From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  Let me make it clear – hip-pocket business goes on way beyond Jimmy and his French Cheese. Guys get to be presidents of agencies because they have business locked in. You control a certain amount of business, and then you muscle. You’ve got more clout than the next guy. At one agency where I worked it was very simple. One guy played golf with a guy who controlled the advertising for a very big automobile account. Another guy had a lock on an enormous piece of cigarette business – but not so big as the automobile business. Very simple. The guy controlling the automobile business told the guy controlling the tobacco business that he wanted to be chairman of the board. And he was. The other guy settled for being president.

  When I went to work at Ted Bates, I was told you can screw around with the entire place, but don’t touch this particular guy. He is so close to the Fleischmann booze business that if he ever gets angry, we’re in trouble. The entire agency was afraid of this guy. He had his own office, his own secretary, and he never had much to do. He was pulling down fifty grand a year and the word was, ‘He’s got the Fleischmann account in his pocket.’ He supposedly played golf with the advertising manager and the rumor always was: ‘He’s the guy who’s going to take the account with him if he ever leaves Bates.’ Everybody was terrorized by this guy, and the funny thing was he was a lovely guy, a great guy who never shoved anyone around, never raised his voice.

  There must have been a good two hundred people – account executives, copywriters, art directors, and so forth – walking very quietly around this guy. Right down the line, one after the other, we knew we must not screw around with this guy. Not only was he making big bucks, he put in a big expense account each year. He did everything he wanted, had people hired, had people fired, did the whole thing. Well, it lasted a year and a half or so. But while he lasted he was class all the way.

  They finally said to themselves, ‘His expense account is going to put us out of business.’ That’s how far he was going – he was literally taking money out of their pockets to the point where the account was no longer going to be profitable if they didn’t put a stop to it. So they took a calculated risk, fear and all, and they decided they were going to fire the guy.

  The day they fired him they found out something – the whole thing was a myth. He had no control over the account, had no lock on the business. The guy had gotten his job based on the rumor that they were going to lose the account but if they hired this guy they’d save the account. In fact, the rumor was all over town. So they hired him – and then they fired him. It’s a beautiful story because if the guy hadn’t run up such a big expense account he’d still be there. They still have the account, by the way. The guy walked out of there and started his own agency, and for weeks the rumor around Bates was that he was going to take the Fleischmann business with him. It never happened.

  What’s sad about the advertising business is that I could take anyone with the proper number of ears, eyes, arms, and so forth, and land him a job at any agency in the city on the theory of pocket business. I would say that your grandmother is a relative of someone who controls a lot of business and then you’re in for at least a year, maybe more.

  When Bates lost Mobil Gas to Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, their first line was, ‘We got to keep the top guys who used to be on this account simply because we’re going to attract another gas company. We can land another gasoline if we have these people around. But the other guys [the little people] have to go because they don’t mean anything – we can’t parade them out.’

  One of the gas guys was moved over and put on the Wink business. The gag around the agency was that maybe Wink doesn’t taste that much different from gasoline. They had still another guy who was their real gas maven. No one really quite figured out what he was doing until he quit. For years they kept this guy in his office, and he was always full of great plans. He was always pitching an account that he was very close to because he went to school with somebody. If I wanted to start all over again and people didn’t know what I looked like, I could go into practically any agency and hint that I’m very tight and close to a lot of business and live there for two or three years. They don’t fire you once they think you’re close to business.

  Once, many years ago, I went looking for work at Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles. In those days it was a very, very nervous agency. I asked to do an assignment and met a copy group chief. The conversation went something like this: ‘I’d like to do an assignment just to show you that I can work for you. I obviously haven’t got any samples in my portfolio.’ He said, ‘Well, I like the rough samples you have, and I’m going to give you an assignment. I want you to do something on Rinso. Oh, no. Wait a minute. Rinso might hear that we’re giving out assignments and there might be some word around that we’re in trouble on Rinso. Why don’t you do it on Bulova? No! Bulova is very touchy now, and there’s a little political situation.’ And he’s talking to a guy who wanted ninety bucks a week, who knew no one in the business. Finally, he couldn’t give me an assignment.

  An agency president once told me, ‘I start worrying about losing an account the minute I get it. The minute I sign the contract, I’m one step closer toward losing it.’ At that point he’s worried and his contribution to the advertising is fear. He pushes it to the people under him: ‘We’ve got to hold, we’ve got to hold.’ A good example of this is Yardley, which came into Bates while I was there, and at the first meeting the word was, ‘We want great work, we want creative work.’ Terrific! Everyone shook hands, and we opened up the booze for special occasions and had a party.

  The next day – I swear, the next day – the word was out: ‘We’re in danger of losing the account. We’ve got to be very careful of the way we handle it.’ So work was done and never shown to the client. Why? ‘We can’t afford to show him stuff like this right now.’ Step one: fear. They’re afraid to even show him work. So they show him what they consider safe. And safe is not what he came to the agency for.

