I picked up the phone, got Corum, and said, ‘Hello, Jerry Greenberg, I hear your account is loose. I’d like to come in and talk to you about it.’ At that point there’s no sense saying we should get together and have a little talk. He’s already talking to other agencies and I might have been too late. He had never heard of me. We had been in business for three months and things were bad. We were running out of bread, two of our partners had decided to pull out and things were very tight. I went to see him, showed him the stuff and got the account, just like that. I practically got it while I was there. When we took over the account Corum was advertising in the Times Magazine and spending something like $65,000. The account now bills close to a half million dollars with us. It’s a major account with us – and pretty soon he’s going to be all over the lot. His sales are fantastic – on that watch made out of a gold piece he’s backed up with orders, two or three months’ worth. The guy has a watch company now. When you’re able to spend close to $500,000 in promotion and advertising, you’ve got to be making a lot of bread.
Let’s say you track down a rumor and you’re asked to make a pitch. You can do it two ways. You can have a standard regular pitch which you make to every prospective new client. Or you can do a lot of work on spec, showing the guy what kind of campaign he should have. Mostly the new and younger agencies feature a standard pitch. They don’t believe in freebies – for anybody. The older agencies – the establishment, which is running scared – will do anything for new business and they’ll go to any lengths, like preparing a whole campaign on spec. Like the TWA thing, which is the great example. One thing good that did come out of the TWA pitch was a growing reluctance on the part of all agencies to do free work.
There is still a third way to get an account, but it is really going out of style fast. What happens is that the chairman of the board of an old-fashioned big agency learns that an account is loose and remembers that he went to school with Bunny or Snoopie or whatever, who now is chairman of the board of the account. The advertising chairman of the board calls his friend at Chase Manhattan and the banker quietly sets up a discreet lunch for the two chairmen of the board. They have a terrific lunch, which is featured by the lack of talk about advertising. Maybe they’ll talk about their mutual friend Stinky who was a big man because he stole the town bell one night after the senior hop. You’ve got to understand that the two chairmen of the board really can’t discuss advertising, because they don’t know a thing about it. After the lunch, if the account chairman is feeling good, he’ll give the account to the agency chairman on the spot because he trusts him and ‘he’s our kind of person.’ However, with so much more money at stake these days, this kind of pitch is going out of style. Only once did I ever run into a guy I knew when I was a kid in Brooklyn. We were pitching a radio station and this kid who used to hang around the same street corner as I did turned out to be the account executive of the radio station. It was the first time I ever had a common background with a potential account. We sat around talking about old times, you know, things like ‘Hey, whatever happened to Baldy?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What happened to Louie Nuts?’ ‘Well Louie Nuts is doing three to five in Dannemora.’ ‘And how about Whacky?’ ‘Whacky?’ ‘Yeah, you remember, Whacky was the guy with the funny pointy head.’ ‘Oh, yeah, Whacky.’ It turns out that out of the first twenty years of his life, Whacky spent ten in various prisons. I’m not very good on pitches that depend on schoolboy chums.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
PROFILES
IN
WARM
AND
HUMANE
COURAGE
‘Presentations are like an opening night on Broadway. It’s very big, it’s the make-or-break moment for an agency, and there is a lot of very tough pressure on everyone. You’ve got thirty-six minutes and your audience is sitting there, and like who knows what’s going to happen? Sometimes you barely get the presentation off the ground before disaster strikes …’
Good agencies refuse to work up a free presentation. The agency which is forced to work up a presentation is an agency that is in trouble. It’s an agency that is desperate, insecure about showing the work they’ve already done. There was a soap commercial on the air and it featured a little girl running up to her mother with a slip which had just been washed in the soap, and the little girl says, ‘Mommy, smell my slip.’ Now if you’re the agency that turned out that little job you really don’t want to go showing it to prospective clients, do you? All right, so a possible client comes to you and says, ‘We don’t like what our present agency is doing for us creatively, what can you do?’ Well, you’re faced with the prospect of either showing the little girl smelling her slip or turning out something on spec. What is happening today in all of advertising is accounts are coming in to talk creative. The main source of dissatisfaction that accounts have is in the creative area.
