Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  * * *

  A momentary pause to remind the reader that among Doyle Dane Bernbach’s most admired attributes was its refusal to do speculative campaigns. An agency had to have a strong backbone to say no to advertisers who insisted on spec work in new business pitches. A strong balance sheet helped, too.

  DDB management held that, because agencies put their most talented people onto spec work in trying for new business, paying clients get shortchanged. Moreover spec campaigns are a waste of time, because the advertiser doesn’t reveal sufficient information until an agency becomes his true partner. Then a “real” campaign is produced. So why play time-consuming games? An agency’s past work should be a reliable enough indicator of its future performance.

  The industry applauded. Alas, few agencies could afford to adopt a similar stance. Lost in history, and in the image projected by its leaders, was the fact that Doyle Dane Bernbach had done spec work once upon a time.

  “When you’re young and poor, you have to do spec to get accounts, and we did,” conceded Ned Doyle, after Bernbach’s death.

  Now old and rich did spec too, as economic pressures worked to make advertisers more wary, more demanding, more frightened. Damned if they would hand over a $50 million budget to an agency without, at the very least, a theme, a concept, and often a piece of music, that brought them to their feet, then and there. The theme might change after the agency’s full indoctrination into the advertiser’s business, but the winning spec campaign provided fail-safe “parameters.”

  You have to change with the times, said Austrian.

  Spec presentations, un-affectionately termed “gang-bangs,” became a consuming part of work life in the agency’s post-Bernbach years.

  “And since we’d never done them before,” said Grace, “we didn’t know how to do them at all. Other agencies knew how. For us it was like re-inventing the wheel.”

  * * *

  Bill Wardell, then head of new business for the agency, also shuddered at the memory of Miller. “It should have been like throwing red meat to the lions—to do a bang-up execution on an assignment with absolutely water-tight strategic guidelines. It was like the yellow brick road, laid out very specifically for us, like ‘fill in the blanks.’

  “The assignment fundamentally was: Miller Time had a few great years. Bud’s good campaign had pre-empted it, they were out-Millering Miller. So freshen up and contemporize, or replace, Miller Time. There was no guessing. Whether you believed in the strategy or not, that’s what they wanted. So everyone went charging off to find better ways.”

  Including Roy Grace, who with his copy partner John Noble, quickly came up with a concept featuring monkeys. Monkeys!?!?

  “Truthfully, I really love gorillas,” said Grace in an agency Christmas party film, featuring monkeys, produced under his aegis. Indeed, his gorilla-banging-suitcase commercial for American Tourister luggage was a classic. That gorilla symbolized “clumsy bellboys, brutal cab drivers, careless doormen, ruthless porters, and all the butterfingered luggage handlers all over the world.” To them, American Tourister said, “Have we got a suitcase for you!” Funny, memorable, effective.

  The Miller monkeys would symbolize people who drank the other beer. Hmmmm.

  “The way that concept came over was, if you’re drinking the other beer you’re a monkey,” recalled research VP Wally Lepkin, who gathered data on responses to concepts for the Miller pitch. “And I thought, 1) why knock the competitor’s product, 2) why alienate a prospective customer, and 3) a lot of Miller customers were black.”

  Copy-testing in markets with heavy black populations showed strong negatives to Grace’s campaign. “I knew it was bad, I just wanted some reassurance,” Grace told Lepkin, who thereupon assumed the monkeys were dead. To Lepkin’s astonishment, they were not. Such surprises became less surprising in the months ahead.

  Lepkin: “One example. We were going after Minoxidil, a hair restorer, which was waiting for approval by the Food & Drug Administration. We did so much research. I read literature this high. And learned if you’re bald, it won’t work. It doesn’t restore hair. If your hair is thinning, it will thicken it. If you’re starting to lose it, this will help you keep it. But you have to be of a certain age and have a certain kind of hair for this to work. We went through the clinicals, the research, etc. Then creative came up with a storyboard showing a tree with leaves, the leaves fall off the tree, and then in reverse motion, the leaves go back up onto the tree and grow again. Very dramatic, but totally fallacious, totally meaningless. It was as if the creative people didn’t read the material.

  “I’ve seen some terrible stuff go through here in new business. So bad you wonder if the creatives are working for another agency.”

  * * *

  Roy Grace used words like “fanatic” and “neurotic” about his need to be the best. Where Bernbach nurtured the agency’s creative people, Grace competed with them. Asked to select the year’s five best agency ads for a special issue of Advertising Age, Grace chose five he himself art directed. DDB’s public relations manager thereupon suggested that “it might be wise to pick a Polaroid ad, given the trouble we’re having on the account.” Grace retorted “You asked for the five best, and I gave them to you.” Subject closed.

  “Nobody has a bigger ego than I do,” conceded Grace. “I’m serious.”

  Few creatives measured up to his standards. Bob Gage and Helmut Krone, he granted, were “major, major talents.” But the frequent reaction by Grace to concepts submitted by other creatives was, “Why are you bringing me this piece of shit?”