  I felt like a shill in the Yardley pitch. They trotted me out and showed the Yardley people some of the work that I had done on Pretty Feet while I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. And Yardley was sold a bill of goods that I was going to be in charge of the account. All I ever did was work on one piece of the account and then the agency never wanted to show the work to the client. The people were afraid of the work and didn’t even want to let the client say no to it. So they did some off-the-wall garbage and they showed it to the client and the client threw it back in their laps. I mean, it was real garbage. And they were hung. The account moved from Bates to Delehanty. Delehanty resigned it when they picked up Coty, which conflicted with Yardley. Yardley then started its own house agency and recently gave that up for Benton & Bowles and Davis, Parker and Valenti.

  Accounts move around so much these days because they’re not getting what they want. It’s the agency’s job to express what they need. That’s the agency’s job. The client simply knows where he wants his product to go in the marketplace. My agency just picked up a new account and the client said, ‘I’ve had two agencies, one which insisted that everything they did was gold and I got rid of them, and the other agency which came in every day and said, “What would you like to see on paper this week?” ‘ My partner Ron Travisano puts it another way: ‘Would you like to see something in an opentoe campaign?’ An account shouldn’t be treated that way. He should be guided, but he shouldn’t be forced into doing anything he really doesn’t want to do.

  Most account guys live with fear in their hearts. I know a guy in town named Coolidge. He once was very big at an agency called Cunningham & Walsh. Big money. Maybe ninety big ones a year. He got fired from there and thanks to his good friend, Beautiful Jim, at Fuller & Smith & Ross, he zipped over to Fuller & Smith as a creative supervisor. Coolidge lives in Westport, knows the right people, he’s very soft-spoken, does none of the things that people assume an agency guy would do. But he doesn’t live like a human being. He’s got that fear crawling in him every day. Most of
these guys start the day off deciding which account is going to call them and scare them. All an account has to do to terrorize an account man is call up and say, ‘Hey, can you send me some copies of the last five ads you’ve done for us?’ and the panic spreads.

  Yet this doesn’t go on at Doyle, Dane. They never think they’re going to lose anything. They’ve got a marvelous track record and they’re confident. Mary Wells isn’t sitting there worrying about whether she’s going to lose anything. And she usually doesn’t. I’m convinced of this.

  Sometimes the creative people get sucked into becoming shills. Let’s say a guy is doing a terrific job on a cosmetic account for a small agency. Let’s say further that an old-line agency has a cosmetic account that is in trouble. So, there’s big fear going around. The big agency will decide to sandbag. They go out and pull in stars and offer them fantastic salaries. Who can resist? Maybe the star copywriter would like to move the hell out of the East Village and breathe some of that good Westport air. So they can’t resist. They show up and they work on the pitch to save the account. The agency was doomed to lose the account anyway. The account goes, the guy goes. He was led into a trap and slaughtered. There have been many cases of this sort of thing and it’s very, very bad business.

  Creative people don’t have a business sense about themselves. When I went to work at Bates I had one of the first contracts in the history of the Bates creative department. No one had ever asked for one. And they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people go in and out of that creative department. Creative people don’t consider what can happen. Most creative people don’t know their own pattern of work and they aren’t smart enough – quite honestly – to go in and say, ‘I want a contract.’ I asked for and got a specific type of contract. I wanted it for eighteen months – not two years, or a year, but eighteen months. I told them that after four months they were going to hate me, and I meant despise me. ‘You won’t be able to stand me,’ I told them. ‘And after another eight months, you’re going to start grudgingly to like me but you would have fired me months ago if I didn’t have that contract. And after that I’m going to score. If I can make it for eighteen months, I’ll stay for life. If I don’t make it. I’ll pull out.’ Which is what I did. When I was at Delehanty for only four months Shep Kurnit was out looking for a new creative director. I stayed there for two and a half years.

  I find it easy to hire an art director or a copywriter, but when an account executive comes in to see me I don’t even know what to ask him. I go through a session with this guy and spend most of the time reading my shoelaces. I have nothing to tell the guy, nothing to ask him. Should I ask him how he smiles? Should I ask him how do you handle yourself with clients? ‘Oh, I handle myself very well.’ ‘Waiter, how’s the liver tonight?’ ‘Oh, the liver’s terrific today.’ How the hell does the waiter know? How the hell do I know if the account guy is good with the account?

  ‘What accounts have you worked on?’ ‘Well, when I was on General Foods, I kept us from losing the account for nine months.’ General Foods has hundreds of guys on the account. And this guy kept the account for nine months! Maybe he did. I don’t know. Not long ago I had two guys in my office who were from the same agency and had worked on the same account. The first guy came in and said, ‘When I was on the account, I helped them introduce “soft gin.”’ Two hours later, so help me, another guy walks in and says, ‘I was the fellow who introduced “soft gin.”’ Now, if one of those cats wasn’t lying, then they were identical twins. And they both said they were account supervisors on the account.

