From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  Part of the problem, especially with the account guys, is that they are living way over their heads. Advertising is a business that goes first class all the way. When you get hooked on the expense-account way of life, there’s a tendency to try to live out of the office the way you do in the office. This is part of it. They own boats, they belong to yacht clubs, they live in expensive houses. A lot of these guys are living very close to the edge. I would bet that most of them haven’t got any money in the bank. No bucks salted away. They just about make it. And they live very high indeed.

  They’re living on loans. They’ve got big liquor bills. Big partying bills. Big school bills for the kids. Big clothes bills. Big everything. The nut is very high for these cats. That house in Rye – they’ve got to live in Rye – has got to cost them seventy-five big ones. And when you’ve got a seventy-fivegrand house with a mortgage this big, you don’t answer the client back that fast. You know, you’re not too quick to screw around. You’re not too ready to do anything except pop a lot of pills and maybe run up a big bill with the shrink.

  The account man is in the only business in the world where he gets hired, is paid a lot of money for four or five years, and then at one point he’s told he’s not worth anything any more because they’ve lost the account. You know, if you go into any other business in the world and you last five years or so you’re going to live there forever. You go to work in this business and if you last for five years the chances are you’re going to be fired the next day. Seniority means nothing. This is not the railroads. There’s too much money at stake. These guys know what happens when they lose a job. They’ve got no place to go for a year or so. I mean, they can’t send their wife out to work, they’re past all that.

  It hits everybody in the business, not just the account executives. I know a very good art director who’s been out of work for eleven months. And he’s good, in fact he just won an award at a show. The guy is fantastic. He was making $40,000 a year but now he says he’ll ‘negotiate.’ That means $25,000 a year. He’s making too much money. I could get some crazy kid to come in and start at $7,000 a year and keep raising him up and up and after five or six years, if I could hang on to him that long, you couldn’t hire an equivalent art director for $50,000. I’ve got one art director who’s twenty-two, and I just hired an eighteen-year-old. The twenty-two-year-old is like an old man next to the eighteen-year-old, who really is far out. These kids are cheaper, they work harder, they’re less problem. It’s a matter of simple economics. And they show: out of schools, off the streets, out of the woodwork. God knows where they come from. It’s the kids who are really revolutionizing the advertising business today. It’s the kids with nothing to lose. The kids are pushing ahead, mainly because they communicate to consumers like we’ve never communicated before. In a couple of years 50 percent of the population is going to be under the age of twenty-five. When we reach this point the kids in advertising are going to take over completely.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  THE

  CREATIVE

  LIFE

  ‘Now advertising is a small business, with a lot of gossip, and there are a lot of guys sitting around in their offices with not too much to do, so when they hear a funny story or a crazy line they sit and call each other up to pass it on. I became known as the Pearl Harbor guy at Panasonic …’

  There are talented people all over New York today who are capable of turning out advertising that doesn’t drive people crazy and does sell the product. Problem is whether the people can sell their advertising to their agencies and their accounts. Within every big agency there’s a pocket of good people who for some reason manage to save the situation, make the advertising and do it well. Within every agency. When I went to Bates my team was, I modestly believe, that quality pocket of advertising. We turned out some excellent advertising at Bates. In one year, we literally turned the Panasonic Electronics account around.

  It took some doing. My title was Creative Supervisor when I went to Bates. But I was part of the zoo. Bates had to form a zoo so that they could take their clients to it and show me to them: ‘Hey, look, he’s creative, he’s won awards, he dresses funny, he does all those mystical things that you hear about.’ What they were saying was: ‘Like we’re in on it, we know exactly what it’s all about. Don’t worry, baby, you’re going to get the same kind of work that you’ve been reading about other people getting.’ Somebody once described it as Operation Judas Goat. I was supposed to come in there and pull in a lot of people from the outside. The idea was that other writers and art directors would look at me and say, ‘Gee, if Della Femina is going in there, maybe it’s worthwhile. Maybe I ought to take a shot at it and forget all about those crazy hammers inside people’s skulls pushing aspirin.’ I had something of a reputation among creative people in town for doing good work. At that point they might want to try a place like Bates. So the notion was that hiring me was going to upgrade their entire image. This is the way they planned it. It was not the way I planned it. The first thing I decided to do was to make a declaration of my intentions, sort of to say, ‘Look, this is what it’s going to be like and I’m not going to put up with most of the pompous crap that goes through the agency.’