When an agency has no smarts in an area like the creative area, they have to go to a pitch. So they come up with a campaign. They work as though they had the account. They go out and take pictures, they work up marketing plans, spend fortunes on shooting rough commercials. They spend thousands of dollars. They get photographers to work for them for reduced rates. They say, O. K., do this for half price now and you can sock one of my clients later when we come to you.’ The current clients of the agency end up paying for presentations. If there is a scandal in the business, it’s the money that clients are paying for work that they never see. A typical example: A large agency has a presentation to do. They write off a lot of it. They take the bills they get for the presentation and spread them throughout the other accounts in the agency. Let’s say they get a $400 stat bill for the presentation. They’ll dump that $400 on the twenty accounts that they have in the agency. So it’s $20 an account, and what does the account know?
When they tell their art director to do something as cheaply as possible, the only thing the art director can say to the photographer is to do it for half price now with the promise that he can sock it on the next bill. Type bills: same thing happens. Sure, they get somebody to cut the type bill, but that type bill shows up later on in some other poor guy’s bill. Instead of paying $25 for something, he winds up paying $29. He doesn’t question it – what does the client know about the cost of setting type? – it’s only a $4,00 difference. The type people aren’t going to absorb the loss. Somebody has to pay for it, so the existing clients foot the bill. When an agency does a full-scale presentation, somebody has to pay for it – that’s obvious. What isn’t so obvious is that the current clients have to do the paying. How do you think a prospective client would feel if, during a pitch, he was told that this pitch came to him through the courtesy of the other clients at the agency? He’d think the way I would – swell, but what happens if I give you my business? Do I have to pay for pitches you’re going to make in the future? Think of the time spent on pitches. The account executive, the art director, copywriters, media people, research people, all of these guys working on a new pitch. If they’re spending their time thinking about new business, they’re not thinking about their regular accounts. This is very unfair. It’s unfair of an advertiser to ask for a campaign and it’s very unfair of an agency to accept the offer to make a pitch with a full campaign.
I would say that most of the smaller and newer agencies won’t touch a pitch if a campaign is asked for. The reason for this is partly pride and partly common sense. Smaller agencies work like hell – they’ve got fewer people per account than larger agencies do and they really don’t have the time to start pulling people off regular accounts to prepare a campaign. We do what a lot of agencies do: a regular, standard, straight-up pitch. It runs exactly thirty-six minutes – no more, no less. We show what we’ve done in the past, we give a one-minute philosophy of our approach, we answer any questions the account might have, and that’s that. If we don’t get the account, we didn’t deserve to get it. They know as much about us in those thirty-six minutes as they e
ver will know. We’ve got our pitch broken down to seven minutes of commercials. Then you show your print ads, explain a bit about the background of each ad, and that’s that.
Presentations are like an opening night on Broadway. It’s very big, it’s the make-or-break moment for an agency, and there is a lot of very tough pressure on everyone. You’ve got thirty-six minutes and your audience is sitting there, and like who knows what’s going to happen? Sometimes you barely get the presentation off the ground before disaster strikes. Ron Travisano and I made a pitch not long ago to a very nice guy named Jerry O’Reilly, who handled the Evening in Paris perfume business. We walked into the offices and they were the slickest offices I’ve seen in a long time. We gave our names to a receptionist and this guy comes down this great long hall. This guy is Mr. O’Reilly’s assistant. He leads us to this great big room where we are to meet Mr. O’Reilly. I was carrying the regular ad case and Ron was carrying the projector, which is a big thing and must weigh sixty or seventy pounds. Mr. O’Reilly walks in and I extend my hand and say, ‘Mr. O’Reilly, I’m Jerry Della Femina.’ He shakes my hand and then Ron turns to him and says, ‘Hi, I’m Ron Travisano.’ What Ron didn’t remember as he turned to O’Reilly was that he was carrying that projector. When he turned, so did the projector, and the thing caught O’Reilly right on the kneecap. The sound of the projector hitting his kneecap was a sound I used to hear when I was a kid going to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. You would listen to the crack of the bat and you could tell from the sound when it was going to be a home run. Same sound from O’Reilly’s knee. I had my eyes shut when I heard that sound, and I could have sworn that his knee was going to end up in the left-field stands. O’Reilly went down to the floor immediately.