  When I talked to the two ‘soft gin’ guys, I was in the market for two account men. I had seen maybe thirty-five guys, and twenty of them were out of work. All right, there are twenty guys looking for a job, and I’ve got room for only two. They’ve all had jobs. Once they were important guys in some agency. Once they were the guys who really did the ‘soft gin’ marketing plan. They lost their jobs, and all of a sudden they have no value at all, except for a guy who might need an account man for a liquor account. Now I was looking for a wine guy, and the two ‘soft gin’ guys know only gin, they don’t know from wine. It is much easier for an agency to hire an account man who knows a piece of business. He can jump right in and start working; you don’t have to teach him. When you have a choice, you take a guy with experience.

  I meet these account people on the street and I meet more people out of work than those who are working. A lot of them just don’t stick to the business. A lot of them just can’t come back. They’re too specialized. The jobs are disappearing and the business is changing. Some of them go into the realestate business; other guys go into the graphic-arts business. Maybe they buy a boat and sail away. They just can’t make it. They can’t take the feast-or-famine aspect of the business. It’s not romantic or glamorous, it’s tragic.

  The average age of the account executive is thirty-two, thirty-three, and then they start lying about their age. I had a guy in my office who was gray. My God, I practically had to help him out the door. He claimed he was thirty-eight. Well, if he was thirty-eight he’s lived a great life. I mean, he really looked like he was in his early fifties. I mean, the guy was an old man.

  Guys are out of work a long time, and they start to lie about their age, and that, too, is part of the fear. Good people are out of work, not just losers. This is one of the few businesses where you can be out of work and tell the world. In most other lines of work, usually you hide and don’t tell your neighbors you’re on the beach. If a guy gets fired, he gets on the phone and calls the first twenty people he can think of. And it’s all over town that he’s been fired. The kids are killing a lot of account people, too. A lot of hard-working young kids are now willing to take a crack at account work. Agencies that used to start kids in the mailroom are taking more chances and giving kids accounts after a couple of years at the agency. In the old days it was a slow process out of the mailroom to account work.

  When a guy is out, he tries anything. He becomes a consultant – that’s the first step. He tries to get all of his friends to give him consultation work. He might look to the magazines as a space salesman. He might turn up working for a printing outfit. The average account man starts making plans to start his own agency after he’s fired. He says, ‘Well, screw them all. I was going to start my own agency anyway.’ But that doesn’t work out. He can’t get the bread. The account he thought he had sewn up wasn’t sewn up. He’s not connected anywhere, and slowly he starts to find that he’s got nine or twelve months of debts ahead of him. The guy is going to be looking for a new job for at least a year. There’s no wonder that an account man is afraid, knowing that if he goes, he’s going to be out this long. It’s natural. You’ve got to be afraid. You spend every day knowing that if you blow it, you’re out for a year. That’s what the average guy spends on the beach today. The shrinking job market is making it tough as hell for people to find a new job quickly.

  And nobody has that kind of money in the bank. The worst story I ever heard along these lines wasn’t about an account man but a copywriter. He had been a star, and he came to see me about a job. He was in his late fifties. His portfolio was complete with samples, but they were at least eight years old. I said, ‘How long have you been out of work?’ He said it had been something like six or seven years, he wasn’t quite sure at that point. I said, ‘How in God’s name did you survive?’ He said, ‘Well, I sold the house in Darien. I sold all my stocks – and I had quite a few of them. I sold some real estate for a while and my wife and I moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn.’ He was working his way backwards. Six or seven years went by without a permanent job, no office to go into in the morning. The guy had no real income for all that time. He was begging me for some freelance work. He wanted a day’s work. Here is a guy who was once earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year. When they fall, they fall very hard, and everyone – account guys and creative people – knows that the fall down is very tough. We’re in a business that is very fashion-
conscious. I mean, what’s in style this year may not be salable next year. The guy with talent from one era has a tough time adjusting to the new style.

  One of the ‘soft gin’ guys who came to see me had been out of work for only a few days, but really he had been out for six months. He knew his agency was going to lose the account six months before. So he’s had six months of looking for a job. Age fifty-two. Chances, zip. Who’s going to hire him? He hints around that. ‘I may have some business.’ He doesn’t have any business. If he had business, he would have kept it. He would have used the business to keep his job.

  With the creative guys becoming more important, the account guys are having a tougher time of it. The entire structure of advertising is being disturbed. I get an account, and somebody loses a job someplace. In the large, older agencies many account executives work on only one account. In the smaller agencies one account man services several accounts. We have a handful of account executives servicing a couple of dozen accounts. That means there are a lot of account executives who are out of work because of us. For some people this could be a terrifying business, with good reason.

  I’ve never been frightened because I always had something to show. I had something I knew how to do – copywriting. And I know what it’s like to be poor. I really know what it’s like to be broke. It’s not that terrifying. It’s not that bad, it’s not the end of the world. Christ, I was born in Brooklyn and I was living there up until a few years ago. I know how to get on the train and go back there. The Transit Authority has got pretty good signs showing you how to get to Brooklyn.