  The first day they had a meeting on the Japanese electronics company, Panasonic, and there must have been six or seven guys there: the account supervisor, the account executive, the executive art director, and a couple of others. I figured I’d keep my mouth shut for a few minutes, like it was my first morning in the place. One guy said, ‘Well, what are we going to do about Panasonic?’ And everybody sat around, frowning and thinking about Panasonic. Finally, I decided, what the hell, I’ll throw a line to loosen them up – I mean, they were paying me $50,000 a year plus a $5,000-a-year expense account, and I thought they deserved something for all this bread. So I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got it, I’ve got it.’ Everbody jumped. Then I got very dramatic, really setting them up. ‘I see a headline, yes, I see this headline.’ ‘What is it?’ they yelled. ‘I see it all now,’ I said, ‘I see an entire campaign built around this headline.’ They all were looking at me now. ‘The headline is, the headline is: “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.”’

  Complete silence. Dead silence. And then the art director went into hysterics, like he was hitting the floor. To him it was funny. One of the account guys who was smoking a pipe – well, his mouth opened up at the line and his pipe dropped all over him, and he spent the next five minutes trying to put out the sparks. The rest of them looked at me as if to say, ‘God, where are we, what did we do?’ They looked very depressed. I was pretty pleased. I thought it wasn’t too bad a line. Later in the day I repeated the line to the guy who hired me, did the same bit for him. The feeling wasn’t spontaneous as all that the second time around but it served its purpose. I know why I do these things: it sets the pace, it really tells people who I am, what I feel.

  Now advertising is a small business, with a lot of gossip, and there are a lot of guys sitting around in their offices with not too much to do, so when they hear a funny story or a crazy line they sit and call each other up to pass it on. I became known as the Pearl Harbor guy at Panasonic.

  I wouldn’t say that things went downhill for me at the agency after that first meeting. It really started to go to hell at Bates after my first creative review board meeting. One of the reasons that copywriters and art directors go crazy is creative review boards. Creative review boards are, first of all, the device of a very large and a very old-fashioned agency. It’s made up so a lot of guys who are over sixty can feel as though they’re part of an agency. A lot of these guys, they have nothing to do and they sit there. They’re professional second-guessers, and they sit there and they want the chance to-review the creative product. If somebody were to ask me what are the physical characteristics of a creative review board, I would say they are made up of guys with red noses and blue veins. And like they sit there and they look like they’re just about to
have a coronary. They have this beautiful flush, most of them are gray and they’re maybe twenty to thirty pounds overweight. These are the guys who have survived to the point where they now make seventy-five, eighty, one hundred grand a year without doing very much. They show up at the office at 10:00 a.m. Maybe. They spend a couple of hours shuffling papers around on the desk and calling people up and making their lunch dates. They’re very concerned with their lunch dates. God forbid they should ever get caught without a lunch date. They wouldn’t know what to do. They make their lunch date. They show up at ‘21,’ which is the place they all go to, and they spend another two or three hours a day there at lunch.

  They never talk about advertising. That’s a funny thing. These cats talk about advertising only at creative review board meetings. They get back to their offices around three o’clock and maybe they’ll call a meeting for no good reason and comes 4:45 they grab the train and go back to Rye or Chappaqua where they all live. They all live in the same valley as far as I’m concerned – the Valley of Death. Man for man, creative review boards are probably responsible for more waste in advertising than anything else. The Comptons have them, and the Thompsons, and the Bateses, and the Foote, Cones, and the Fuller, Smiths and just about every one of those old-line, heavy, overstaffed, fat agencies. The joke of the business is that an agency like a Compton has a creative review board. So they get together once a month, these killers, and they review.

