From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor

by Jerry Della Femina

  Guys get nervous before presentations, very uptight. Some guys throw up before presentations. There are some agency presidents who are basically shy, and when they present, they are being called on to do things that they never really wanted to do. In what other business does the president of the company go out and solicit the business? Salesmen get business. If your salesmen aren’t getting the business, then you call in the sales manager and straighten him out. If a guy wants to go and be handled by a law firm, the partners don’t show up and tell him what their law firm is going to do for him and what clients they’ve kept out of jail in the past. But in advertising you don’t get an account without the client getting to see the president of the agency.

  It’s just as tough on the other side. The client has to pick an agency, and let’s say that the field has been narrowed down to four finalists. Here he’s about to commit $3 million or $4 million to a bunch of guys and he has to evaluate them in an hour or so. And you know what? All four of them start to look alike after a while, and nowadays they say the same thing.

  Cliché number one is: We’re the most creative agency in New York City.

  They’ll even give you a tour of their creative department. Then the prospective client sees guys in their offices who have hair jumping out of their heads as if they had stuck their tongue in an electric socket. ‘That guy over there, we have to keep him strapped in. You know, he goes berserk from time to time. But wow, what an art director!’ They’ll point to a copywriter: ‘Very good. You’ll never have to deal with him. We don’t deal with him ourselves except when it’s feeding time.’ Bates was always very big at showing clients the creative department. Let’s face it, my section was crazy, guys yelling, secretaries screaming. It looked strange as hell. Delehanty, which has some genuine crazy people, downplays the talk about them. They talk about their advertising. It’s like an arms race, this creative stuff. Our nuts are nuttier than anyone else’s. We have more madmen per square inch than any other agency. Therefore we are creative. I think any client who falls for that is really pretty naïve, but some still do.

  Cliché number two is: We’ve got some of the great success stories in the business.

  Everybody has a success story. If you go by presentations, there has never been a product that failed in American history. Everybody succeeds. We took such and such, which had a losing share of the market, and now they’re number one. We took this thing here which was a new product and now it leads the field.

  After a while the agency guys all start to run together. They all are very sharp, very charming. The guys are going to be charming, they’re going to be witty, they’re going to be bright, they’re going to stare at the client, at the tip of the guy’s nose, and appear to be staring deeply into his eyes. They’re going to do all the things that they learned about over the years. They’re going to be so good at it that they all look alike.

  The only thing that the guy can really depend on is the work. If I were a client, I would not even want to see any agency people until I was just about to make my decision. Then, if they didn’t turn out to be gorillas, I would give them the business. I’ve worked at five different agencies and I’ve never seen anything said at a presentation that is any different from what we say now. We’re all in the same bag. We all say the same things.

  Oh, sure, some guys pose. They say, ‘I don’t know if I can take your account.’ Very funny. Deep down they’re saying, ‘If you give it to me, I’ll be sure to figure out a way to take it.’ But basically we’re all the same. We’re all bright, we’re all witty, we’re all smart, we all know the client’s problems, we all know how to solve them. It’s a very tough sell, but it’s a very tough buy, too. It’s very tough for a client to buy an agency. He’s always going to wonder if he made the wrong decision. He’s always going to wonder if maybe those other guys he let go out the door had a little more magic. He’s got to go on past record – that’s the only thing. And that’s where we live or die as an agency. That’s all we have. I don’t play golf. Ron plays golf but he gets very hostile on the golf course, so we can’t go looking for new business on the course. I’ve never had a client to dinner at my home. Neither has Ron. You don’t need us for any of the other things. Join a friendship club for that kind of stuff. We’ll take a client to dinner – to discuss business.