Ron turned to me right at the crack of the bat and said, ‘This is not going to be such a good presentation.’ And like I flipped when he said that. We both went into hysterics. Tears were coming out of my eyes. The guy, he went down and he had a little trouble talking for a few minutes. Ron and I went into such hysterics that we couldn’t move – we were useless for the rest of the presentation. O’Reilly was very nice about it, considering that he might have been crippled for life by the shot. I’m sorry to say we didn’t get the account – which is not surprising – and the guy was nice enough not to sue us for bodily damage with intent to kill.
Just after we went into business for ourselves we had a chance to pitch an account over in Jersey – some outfit that made hair tonic. They wanted to see what we had done in the past and we decided to ship all of our previous ads out to Jersey ahead of time. Ron lives in Jersey and he said he would take the portfolio out there the day before, since it was on his way home. Ron sometimes dresses a little too much. This particular day he was wearing a bright-green sport jacket plus an electric-blue shirt, and to top that off he had on one of those flowered ties. He’s got very swarthy skin and very weird hair and occasionally when you take a look at him he comes on a little strange. He gets out to Jersey with the portfolio and he tells the receptionist he’s the executive vice-president of the agency and they show him to the office of Mr. Jones, the guy we’re supposed to pitch. Jones comes to the door and Ron starts to say that he’s from the agency but Jones takes one look at Ron and figures him for a Mercury Messenger or something. ‘O. K., thanks, boy,’ Jones says, and leaves poor Ron standing there. It was obvious that if Ron had a piece of paper in his hand Jones would have signed it and sent him on his way. Like Ron was destroyed for three days after that. It was the first time he had ever been mistaken for a messenger.
Sometimes presentations turn into disasters because you find out halfway through that you really shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Years ago I worked for a short time at an agency called Ashe & Engelmore. One of the guys at the agency named Bob Hirshberg had met another guy at the bar of ‘21’ and after two minutes of talk Bob figured that the guy was hinting that we should go out and make a very big presentation for the Loew’s Hotel business in Puerto Rico. I don’t know to this day how Bob got that impression, but he came back to the agency and said, ‘This is it, we’ve got a real shot at this account.’
Well, we sat down and I get the bright idea that we’ve got to find out more about how travel agents react to the Americana Hotel. I got a little tape recorder with an attachment to the telephone and we started to call travel agents. I decided that I would tell them that I’m a guy going to Puerto Rico and could they recommend a hotel. If they don’t recommend the Americana, then I would say, ‘Hey, how about the Americana? Is that any good?’ Then we’d take the tape and use it at the presentation.
I got a tapeload of reactions. Little did I know that things like this can blow a whole presentation. I figured the tape would immediately strike them that they needed an agency like us, one that thought ahead and really was interested enough to know the problems that they might be facing. At the first meeting I knew something was wrong when the guy whom Bob had met in the bar said, ‘Bob, you didn’t have to do anything like this.’ Bob says, ‘Well, we thought we would show you what our ideas on the …’ And the guy said, ‘Look, I thought this would just be a meeting where we would talk a little bit.’ When you hear that phrase, duck. Also sitting in at the meeting was one of the Tisch brothers – I forgot which – but one of the owners of Loew’s Hotels.
They’re waiting for the presentation to start and I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’d like you to hear this tape.’ The tape goes on, you hear the telephone ringing, and my voice saying, ‘Is this the Magic Carpet Travel Service?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘My name is Jerry Dell and I’m looking for a place to stay when I go to Puerto Rico. I was wondering if you could tell me something about the place.’ And the travel agent’s voice comes on, ‘Well, there are a lot of nice places in Puerto Rico.’ One of the Loew’s guys says, ‘That’s Hymie Smith.’ They start whispering around the table, ‘Hey that’s Hymie, that’s Hymie.’