  Why should a Mary Wells have a creative review board, or a Doyle, Dane, or a Delehanty? They know they’re good, they don’t need any board to tell themselves so. The evidence is in their fantastic growth and in the awards they win each year for their work. I don’t believe that people should have their writing reviewed.

  Now the creative review board at Bates was a new deal. Bates hadn’t had one before. A first for them. And to their credit I must say that they had some younger people in it. It wasn’t just the red noses and the blue veins. With one or two exceptions, they had some very young, very untalented people whom they put on the board. It’s amazing how you could be that young and that untalented.

  I had been at Bates for five or six months when the word got out that I was going to be the first guy reviewed by their new creative review board. And that bugged me. After they told me that I was it, I said, ‘O.K. Here are my golden rules. I will not defend anything that I have done. All I will do is show you what I have done and answer your questions. I’m not here to defend myself.’

  I did have stuff to show. I had the Panasonic, I had Royal Globe Insurance, which was doing pretty well, and I had some other things that my group had produced. The Royal Globe television commercial we had done was very dramatic. The viewer was put in the driver’s seat – at night – and for sixty seconds all you saw were blinding headlights. We were a group. They used us like a special squad to be brought in whenever something went wrong. Whenever somebody was about to lose an account, whenever there was a new business pitch, my group – Ron Travisano, Frank Siebke, Ned Tolmach and I – would be called in. But Bates was getting a little uptight about the group and they were looking forward to their creative review board session.

  The night before the meeting I really didn’t know what to do. I was sitting at home saying to myself, ‘I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to find a way to show them exactly what I think of the meeting.’ And then it hit me. I’d walk in there with a tape recorder and tape the entire proceedings.

  I showed up the next day to face the board, which was made up of about seven guys, whose average salary was maybe $80,000 a year. One guy there, the Creative Director of the World – that was his title and it meant Creative Director of the Bates World – was making maybe $120,000. The other guys weighed in at $80,000 and $90,000, and there were a couple of lower-echelon guys able to grab off only $70,000 a year. I was by far the lowest-paid guy in the place. I mean, there must have been close to a half-million dollars a year in salary there.

  As I walked in, one guy had to be a wise guy and throw a line: ‘Well, have you got the crown of thorns ready for him?’ And they all laughed. Then I put the little tape recorder down on the table. They quit laughing and immediately all eyes just went to the thing. I said, ‘I’ve got my ads pinned up and like I said before if you have any questions about the quality or type of advertising I’ll be happy to answer anything you want. But before we do that I would like to turn on the tape recorder and record this session.’ Before I turned it on I said, ‘If there’s anyone in this room who objects to being taped I’ll be very happy to leave it off.’ And everyone just kind of shuffled and said nothing. So I turned it on and said, ‘O. K., let’s have some questions.’

  Nothing. One guy cleared his throat and hemmed and hawed, and said, ‘Well, I notice you use a black background on that ad for Royal Globe.’ All the while he’s watching that Concord tape recorder work. It wasn’t even a Panasonic recorder. I said, ‘That’s right, we felt a black background would be better.’ More nothing. And then babble, pure babble, all babble. Two solid hours of babbling. They were terrified, and I know it, and it’s beautiful, and I’m sitting there and talking and just answering any question they want, but they’re not asking any questions. One guy talks about pro football. Guys start talking about anything they could think of and all the while they’re staring at the machine, they couldn’t keep their eyes off that machine. Ned Tolmach, who was sitting next to me during the entire meeting, was watching this whole beautiful scene with amazement.

  And finally, after two hours of nonsense, I said, ‘You know, gentlemen, I don’t think there is anything else that you want to ask me, is there?’ They’re still looking and one of them says, ‘No.’ So I shut the tape recorder off and I say, ‘Well, thank you,’ and we walk out. As Ned and I walked out of the room I turned to him and said, ‘Ned, do you think it worked?’ Ned said, ‘I don’t know if it worked, but boy, are they fucking stupid people up here.’ ‘Could it be that they’re just stupid?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I just can’t figure it.’

