Up the Agency

by Peter Mayle

  But those days of high drama are still ahead. For the moment, the new agency’s founders are busy presenting a united and enthusiastic front to anyone who will listen to them.

  Traditionally, agencies are started by individuals who can bring different but complementary skills to the partnership. The old favorite—three young people walking around in alphabetical order—consists of an account executive, a copywriter, and an art director. These three, if they are sufficiently well known in the industry, will enjoy a period of limelight and novelty, maybe lasting for months, when they will give interviews to the business press and presentations to prospective clients. A “prospective client,” in this atmosphere of overcranked optimism, is someone from a client organization who can be persuaded to accept lunch from you; a “hot prospect” is someone who can be persuaded to visit the agency without the benefit of lunch.

  The gist of the interviews and presentations is the same: the reason, other than ego and money, why yet another agency should be added to the 640 agencies that already exist. The difficulty here is that there is only one valid commercial reason for a client to change agencies, and that is to get more effective advertising. It won’t be significantly cheaper or produced any more quickly. The meetings won’t necessarily be any more stimulating. The working lunches will be just as earnest. All the client can hope for at the end of the day is that the work produced by the eager trio will be better than his existing advertising; and that, as any realist will admit, is not a result that can be guaranteed. So it comes down to a question of confidence. If the prospective client can be made to feel that there is a justifiable chance of getting better value for his advertising money, he might take it.

  The bait offered by new agencies to inspire confidence will vary in the way it is stuck on the hook, but it will usually be a combination of three elements, with the emphasis changing according to the personalities and abilities involved.

  First, credentials have to be established. As the agency is new, it won’t have a track record of successful case histories with which to dazzle the audience. So, necessity being the mother of appropriation, it borrows them. The founders pool their past efforts, taking care to forget the flops, and wheel out an array of household names and famous campaigns on which they have worked. The connections in some cases are best described as tenuous. It is not unknown for two or three copywriters with conveniently faulty memories to give the modest but definite impression that each of them was responsible for the same campaign. Since any long-running campaign will have received contributions from a number of writers, this kind of creative slipstreaming is almost impossible to disprove. So it is with executives who have been “associated” with a successful brand. The implication is that they steered it to success; the reality is often different but, unfortunately, less impressive.

  Thus in one way or another, with or without scruples, the new agency is able to equip itself from the start with a convincing and familiar body of work.

  The second element in the presentation is where bullshit meets science. Advertising people are trained to ferret out minor differences among competing but similar products and to promote what they feel will be the difference that makes the sale. With commendable faith, they will often apply this technique to themselves, imposing severe strains on credibility and syntax alike. Their intention is to distill their own methods of working into an easily digested formula—their very own agency philosophy—and give it a label that separates it from all the other formulas being bandied around by their competitors. A great deal of time and ingenuity is devoted in these early and desperate days to getting it right. Or if not right, at least different.

  One of the most energetically trumpeted agency philosophies was devised many years ago by Ted Bates, the American agency. It was based on the premise that every product could be given a “unique selling proposition” (but only by Ted Bates, who had the secret). This phrase has now passed into general advertising language, possibly because it is two-thirds perfect: Unique and selling are words that can, and indeed did, evoke an almost Pavlovian response among clients. And there have been other magical recipes, equally sharply defined, if not so seductively worded: the prime prospect, the four-point process, the reduction of risk through research, the preemptive factor, the dormant benefit—dozens of them, all attempting to reduce the complex and uncertain process of persuasion down to a simple certainty. Alas, for agencies and clients, certainties don’t exist. As long as there is room for free and intelligent choice in society, they never will exist, and no amount of behind-the-scenes waffle can do more than provide a rational introduction to what may look like an irrational idea. Agency philosophies are, at best, common sense dressed up as the Holy Grail and, at worst, specious and cynical bunk.

  The final element in a new agency’s presentation can be, for a limited time, very attractive. It goes something like this:

  Here we are, experienced, talented, and hungry. We have left our comfortable jobs with big agencies because we had to spend more time administering and delegating than preparing advertisements. We have seen what happens in big agencies when the honeymoon period is over, when clients used to dealing with the managing director are palmed off with beardless boys, when the best brains of the agency are busy on someone else’s account. But if you give your business to us, we personally will devote our enormous energies and skills to it. We, the proprietors, will cherish your business as though it was our own (which, of course, it is). You will always be able to pick up the phone and talk to the boss.

  This is all very well and even true, up to a point. But the question sitting up and begging at the end of the conference table is what will happen to the delightful intimacy of the proposed arrangement if the new agency should get another account, or another dozen accounts. The question is rarely pursued, because any remotely perceptive client knows the answer. He will just have to hope that the founders of the agency are confident enough of their own talents to hire equally talented people as their business grows. In the meantime, the client will benefit from the fact that new agencies need to make their mark with their first accounts, and he’s likely to get the best that they can give in the way of service and creativity.