  The Miller work that began to cross his desk didn’t improve his opinion of others’ talents. He grew fonder of his monkeys. During a Mobil shoot in Los Angeles, Grace and John Noble shoehorned in the filming of a spot depicting little construction monkeys drinking another beer.

  Every other campaign presented to Miller would be in the form of storyboards or animatics.

  Bill Wardell: “So Grace and Noble come back from L.A. with the monkeys. And half of us are saying it’s insulting, it’s awful, and half of us are thinking, Well we don’t have anything else yet.”

  As a knockout idea failed to turn up, panic increased. The chosen band became less exclusive. “Anybody with a job in the creative department got to play ball,” said Wardell. “Even the babies. Hey, that creep who does radio. Anybody!”

  “It got out of hand,” remembered Mike Mangano, a 21-year veteran of the agency and one of its top three creative heads at the time. “Too many people were working on it. I’ll bet 75 percent of the creative department, and it was eating them up. Other work was neglected.”

  Fifty-one (count ‘em, fifty one!) campaigns came up for judgment by Grace, Noble and Mangano, who simultaneously were working on their own Miller submissions (“I hated that,” said Mangano), and by Wardell and Loughrane.

  “Instead of a tour de force,” said Wardell, “it was a tour de weakness. But we were nearing pencils-down time because we had to finish up slides and make music, etc. We sat there and went over probably 22 campaigns, creative teams walking in back to back. And we had to pick three or four things.”

  They picked three: two with music, one without. All featured working people—construction workers, truck drivers, people who do unglamorous jobs but do them well. Only one campaign was “old DDB,” the one without music. Visually, the working hands of Miller Men would complement an audio of short, compelling dialogues. Of the two with music, one followed the rhythms of the working day through to a rewarding finish at the saloon. The other took off from the Tom Wolfe book and film, “The Right Stuff.” Agency bets were on this campaign. “Be the one who has the right stuff/They’re a very special few,” urged the theme song. Alas, the film, released late in 1983, had done only middling-well at the box-office, although Wolfe’s phrase had entered the language.

  Mangano created “The Right Stuff” campaign, but he didn’t even like it. He preferred the off-beat Miller Men campaign. Everything a
bout the episode bothered Mangano: the “let’s do conventional beer advertising” atmosphere; the courtroom proceedings where the judges were competing with those they judged; and, finally, the agency’s “chicken-heartedness” in the presentations.

  “We were afraid to take a stand. ‘What if they like that one?’ In the old days, when we were principled, we’d do something we believed in and we’d say, ‘Hey, we think this is great.’ I guess that went away.”

  The monkey commercial would be taken to the presentation under somebody’s armpit, just in case.

  * * *

  “Oh, Jesus, we’re in trouble,” moaned Clay Timon, head of international, when he and Neil Austrian reviewed the finished slides and music for the Miller presentation. Timon had no ax to grind. Candid and cheerful, he was perhaps the only person on the management floor universally liked and trusted.

  “We were the odds-on favorite to win Miller,” recounted Timon. “The presentation was in a day or two. We didn’t expect they’d buy it, but we did expect they’d give us another shot, because we knew they liked us.”

  If so, they didn’t show it.

  Wardell: “We must have gone through two solid hours of wall-to-wall creative, really whoop-de-doo. Music, song and dance, campaign A, B and C. And not one eyelash twitched among the eight jurors sitting there.”

  So Roy Grace pulled out the monkey commercial, with an “Oh, by the way” introduction. Chairs shifted ever so slightly. An eyelash or two twitched, almost imperceptibly. Nothing was said. But the final message was “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

  * * *

  Miller instantly cut Doyle Dane Bernbach out of the running for High Life. Given the turmoil and hysteria and bruising that the agency went through in preparing its pitch, Barry Loughrane tried to put a hopeful spin on the news in a staff memo:

  “What they told me is that they had not elected to test any of our recommendations at this time. That could mean we are out forever or that we will be considered if they aren’t satisfied with the tests of the other agencies’ work.”

  They were, of course, out forever.

  Word that the monkeys put the lid on DDB kept filtering back to the agency. Its law firm heard it from another of its clients. A former DDBer who pitched a Miller product a year later reported that the brewery people were still shaking their heads in disbelief.

  “The sense was, ‘Why would any advertiser give its business to an agency that portrayed its potential customers as monkeys?”

  * * *

  The monkey story didn’t reach the press, and wasn’t known to many staffers within the agency. But the sudden-death end to the staggering effort on Miller sent the agency into a new depression. This was what a terminal illness must be like.

  DDBers in record numbers turned their minds to the possibility of working elsewhere. Including the CEO.