  As I was walking down the hall and approaching my office I could hear the telephone ringing. I broke into a run and grabbed the phone and it’s the $120,000-a-year Creative Director of the World. ‘Jerry,’ he says on the phone, ‘can you come down to my office and bring that tape recorder?’ And I said, ‘Bring in my tape recorder?’ ‘And bring the tape, too.’ I said, ‘But there’s nothing on the tape. It’s useless to me now. But I’ll run it over again if you want.’ ‘Just bring the tape, Jerry.’

  On my way to the Creative Director of the World’s office I met four of the guys in the hall who were in that creative review board meeting. One of the $75,000-a-year biggies – I’ll call him Kent – is standing right there in the hallway, blocking my way, and he’s looking even more nervous than he usually looked, which was pretty nervous anyhow. ‘Jerry,’ Kent said, ‘why’d you bring that tape into the meeting?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I just like to hear my voice.’ Kent is really against the wall because he doesn’t quite know where he fits in the advertising business. ‘You probably can’t hear my voice on that recorder,’ he says. I said, ‘Come on, Kent, come on, I know it was you speaking.’ He couldn’t even take it as a joke. ‘Oh, no,’ Kent said, ‘I know my own voice. I know when I talk and I can tell if I have my voice on a tape recorder.’

  I passed by another office, a guy named Marks, and he vaulted over a little marble coffee table he had in his office and flew into the hall. ‘Why’d you do it, Jerry?’ Marks asked. ‘To hear my voice,’ I said, and I was getting a bit tired of saying it, too. ‘It’s a very bad business,’ he said, and turned away. Finally I got to the Creative Director of the World and there were the rest of the creative review board.

  ‘It turned me off,’ said one guy. ‘Why did you do it?’ asked another. The Creative Director of the World said, ‘Will you hand it over, please?’ They really were quite disturbed. As I walked out of the office I couldn’t resist saying, ‘Gee, I think this should be a practice
in all of your creative review sessions. You know, I think it would be fantastic if you installed a videotape set so that you could tape these things and have them running for the rest of the people in the agency. It would be very helpful.’ One guy, a good friend of mine, said, ‘It will be a long time before we tape any other review session and it will be an even longer time before you come back to the creative review board.’

  Well, what’s the story here? Fear. Basically, these guys have never, never been on record before. The noncreative people who work in the creative department are so used to lying to themselves that they can write – these guys were afraid of the tape recorder. It represented truth. These guys had been kidding each other all their lives, and like this tape recorder meant something. The tape recorder could put them away. The tape recorder was truth; they couldn’t deny truth and they couldn’t live with it. They could carry on, but they couldn’t face that little thirty-dollar tape recorder. Some of these people are so adept at kidding themselves and everybody else that they’re professionals at it.

  They never held another creative review board meeting at Bates – at least not while I was there. That session with me ended it. And the word got out in the agency, ‘Did you really do it?’ And I said, ‘Of course I did.’ The story picked up the entire creative department. Everybody in the creative department felt – Wow! – we’ve got something going here. It was like a victory for a lot of guys who had been getting killed by the noncreative creative experts.

  Sometimes the pressure on the creative people isn’t as obvious as a review board. It can get subtle, very subtle. A one-on-one kind of thing. I worked at an agency where there was a guy whom I referred to as the Mount Everest of Fear. He worked for the vice-president, the man named David whom we called The Klutz, and to this day I’ve never met a more fearful guy. I was really just a punk kid then, I couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and David used this man the way the Green Hornet used to use his trusty valet Cato. I would walk into David’s office to show him an ad, and David would always drive me insane because he would always come out and say, ‘I don’t like it.’ He never said, ‘I don’t like it because …’ Just ‘I don’t like it.’ And I’d say, ‘Come on, David, you must have a reason for not liking it. There’s got to be something there that you can put your finger on.’ Good old David would shake his head and say, ‘Jerry, this just doesn’t make it.’ Then he’d say, ‘All right, I’m going to prove it. I’ll call in Cato and let’s see if Cato likes it.’