  Not long ago we made a pitch and we were competing with Doyle, Dane and Wells, Rich, and Jack Tinker. Three very strong agencies. I didn’t figure we would get the business but I thought it was nice to be in such company. Suddenly it’s reported in the papers that none of the four agencies got the account – it went to a very, very bad agency. One of those places where they strive for mediocrity and miss. Now this bad agency did not present – they were nowhere. They certainly couldn’t get the account on the basis of their past work. Somewhere along the line, somebody made a hit, somebody scored. I figure they got the account through their bank. This bad agency found out who the client’s bank was and worked a deal. It’s so sad, because this client really needed a good agency to bail them out of their problems. Doyle, Dane would have been terrific for them, or Wells, Rich, or even us, but the outfit they gave the account to will run them into the ground. The sales will continue to drop and they will wonder why they can’t move their product out.

  Sometimes agency presidents are pretty casual guys themselves – forget about the writers and art directors. Charlie Goldschmidt is that kind of president – not uptight at all. Charlie has a thing about fire engines, or maybe it’s fires. He would chase fire engines down the block. We might be having a presentation and Charlie would be sitting there quietly when, whammo, he’d hear a siren outside. He would jump up, run out the door, and you wouldn’t see him for an hour or so. Some days I would be sitting with him alone and if he heard an engine he’d open the window. If it looked like the fire was close enough, he’d go out and see it. He was a big man for fires. One day in the middle of a very important meeting, Danny Karsch and a few other people were discussing things with a prospective client when he heard fire engines. The door to the office slams open, Charlie comes busting through. He walked right through the offices not saying a word to anyone, opened the window to check how close the fire was, shut the window, walked out, and shut the door. Not one single word during all this. Everybody is looking at one another, and finally Danny said, ‘I think that people who like fires really don’t like people.’

  Packaged presentations are put together like Broadway shows. There are word cues and the whole thing. In our presentation, I might be talking and I’ll say, ‘And on the subject of marketing …’ and Tully Plesser of the Cambridge Marketing group, who occasionally does a research study for us, will say, ‘On the subject of marketing, I would say that we can offer you the following …’ At the end of the marketing piece Tully might say, ‘And of course marketing is only as good as media.’ Then we punch the media director who wakes up and says, ‘Life magazine, four-color, full page.’ Some agencies have this thing down to such a science that they don’t even need word cues; they look at one another.

  Not long ago we pitched to a very big food company in Dallas. There was a lot of money at stake and we were very nervous – when you’re talking about millions of dollars you can’t help but be nervous. We left New York on a Thursday for a Friday-morning pitch. We rent a car at the Dallas airport and drive into town and check into the hotel. We know we’re in a foreign country when a local takes a look at Ron, who happens to be dressed very quietly, and says, ‘Hey, boy, why don’t you get a haircut?’ Ron is very tense and says, ‘Up yours, Reb.’ We have dinner that night at the local top restaurant, where the big dish is fried steak with enchiladas on the side.

  The next morning, grits. Ron, who sweats a lot, is really doing a job. We pile into the rented car and start looking for the main office. The company we’re pitching to is enormous but we couldn’t find it. You stop the car at a corner and ask somebody where the main headquarters are and of course you can’t understand wha
t the guy says. He’s talking a different language. We felt like tourists in a foreign country. We started the car again and Ron says, ‘What did he say?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t understand him.’ We keep driving through this maze in the hope that we’ll find an American we can talk to. Finally we get to one guy who says something like the building we’re looking for is two blocks down, turn to the right.

  Sure enough, general headquarters. Last-minute nerves. ‘Don’t forget we’re billing fifteen million.’ ‘Fifteen? I thought it was eighteen.’ ‘How many people we got working for us now?’ ‘I don’t know, I haven’t counted lately.’ You’re trying to get all your facts straight.