  If their best is good enough, it won’t be long before the agency starts to make its presence felt. The advertising community spends a lot of time in bars and restaurants gossiping about itself. One good opening campaign and some adroit self-promotion can have an effect out of all proportion to the agency’s size and accomplishments. It becomes hot.

  Stocking the Zoo, and the Joys of Management

  One of the more solemn clichés in advertising is that the real assets of an agency are the people who work in it. And it’s true: The ability to attract and keep talented staff is generally considered to be almost as important as bringing in new clients. In many ways, however, it is more difficult. Clients tend to be rational. They are used to working within certain corporate disciplines. They look for steady progress in their careers, and they are prepared to exercise patience as they climb toward the giddy eminence of a seat on the board. You can reason with clients—most of them, anyway.

  Advertising people, in contrast, tend to be impatient, often irrational, usually impulsive, and almost always egotistical. These qualities, while useful and necessary in dictators, produce troublesome employees, and for the management of an advertising agency, maintaining some kind of productive harmony among the rank and file is like getting the Italian army to march in step. Not only do they have to contend with the outbreaks of greed, ambition, and office feuds that occur in any business but there is also a fundamentally disruptive element peculiar to advertising that is guaranteed, sooner or later, to cause grief and conflict. It is the creative department.

  Creative people are not temperamentally suited to the orderly routine of office life. They find conventional working hours inconvenient. Meetings bore them. Clients exasperate them. Deadlines are beneath their consideration. They will spend weeks apparently
doing nothing about a crucial job despite entreaties and threats and then, just before the ax comes down on their necks, they will work all weekend and expect applause and sympathy on Monday morning. They are intransigent and highly opinionated, and yet often curiously inarticulate when it comes to justifying those opinions. They take criticism badly and sulk easily. They are constantly demanding more money than there is in the budget, bigger spaces and longer time periods than there are in the media plan, and extensions to the deadlines they accepted or ignored weeks ago. Because of their occasional triumphs and because, in the end, nobody else in the agency can do what they do, they get away with behavior that should have gotten them thrown out on the street.

  All this, of course, is about as popular as halitosis with their colleagues, particularly account executives, who have egos of their own and who see themselves as being equally necessary to the agency’s daily business. Account executives want to keep their clients happy. Creative people want to do work that will make them famous. In theory, these two aims are not mutually exclusive, but in practice very few campaigns are ever produced without friction and disagreement, and occasionally the odd drops of blood are visible on the office carpet.

  It’s entirely predictable. The creative people have spent their customary weeks walking around the problem, sharpening their pencils, playing darts, and generally getting themselves prepared for a visit from their muse. The account executives watch the days go by and fend off increasingly insistent demands from the client, who is anxious to see what next year’s millions are going to be spent on. Finally, the campaign is presented within the agency and someone has the temerity to suggest that changes are necessary (as they usually are).

  Stunned disbelief from the writer and art director ensues. They retire hurt to a convenient restaurant, tossing their curls and muttering darkly about stupidity and compromise. The account executives commiserate with one another about having to deal with overpaid children. When work resumes, as it must, because by now the client is sputtering with impatience, there is a distinct absence of friendly and respectful collaboration. It is advertising’s version of the eternal conflict between art and commerce, and the only people in the agency who can observe it with the detached amusement it deserves are the mail-room boy and the cleaning lady.

  Everyone else is affected. From the secretary who is on the receiving end of a copywriter’s sulk to the financial director who queries a bundle of wine-stained and incomprehensible expenses from an art director, nobody is completely immune from the mysterious ways in which creative people move and the interminable sparring that goes on between them and the rest of the world. But that’s the nature of the business, and the compensations for putting up with a little strife each day are considerable.

  There are four, or in exceptional circumstances five, varieties of inducement used by agency managements to hang on to their employees. Although they are set out here as a series of steps up a single ladder, it is very unlikely that one individual will stay long enough to complete the course with one agency, because changing agencies is a quicker way to make the quantum leap from getting a salary to getting a slice of the action. But, if you should stay put, your brilliant career in advertising will proceed as follows.

  Money

  To start with, there will only be money. It will probably be more than you could earn in most other businesses (apart from the freak money being picked up by adolescent bond traders on Wall Street), but that’s all it will be—a paycheck, subject to tax and, even worse, with no visible status attached to it. However, if you have any kind of aptitude and a reasonably intelligent and perceptive boss, it won’t be long before the thought of losing you to another agency will provoke the generous reflex that moves you up a step.

