Up the Agency

by Peter Mayle

  UP THE AGENCY

  Peter Mayle

  ALSO BY PETER MAYLE

  The Vintage Caper

  Provence A-Z

  A Good Year

  French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew

  A Year in Provence

  Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France

  Chasing Cezanne

  Anything Considered

  A Dog’s Life

  Hotel Pastis

  Acquired Tastes (also titled Expensive Habits)

  Toujours Provence

  A Year in Provence

  Where Did I Come From?

  Wicked Willie’s Guide to Women: Further Adventures of Man’s Best Friend

  How to be a Pregnant Father

  Man’s Best Friend

  The Honeymoon Book

  Baby Taming

  Chilly Billy

  What’s Happening to Me?

  Great Moments in Baby History

  Will I Go to Heaven?

  Published by

  Escargot Books

  North Yorkshire, England LS21 2JJ

  First digital and audio editions 2012

  Copyright © 1990 Peter Mayle. All rights reserved.

  Peter Mayle asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN 978-1-908191-50-2 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-908191-51-9 (Kindle)

  ISBN 978-1-908191-52-6 (CD audio)

  ISBN 978-1-908191-53-3 (Audio download)

  Author Photograph © Betina La Plante 2012

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  To the ladies and gentlemen of

  the BBDO London creative

  department, 1971-1974

  Thanks for the memories.

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Perfect Advertising Man and His Private Language

  Starting an Agency

  Stocking the Zoo, and the Joys of Management

  On the Menu: Poached Client

  Great Moments in the Working Day

  Pigs with Checkbooks

  Growing Pains

  Invasion of the Men in Suits

  America the Bountiful

  Tribal Customs

  The Ultimate Trip

  The Dance of the Leviathans

  About the Author

  Foreword

  I was lucky. My first job in advertising was in New York, with David Ogilvy’s agency. At that time, in the sixties, Ogilvy was one of a small group of people who were changing the face of the business, making it more amusing and more intelligent. “The consumer is not a moron,” he was fond of saying, “she is your wife.” And so we copywriters were encouraged—nay, instructed—to treat our audiences like adults. Charm, wit, and words of persuasion were preferred to the traditional style of 1960s advertising, in which agencies competed to see who could bellow the loudest. The head of one of these old-style agencies likened his creative philosophy to training a donkey: first, you hit the poor beast on the head several times with a hammer. That gets his attention. Then you can start talking to him. The advertising produced by his agency—crude, strident and mind-numbingly repetitive—was the perfect reflection of that philosophy, (Alas, it still survives, as an evening in front of the TV will demonstrate.)

  After a couple of years with Ogilvy, I was persuaded to move to another agency, Papert Koenig Lois, described by one competitor as “three young men walking around without the benefit of punctuation.” There were two good reasons for this decision. More money, certainly, but what attracted me most was the chance to improve my advertising education. Ogilvy was very much a writer’s agency, Anglophile and gentlemanly. PKL was pure New York, brash, tough and noisy, and it was more of an art director’s agency, thanks largely to the influence of George Lois—a brilliant, rowdy Greek with a reputation for great work, punching executives who disagreed with him, and the loudest mouth in the business. He sounded like fun. And so I went to work for George.

  Fun it certainly was, but I also learned a lot. At that time, George was producing a series of covers for Esquire magazine—Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup, Muhammad Ali bristling with arrows, and many more. The images were fresh, powerful, ingenious, and sometimes shocking, and they made me think that maybe a picture really was worth a thousand words. I will always be grateful to George for opening my eyes to the delights of good graphic design.

  So far, my time in advertising had been mercifully free of office politics, but this was about to change. I was sent to work in PKL’s London office, and found myself in the middle of a struggling company seething with repressed animosity. The Americans thought the Brits snotty and difficult. The Brits thought the Americans cocky and (even worse) overpaid. The writers and art directors were locked into a long-running squabble with the executives. The American who was running the agency neither liked nor understood the English, and was inclined to favoritism. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t, ending in dramatic fashion with a fight at the office Christmas party between, inevitably, an American and an Englishman. Words were exchanged and tempers flared. The American attacked the Englishman, who put out his hand to defend himself. Unfortunately, the hand was holding a glass of champagne, which broke off in the American’s neck, a whisker away from the carotid artery. Blood was everywhere. The American was rushed to hospital and the rest of us were put to work mopping up. We had a new business presentation the following morning, and it was felt that a prospective client might be put off if he had to wade through puddles of gore.