  A guy from the company comes out and he’s very friendly and personable: ‘Hi, I’m Eddie Jones, come on in.’ Immediately four guys try to go through the door at the same time. It always happens, and the door is only built to hold maybe half of a guy. There is always a bumping of bodies on the way in to a presentation. I am very nervous, picking up and putting down the portfolio. It is like playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium when you know that it’s going to be O. K. if you ever get a ball hit in your direction. If somebody would ask you, ‘What are you guys billing?’ things would be all right. Nobody’s doing that. All they’re trying to be is friendly. They get you into a real Texas-sized conference room and you pray that there will be at least one guy there you will be able to understand. You start listening to the introductions and the hellos, and on a hello from one guy Ron leaned into my ear and said, ‘New York!’ Fantastic. One cat we could understand. He was from New York and it was a great feeling that we weren’t alone in this foreign country.

  We still have to pick the man who has got the clout in the room. There is always one guy in a room who is going to say yes or no. Finding this guy is a job all by itself. There can be real problems in searching out this guy. A guy I know once came into a meeting late. He sat down, looked at his papers, and when it was his time to go on he’s looking right down the line at each guy to find the one he’s going to zero in on. He spots one guy who looks like he’s important and very inquisitive and says to himself, ‘This is it.’ He stared him straight in the eye all the way through the pitch, never taking his eye off him. He threw out the rest of the people, so help me, and sold and sold and sold. He forgot the whole room. When it was over he was convinced that he had done a terrific job. Then they told him he had been pitching to a new guy who had just come to work at his agency – an assistant media director. Obviously the new guy was too terrified to say, ‘Hey, I’m on your team.’

  There may be six people in the room and there’s going to be discussion, but when it’s all over one guy’s going to say, ‘I think we should go this way.’ He might not even say that. He might say, ‘The president, I think, will agree that we should go this way.’ This is the guy you want to find.

  You start off ad libbing and you have no idea whom you’re talking to. They want to know where we ate the night before and when we tell them they say, ‘Great place, great steak.’ I keep thinking of the enchiladas. They’re uncomfortable because they know you’re nervous as hell. You start off by saying, ‘I want to thank you all for allowing us to come out here and make this presentation.’

  The top gunner, the big guy, is at this meeting. Which is not good. My feeling about top gunners is when they’re at a meeting their troops feel they’ve got to perform for the top gunner. I like to go with plateaus.

  The group we’re pitching to, they’re all big gunners. You could see it when the introductions started: ‘Vice-President in charge of international operations’; ‘Vice-President in charge of marketing’; ‘Director of marketing and advertising.’

  I start up again by thanking everyone. I give a little of my background and then we go around the table, and each of us gives background on himself. One of our account executives, Jim Travis, tells who he is. Ron tells them who he is – he’s still nervous but he gets through it fine. Now we’re back to what to do next. I still don’t think it’s time to show the work; neither does Ron, because the way we work Ron hands me the ads as I show them and he’s not moving for the pile. I’m not even looking at him because I don’t want to show, either. We started looking at each other around 8:30 a.m. and now it’s about ten after nine. It’s still not the right time and then one of the gunners asks me about a column I wrote in Marketing/ Communications. I talk about the column and everybody laughs – I was attacking the Federal Government and guys in the food business live in fear of the Food and Drug Administration.

  All of a sudden, now it’s O. K. to show the work. We’re very close to them and now the pitch becomes almost automatic. I start to look over at Ron but I don’t have to because he’s reaching to pick up the first sample of work. First I go into a disclaimer, telling them that some of the work they’re going to see was done at three different agencies.

  The first ad we show is the Peanuts ad for Talon Zippers. We do it because it gives the group a chance to laugh right off the bat. I tell them that I don’t know whether the ad ever sold a zipper or not, but it was a good ad psychologically for all the clothing manufacturers who were looking at the ad to know about Talon. So you’ve opened the meeting and the feeling is warm and friendly; now you’ve got to hit them with something hard, so we show the Pretty Feet ad – the one that says, ‘What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?’ A very good reaction on this one. They look impressed so I detour into drug advertising. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a long discussion about Pretty Feet.

  Plesser is there watching and waiting. The very second this guy asks me a question and I answer it, I know I haven’t answered it right down the line. One second later the next voice I hear is Plesser’s saying, ‘And another side of it is …’ Plesser adds a little more weight; he makes my answer palatable.