  More Money, and a Company Car

  It won’t, at this stage, be one of the black Porsches so dear to the hearts of middle-aged advertising executives (which is why they’re known as MenoPorsches), or even the beginner’s BMW that sits, with dozens like it, in city garages. But it’s a start, and if you shop around, you might be able to swing something a little out of the ordinary, such as a Harley-Davidson or a VW convertible. The great thing is to get a car that couldn’t possibly belong to a Procter & Gamble sales rep.

  A Title

  Your next step takes you out of the purely material rewards and into the officially anointed hierarchy. There are almost as many artfully contrived titles in advertising as there are in the Debrett’s—meaningless to the outside world, perhaps, but of enormous significance to the recipient. (Where else but in advertising would you find a man desperate enough to have International Deputy Vice Chairman printed on his business cards?) Your title will depend on your field of expertise, but it will usually include one or more of the following: supervisor, group head, Executive (with a capital E), senior personal (as in personal assistant), joint or co- (as in cocreative director), and so on. Nuance is all-important, and those who invent and bestow titles have to be very careful that by pleasing you they don’t deliver a terminal blow to the self-esteem of some of your colleagues. Anyway, that’s their problem. You have your title and, naturally, more money and a better car.

  A Share in the Equity

  Now we come to the main move. This could set you up for life—or, if not life, at least for the next five years—and it causes untold agonizing in agency boardrooms. If you have become invaluable—by consistently producing good campaigns, let’s say, or by ingratiating yourself so thoroughly with a big client that he will follow you wherever you may wander—the top management of your agency will be obliged to nail you to the desk. This is a disagreeable situation for them, because it means that they will have to dig not only into their wallets but into their closely guarded hoard of shares in the agency, and there will always be one or two shareholders who will dispute the need to reduce their personal holdings in order to humor a young kid like you. Hence the agonizing. But what else can be done? They’ve tried keeping you quiet with a Ferrari, with a higher salary, fatter expenses, and the most important title they can think of, but they have nightmares that you and a significant slice of business will go and do something silly like start another agency. There’s nothing for it but to give you a share of the equity and a nice restrictive contract. This is done with varying degrees of good grace and everyone gets back to work.

  Your Name on the Door

  That is as far as it goes for the majority of people who make successful careers in advertising, and it’s enough, if the agency prospers and goes public, to make them millionaires. But what is mere money to someone who has been trying to keep the lid on a rabid ego all these years? There is a high incidence of egomaniacs in advertising, and they will not be satisfied until they have achieved the fifth and ultimate level of success; they have to be seen to own part of the agency. They want their name everywhere: on the door, on the letterhead, on the envelopes, on the compliments slips and the receptionist’s lips, and—the big thrill—on the stock-market listing. If they are sufficiently determined and sufficiently important to the future prosperity of their partners, they will get their way, requiring another heavy bill for reprinted stationery, another eulogy disguised as a press release, another placated ego.

  And yet, looked at when the first warm glow of self-satisfaction has faded, there is still something… not quite right. The name will be visible, certainly, but it will be the last horse in the race. The agency name may have become Still Price Twivy Court D’Souza and Jenkins, but we all know what happens to those names that dangle at the end of a long list. They drop off. In practical terms of everyday usage, they might as well not be there. If one looks at it cynically (and cynicism does, from time to time, creep into these matters), adding to the agency’s name to keep a valued colleague from arranging a mutiny costs little and means less.

  Ability is quickly rewarded in advertising, and the whole process that has just been described can be completed within ten years. If you make a couple of well-considered jumps from o
ne agency to another, it might not even take that long, and therein lies the second ever-present problem for management, just as tiresome and occasionally more damaging than the war of attrition with the creative department. Rumor stalks the halls of every advertising agency, encouraging ambition and impatience with stories of salaries being doubled, five-figure bonuses, turbo-charged Maseratis, and all those other plums that are falling into the laps of anyone who is good enough to play the game of agency leapfrog. It is most unsettling. Why, any day now another agency that has just pulled a fat account could call you up and make you an offer you can’t believe, and if you’ve been having a normal abrasive time with the idiots that you work with, you will be hard put to turn it down. (The thought of encountering more, and maybe worse, idiots in the other agency doesn’t occur to you yet.)

  Your management will know all about this kind of inducement because they do it themselves when they want to hire someone of established ability. They are also aware that some agencies, either because they’re stuffed with cash or hiring specifically for a major account, will make offers that simply can’t be matched in material terms. But even in advertising, money isn’t everything, and a handful of the better-run agencies are able to keep their best people without beating them about the ears every three months with a checkbook.

  They do it by providing what corporate psychologists would call job satisfactions, one of those wonderfully vague but all-embracing phrases that can mean all things to all people and that looks so neat and tidy on personnel reports. In fact, it is neither neat nor easy to define, since it is made up of so many intangibles, but there are certain characteristics common to those few agencies that enjoy a high degree of staff loyalty and a correspondingly low rate of staff turnover.