  That was probably the most spectacular incident I witnessed during my time in advertising, but I was working with young, talented and slightly crazy people, and there was usually something bizarre going on. There was the evening when a naked streaker did a circuit of the creative department in order, so she said later, “to give the boys some inspiration.” Or the morning I found a very small copywriter sitting on my secretary’s lap, his head and shoulders hidden inside her sweater in an attempt to avoid detection. There was never a dull moment, and I rarely stopped laughing. I forget now who it was who said that working in advertising was “the most fun you could have with your clothes on,” but how right he was.

  I’m told by friends who are still in advertising that the business has changed. There is more research, more pressure from the dead hand of client committees, less risk and less laughter. As I said earlier, I was lucky.

  The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,

  The homely hen lays one.

  The codfish never cackles

  To tell you what she’s done.

  And so we scorn the codfish,

  While the humble hen we prize,

  Which only goes to show you

  That it pays to advertise.

  —Anonymous

  I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.

  —Lord Leverhulme

  CLIENT: What time is it?

  AGENCY: What time would you like it to be?

  —attributed to many agencies,

  and denied by all

  The Perfect Advertising Man and His Private Language

  Advertising has been variously described as an art, a profession, a sinister instrument of mass persuasion, and a ludicrous waste of money. It hovers on the fringes of big business and show business, of sports and politics, of sleaze and respectability all at once. It is impossible to ignore, an
d yet most people deny that they are influenced by it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. In either case, conclusive proof is hard to come by because of all the other elements involved in persuading millions of people to make a particular choice. It is this—the delightfully imprecise nature of advertising—that makes it such a happy hunting ground for the articulate young person who is convinced he or she has a great idea. Maybe it is indeed a great idea, or maybe it is a piece of twaddle artfully presented, but who’s to know? There are no foolproof methods of judging, no truly reliable methods of prediction, no guarantees of success. It’s a funny business.

  And it attracts some funny people. Most advertising agencies recruit staff on the basis of suspected merit rather than formal qualifications or impressive social backgrounds, and it is a selection process that throws up a rich and varied cast of characters: university graduates, school dropouts, ex-actors, aspiring politicians, assorted corporate misfits, would-be novelists, lay psychologists. There is room for them all, and small fortunes for the lucky ones.

  There cannot be many other occupations outside organized crime or entertainment in which money can be made so quickly and at such a young age. Salaries are high and can be doubled within months as a result of a single campaign that is noticed and admired within the business. Agencies have been started from scratch and gone public in the space of five years, making their principals paper millionaires while still in their thirties. And those years spent getting there—the day-to-day working conditions—are by no means brutally arduous or uncomfortable. Offices are well designed and often palatial. Company cars are exotic. Travel is frequent. Eating and drinking in good restaurants is an integral part of the executive’s job. Compared to the grind of normal employment, advertising is a most amusing way to spend the working day. Up to a point.

  A certain disenchantment sets in, for more people than would publicly admit to it, when the novelty of achievement wears off and they find themselves jumping through the same hoops once too often. In spite of the superficial differences between selling an airline and selling soap, the first requirement of advertising, which is to get somebody to pay for your ideas, doesn’t change. The demands imposed on imagination and enthusiasm don’t get any less daunting over the years, and meeting those demands becomes increasingly difficult as that first act of persuasion—obtaining approval to spend the money—assumes the familiarity of routine. How many times can you try to convince those skeptical faces across the table that they should buy your campaign? There they sit, responding to what is laid before them with the vivacity of a group of undertaker’s mutes while your patience wears thin and you wonder if anything short of dropping your trousers would elicit a reaction. It isn’t exciting anymore. It’s work.

  To some fortunate souls, blessed with the zeal of the true evangelist, this kind of situation is a challenge, even though it has happened hundreds of times before. To others, it finally reaches a stage of such intense tedium that they consider leaving advertising altogether. But for what? Where else would they find the salaries and creature comforts that would be such a wrench to give up? Who will pay for the Mercedes and the lunches? And in any case, what else are they qualified to do? With a handful of exceptions, they stay in the business and console themselves with their standard of living, sometimes cynical, sometimes philosophical, sometimes discontented, but always prosperous.

  The exceptions are those who have realized that advertising can be a very useful first career. It provides ample opportunity for an intimate study of other people’s businesses (whether the clients are bankers or brewers or manufacturers of squeaky toys, they all like their agencies to become “deeply involved”). It provides training in market analysis and the lucid presentation of ideas and recommendations. It offers an interesting course in human nature and the motivations of individuals and large groups alike. It is well paid, and youth is not considered a disadvantage. After ten or fifteen lucrative years, a well-judged leap can take you, still relatively young, into another business where you can start very close to the top.

  It happens in politics (at least two current Members of Parliament came from advertising), in the arts (the previous manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York came from advertising), and in the large financial institutions (Charles Saatchi used to be an advertising writer). The fact that it doesn’t happen more frequently is not for lack of opportunity or incentive but because, despite all the grumbling about difficult clients and the high levels of stress and indigestion, advertising is still more diverting than most other legitimate enterprises.

