle. “What should I do, Ned?” pleaded Grace. “Did you say it?” asked Doyle in his lawyerly fashion, first getting the facts.

  “Yes, but I thought it was off the record,” Grace told Doyle, who accepted that version. (The version I accepted was told me, at the time, by Dougherty, and later conceded by Grace.)

  Doyle: “On or off the record, Roy, it was the wrong thing to do. But now, you can do one of two things. You can either do a big mea culpa, or you can stonewall it—don’t apologize for a goddamn thing, and don’t even bring it up.”

  Grace opted for the latter.

  Meanwhile, Austrian telephoned and wrote to P&G’s advertising head, Robert V. Goldstein, to apologize for the article and assure him the viewpoint was Grace’s alone, not the agency’s. (Four years later, Goldstein would be one of five advertising executives to die in an accident during a white-water rafting party organized by DDB-Needham Worldwide.)

  The day passed without a press conference or a firing. Next day, the shrimp board met. Doyle continues the story:

  “Neil got hold of me before the meeting and said, ‘What do you think about it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to say, Neil.’ He said, ‘I feel like firing him.’ ‘That happens to be your privilege; I’m not going to confirm or deny whether you should or should not.’”

  Austrian didn’t.

  No one on the board brought the subject up. So Grace sat quietly, volunteering nothing. “They were afraid to do it,” Grace believed.

  Austrian finally said something, not at the board meeting, but directly to Grace. “The only person who ever mentioned it was Neil,” Grace recalled. “He said he got a call from [client] Bruce Gelb saying, and I remember the quote exactly, ‘You’ve got a loose cannon on board.’”

  Grace stood his ground. Why should DDB “get kicked around by a client they never made a nickel on?” Finally they’d “had the balls to stand up to them, to do something that had some principles.” What’s so horrible about resigning a client?

  And nothing else happened.

  Except a kind of hopelessness began to settle over the agency that once had been cock of the walk.

  * * *

  “We are not altogether sorry to have 1983 behind us,” opened the letter to shareholders in Doyle Dane Bernbach’s annual report of that year.

  The letter was signed by Neil Austrian as CEO, and Joe Daly, still Chairman of the Board.

  The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  24

  Monkey Business

  “The great mistakes are made when we feel we are beyond questioning.” —Bill Bernbach

  A memorable episode, one that vividly illustrates the chaos of the post-Bernbach era, was the agency’s 1984 pitch for the $50 million Miller High Life account. Here at last was the opportunity that justified taking on cigarets. How many years the agency had longed for a shot at great beverage account—the colas, the un-colas, the major beer brands. Most of the work on such products was interchangeable, DDBers often said. Catchy music, quick cuts of happy people doing adorable things. You could (and someone at the agency did) switch their sound-tracks; viewers of the scrambled reel didn’t know the difference.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach could find a new direction. Zig when everybody else is zagging. That’s what made the agency great. And surely they knew beer advertising. Their early ‘60s classic print campaign for Utica Club (“I sometimes wonder if it pays to make beer this way”), along with TV commercials featuring animated Schultz and Dooley beer mugs, brought fame and riches to an obscure upstate New York brand. The line “We must be doing something right,” for New York City’s Rheingold beer, went into the English language. And sales of Detroit’s Stroh brewery soared to third place nationally—from twelfth place—while Doyle Dane Bernbach did its advertising. (So why did Stroh leave in 1982? Same old DDB story: superior advertising, neglected relationships,, fences un-mended, entropy. Still, past is past. On with the future.)

  Miller High Life needed help. The brand had slipped onto a steep decline in 1981. Competitor Budweiser’s macho commercials, set in friendly saloons, played to the masculine ego of the heavy beer consumers, blue-collar types. Same guys didn’t identify with the Ivy Leaguers who shared a campfire and High Life when “Miller Time” rolled around. Hey!

  A straightforward advertising problem. A brand in trouble not because of the quality of the product, but because of its image. Perfect for Doyle Dane Bernbaach.

  * * *

  It is a belief universally held in the industry, that a $50 million piece of new business will solve all of an agency’s problems. Doyle Dane Bernbach needed a save as badly as Miller High Life needed help

  Barry Loughrane and Roy Grace, heading up the Miller crusade, called some 40 staffers together in the sanctified, premiere 12th floor boardroom—a place designed to display without ostentation a deep richness in taste and resources, a place that attested to the solidity of past success and the assurance of a long future. As Loughrane spoke, a few literary minds drifted to King Henry V’s charge to his outnumbered men before the battle of Agincourt:

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition;

  And gentlemen in England now abed

  Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

  So too the chosen band that would bring victory in this “biggest, most important, new business assignment that Doyle Dane Bernbach has ever gone after,” in Loughrane’s words. “All of you who are part of this will remember it as one of the great moments in this agency’s history, and one of the great personal opportunities in your careers.”

  The uplifting rhetoric in no way struck the troops as overkill. For word on the street had Doyle Dane Bernbach the clear favorite to win Miller High Life.

  As a good general, Loughrane gave a thorough briefing—what was known, what needed to be known, what needed doing, and by when.

  Afterwards, Neil Austrian tossed in a word of caution: “Just don’t do a bunch of smart-ass New York campaigns.”

  To the agency creative bulls, his admonition was a big, bright red flag. It meant, “Let’s give ‘em what they want.” The line Bernbach had taught them contempt fo
r.

  * * *

  Roy Grace still shuddered at the mention of the Miller pitch. “Its foundation was hysteria. Its undercurrent was, ‘Let’s not do DDB work, because that is not going to get us a beer. Let’s do the kind of pap they do in the Midwest—that will get us a beer.’ That’s like having a band of the finest Sioux warriors, and asking them to drive a tank.

  “The screws were tightened on everyone—but you don’t change your way of working because you want to win. We were not good at working that way.”

  Instead of Agincourt, it would be Waterloo.

  As recounted by a number of veterans of that memorable defeat, the coup de grace was delivered, eponymously enough, by Grace himself.