I said, ‘What place would you recommend?’ Hymie says, ‘Well, I would recommend …’ and he recommended something other than the Americana. My voice comes on again. ‘What about the Americana? I hear a lot about the Americana.’ Hymie says, ‘The Americana? It’s too close to the airport. It hasn’t got a swinging crowd. You’re a young guy, right?’
The next voice I hear is one of the Loew’s Hotel people who says, ‘That prick! Stop the tape!’ I stop the tape and the hotel guy tells a secretary to call in a guy named Sid, who evidently is in charge of travel-agent relations. Sid is a very fat guy and when he walks in he’s very cordial and gives everybody a big smile and makes a big thing of shaking all hands. ‘Sid,’ says the hotel guy, ‘when’s the last time you spoke to Hymie Smith over at Magic Carpet Travel?’ ‘Hymie? I took Hymie to lunch just the other day.’ ‘Would you say that Hymie is your friend?’ ‘Oh, Hymie is one of our good friends.’ ‘Play the tape.’ I replay the tape and Sid is perspiring a lot.
At this point I’m ready to go into the presentation. They couldn’t care less. At this point they’re so aggravated at Hymie over at Magic Carpet Travel that they don’t know I’m in the room. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘now I’d like to show you what we’re going to do to combat this indifference to your hotel.’ Nobody’s listening. The Loew’s guy is going on in this vein – ‘You spend money, you take these guys to places I don’t go to, and then they show you this? Those bastards have no loyalty.’ Guys are walking around muttering, ‘How could you spend money on those bastards?’
I try to butt in with ‘I’d like to tell you how we’re going to solve this marketing problem of yours …’ One hotel guy looked at me as if to say, ‘What, are you still here? You caused all the trouble, you bum, now go away.’ I said, ‘Here’s an ad we have featuring James Bond …’ One guy says, ‘Look. We got advertising, we got good advertising. We’re not interested in a new agency. We’re worried about the off season.’
Meanwhile we’re trying to back out the door without getting hit. Now it’s a case where you have to grab your equipment, and su
ddenly it feels like you have a lot more equipment than when you went in. You’re plugging things and unplugging things and the tape recorder is falling on the floor and ‘Bob, hold this,’ ‘I got it,’ and they’re still yelling at Sid. The whole thing was such a disaster that it probably was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in advertising because I learned one thing out of it: that was, never be afraid of a presentation. I mean, what could go worse? Worse is that they could physically attack you. That is the end. I’ve seen people who were uptight about presentations. A lot of people. Agency presidents who get very shook about presenting. And I always think back to that day with Loew’s as Bob and I were walking out. I was trying to hold my head in my hands and keep the tape recorder under one arm.
On the street it was murder. A hot, hot day in July, and it must have been like 98 degrees out. When we got downstairs the heat hit us. Now usually whenever an agency finishes a presentation, no matter how bad it is, they usually say, ‘Did you notice that guy over there on the end? He looked pretty impressed. The other two were yawning but …’ They always try to find something to get them through the day. Nobody doesn’t get an account. You always say, ‘Gee, we got a good chance.’ When Bob and I came down the elevator we were still looking back to see if they were chasing us. They were shoving us out the door saying things like ‘Here, take this. This is the top to that thing you’re carrying. You can snap it on later.’
So there we are, 98 degrees out, carrying all this equipment. I start to say something in the usual vein about the presentation and Bob looked at me and said, ‘Shhh. Don’t even talk about it.’ We’re lugging all of this equipment and of course no cabs. We had to walk back from Forty-third and Broadway to Madison Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. It was like the Bataan Death March. We were sweating, we were dying, the heat was killing us. I felt like people were hitting me with bayonets to get me going.
From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Page 20