  This is largely due to the nature of the advertising beast. There are, God knows, some semi-competent dullards in the business who should have taken up their natural places in the undemanding obscurity of the civil service, but they are comparatively few, because advertising attracts stimulating personalities, not necessarily pleasant or reasonable or trustworthy, but certainly not dull.

  If, by some frightful process of genetic packaging, we were able to create the perfect advertising man, what would we find?

  Here he is, a shameless extrovert, on a first-name basis with the world. His conversational style is somewhere between the instant familiarity of a TV talk-show host and the soothing bedside manner of a family doctor. He is able to get his foot in the door even over the telephone, never believing no for an answer, temperamentally immune from rebuff, eternally self-confident, rock-solid in his conviction that all manner of good things will come to pass if he can just have half an hour of your time over a drink at the end of the day.

  He is an immediate enthusiast, capable of developing a passionate interest in the most unlikely subjects as long as they are connected to the product or service that he is working on. A visit to the factory to see how disposable diapers are made? Terrific! A two-day sales conference in Newark? Wonderful! An afternoon with the man who invented perforated tea bags? Fascinating! Deep involvement, the deeper the better, is the breath of life to him.

  But should the unthinkable happen and the disposable diaper account go somewhere else, will he brood and despair? Not for long, because he is a man of quite extraordinary resilience. Within days, he will have bounced back. Disposable diapers will have been forgotten in the excitement of a new interest that has plunged him into the absorbing minutiae of double-glazed windows or deodorant socks.

  He is not, however, just a receptacle. Once the information has been gathered, it is weighed and processed and arranged so that it provides support for the idea that our man is going to sell to his client. It is here that he will reveal his greatest strength, because he is a superb salesman, leading his audience carefully through a series of reasoned arguments to arrive at an inescapable conclusion. Finally, the idea reflecting this conclusion is unveiled. The campaign is pinned to the wall or shown on the screen while, like a proud father cooing over his firstborn, our man points out the infinite charms on display.

  There is one last addition to this impressive list of qualities, and it is perseverance. In the long run, this is as important as business acumen or creative ability, and it explains why you will occasionally find agencies that are run by people of outstanding mediocrity. They may not have much in the way of talent, but they have a tenacity of purpose often lacking in their brighter and more flighty colleagues. They stick it out and reach the top, proving that even in advertising there are rewards for solid and unspectacular virtues.

  Like most other businesses, advertising has its own collection of labels and euphemisms and pomposities, and as these will appear from time to time in later chapters, it is necessary to explain them.

  Most of them spring from a deep-seated desire for commercial respectability, a need to get as far away as possible from the snake-oil salesman and the “Stop me and buy one” era and into the hallowed and profitable ground of professional consultancy. Very large amounts of money are involved here, and all manner of expensive devices and imposing titles have been developed in order to give the simple process of selling
a veneer of mystique. No company chairman in his right mind would unquestioningly hand over millions of dollars to a young individual with a bright idea, so the transaction has to be embellished by ritual. In most cases, this is perfectly harmless and makes both parties to the arrangement feel more businesslike. In other cases, it is just deceptive mumbo jumbo, designed to give a raddled sow’s ear the appearance of a silk purse. What is confusing to the newcomer, however, is that all agencies, good and bad, are fluent in the kind of terminology that sounds convincingly like value for money.

  Here, then, is a discussion of the terms most often used in advertising, starting with the frequently reviled but assiduously courted figure who is central to the whole business.

  The Client

  Tradesmen have customers, but professional people, from merchant bankers to hairdressers, have clients. In advertising, the client can mean one individual or it can be used in the collective sense to embrace the small herd that will from time to time visit the agency for particularly important meetings. (See Presentations and Pitches.) Clients are usually less well paid than their agency counterparts, work in less glamorous surroundings, and do not habitually eat in expensive restaurants. This may explain their fondness for the eleven o’clock meeting: a stretched hour and a half of marketing strategy, followed by the startled realization that it’s time for lunch, followed inevitably by an invitation from the agency to continue the discussion around the corner at Luigi’s.

  Commission

  The ancestors of today’s advertising agents were men who sold space in newspapers. For no extra charge, they would fill the space with a message speaking well of their clients’ goods or services. They could afford to do this because they received a sales commission from the newspaper.

  In a sense, they still do—not only from the newspapers but from the television and radio stations, the magazine publishers, and the owners of poster sites. There is one price for an advertising agency and a higher one for the individual who buys direct, and the difference is approximately 15 percent. An agency placing a million dollars’ worth of advertising should, under these circumstances, receive an income of $150,000.