  Account Gains and Losses—1983-84

  In:

  Brown & Williamson

  Excedrin

  Hyatt Legal Services

  Magnavox

  Michelin tires

  Western Airlines

  Out:

  Atari

  Bankers Trust

  Bulova

  El Al

  Israel Tourist

  Philip Morris (Parliament)

  Polaroid

  Porsche

  Schaeffer pens

  25

  Things Fall Apart

  “It’s hard to ruin a good agency, and God knows, a lot of good men have tried.”—Tom Dillon, BBDO

  Every profession has its Golden Age; advertising had Doyle Dane Bernbach in the ’50s and ’60s. The winds of fortune began to change in 1970, though the outside world didn’t perceive that. Inside, the pride and joy of working for the mythic agency were palpable into the ’80s. Waves of downsizing over the years depressed the troops temporarily; the survivors quickly regained their high spirits. They still worked at the best place, where the standards were highest, the reins the loosest, the fun most constant.

  “Ah, but it’s not like it was when I got here,” one heard frequently. The speaker might have got there in the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, or even early ’80s. Yet the comment was the same. For getting there, in whatever year, was adland’s equivalent of dying and going to heaven. Being there, inevitably, brought awareness of trouble in paradise.

  In the Orwellian year of 1984, the sounds of crumbling illusions echoed through the once raucous halls of Doyle Dane Bernbach.

  * * *

  Neil Austrian had led the agency through a renaissance in the mid-’70s, picking up when Tom Gallagher dropped the baton, and, with Marvin Honig, continuing what the triumvirate had started. Stemming the outflow of clients. Reinvigorating the creative work. Going after and winning significant new business. And, most clearly the work of Austrian, the great expansion of the agency’s international network.

  “We were back on a roll,” said Clay Timon, recalling the period with a warm nostalgia.

  Then came the Paulson presidency, the death of Bernbach, the lethal creative rivalries. Austrian confided to Timon that he “woke up one day and realized that the wheels were beginning to fall off, and he didn’t know how to fix it.” His natural exuberance had led him to believe he could fix just about anything, and in the past, he had. But having rebuilt a collapsing Doyle Dane Bernbach in the mid ’70s, he couldn’t (and wouldn’t, being honest to his core) shift the blame for decisions that threatened its collapse anew: bringing Paulson aboard and bringing Honig back. Doubts were spreading now about Loughrane. Who could bear going through it all again?

  And so Austrian listened when an executive recruiting firm, Heidrich & Struggles, approached him about the CEO position at Showtime/The Movie Channel.

  On the morning of May 15, 1984, Doyle Dane Bernbach announced that Austrian had resigned to join Showtime.

  Throughout the agency, through the morning and early afternoon, one heard and saw expressions of incredulity, bewilderment, anxiety, hurt, sadness. Doyle Dane Bernbach had lost its leader—a leader who had won the admiration and affection of . . . well, not all, but many employees. Austrian hadn’t always ruled wisely, but he alone represented the whole of the agency, not one creative faction, or one account group fiefdom, or one department. His warmth and energy had fueled Doyle Dane Bernbach worldwide.

  Groups huddled in halls, exchanging concerns, and then stories. Tales were told about promises made and never kept. One former executive who worked closely with him spoke of “his incredible capacity to say yes to everybody, no matter what their point of view. But who knew? I didn’t know until the end of it, and then these stories started coming out and I thought, Holy shit!”

  Said another, “You’ve never seen anybody dissolve from the history books of DDB faster than the 30 seconds it took for Neil.”

  By day’s end, misery had metamorphosed into relief. It was time for Austrian to go. Now a real advertising man could get things moving again.

  * * *

  On March 8, 1984, Ned Doyle told me that the top guns of the agency had “lost faith” in Austrian. On the day of Austrian’s resignation, two months later, Doyle asked me, in tones of dismay and surprise, if I knew “why Neil did it.” The board hadn’t expected Austrian’s move. For all their growing dissatisfaction with his leadership, they weren’t ready with an alternate plan. With some reluctance, they gave Austrian’s titles to Barry Loughrane.

  “Who were they going to make CEO, the president of Afghanistan?” growled Loughrane, looking back to the day of his promotion.

  In fact, they talked about giving the CEO title to John Bernbach, whom Austrian was bringing back from Europe as president of DDB-International, perhaps with the hope of grooming him for succession to CEO worldwide. Austrian had made clear, when he joined the agency ten years earlier, that he couldn’t commit to advertising as a lifetime career.

  “If you give it to John, I’ll leave,” threatened Daly. (“Threatening to leave” ranked with “sendi
ng the wrong signal” and “love-hate relationship” as common threads weaving through the agency management saga.) Other board members allowed as how John needed time to prove himself to the New York people. Very few knew him. Those who did gave him mixed reviews. The troops picked up the phrase, “Basically, all John wants is a pocketful of tickets on the Concorde and a limo to meet him when he gets off the plane.”

  Some thought that all Loughrane wanted was to be back in California, spending his days in the far more tractable DDB-West offices, and nights at his restaurants. His tenure in New York had, so far, impressed few. His bearing impressed fewer. A pot belly protruded between his red suspenders. Darting eyes set in a fleshy face, and atop his head, whitish-yellow hair that looked like it had been left out all night in the rain. Could this man inspire and lead the weary troops to renewed glory?