  Corum Watches comes on next and before you know it the lights are out and the commercial reel is on. We open with the commercial for Ozone, a men’s hairspray, which we did at Bates using Yogi Berra. Whenever that commercial is shown at a presentation, somebody’s voice comes out of the dark saying, ‘Look at the face on this guy.’ The next commercial is one our own agency did for The New York Knickerbocker, a newspaper that began after the World-Journal Tribune folded. It folded pretty quickly itself. As it starts to play I always say, ‘That commercial cost six thousand dollars to produce. These days you can’t even get a baby picture of your kid for six thousand.’ They all pick up. Now they’re looking to see what we got for our six grand – which is something they toss away every hour. A Royal Globe Insurance commercial is next. In the final scene of this one a driver out of control is coming straight out of the screen at the viewer in a very dramatic night shot. Ron quietly gets up during this commercial and walks over to the projector. He looks as though he’s fiddling with the focus, but what he really is doing is turning the sound of the commercial up full blast. The sound of the commercial fills the room just as the car is about to crash. As the commercial finishes, Ron turns down the sound and sits down again. This works very well and the guy next to me says, ‘Wow!’

  We close the reel with a commercial we did for the National Hemophilia Foundation, which features a bleeder bleeding on camera. On come the lights and then I go into the agency philosophy. Because this is a company with problems with the Government, I tell them about Miss Cheng and Feminique. They’re nodding their heads, saying, ‘Yeah. Thank God somebody else is being persecuted.’ One old conservative guy at the meeting is saying, ‘You mean you can talk about a woman’s private parts and they won’t let us say what we want to say about food?’ He’s very angry and as far as he’s concerned he’s got to go out and lynch a couple of Mexicans to feel better.

  Then I talk about our billing – all of us had finally agreed on a figure which was reasonably accurate. Then I mention that we have had assignments from R.J.Reynolds and Quaker Oats. I repeat it three times because somebody might have thought it was the Quakertown Oats Company, which makes horse food. ‘Yes, Quaker Oats ca
lled us and said, “We’ve decided to give you an assignment.” Just to make sure, I throw in, ‘Lovely people over at Quaker Oats.’ If I could have, I would have asked them if they had their Quaker Oats for breakfast this morning. What I’m doing with Quaker Oats is establishing that although that company is bigger than our prospective client, they think we’re respectable.

  I talk about the American Broadcasting Company next. They all love the word ‘American’ in Dallas and they seem to have heard of ABC. Great second name to mention. From ABC I move to Cinzano Vermouth. I look over at the older guy. He looks as if he’s thinking that we’re in bed with all the Italians. ‘That client also has Moët Champagne,’ I add. He doesn’t like the French either, right? So we go into Blue Nun wine – I almost get a smile out of him with Blue Nun wine. We’ve also done some special projects for a large account that they’ve heard of. All of a sudden little looks around the table. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘they’re very happy with their agency but it’s practically the same situation where you called me and said you’re not unhappy with your agency, either.’ I talk about Corum Watches. Who knows from Corum Watches? ‘Part of the Piaget Company.’ Nobody stirs. ‘Part of the North American Watch Company.’ The old guy hears American and starts to nod.

  Suddenly one guy asks, ‘What do you think of Ted Bates?’ I don’t think much of Ted Bates in or out of a presentation so I start blasting Bates. They keep talking. The big question they bring up is, ‘What happens if Della Femina gets run over by a truck?’ They’re worried about the fact that we appear to be a one-man operation. We have to convince them that they’re wrong. We end up by leaving them with the impression that I was already dead at this meeting and stuffed just to make the presentation look nice.

  We tell them that we’ve just moved into a new set of offices. We finish our pitch and that’s that. We made plans for them to visit us in New York, which they want to do. Dates are set up, which is good. The only thing different we’ll do is to take our art director, Bob Giraldi, and go get him a haircut and maybe dress him like an American. Otherwise nothing will change.