Up the Agency

by Peter Mayle

  But the marketing director, resplendent in his expensive silk tie and rather less expensive suit, is not happy with the campaign. He looks down his nose and shakes his head. He has concerns, grave concerns. Oh dear.

  The agency looks to its pal for support. Does he stand up and pound the table and argue passionately for the campaign? Does he repeat those words of praise and encouragement that flowed as profusely as wine during lunch last week? Does he come out fighting? Does he, hell. He is bent over his notes, avoiding eye contact with his old cronies, nodding in agreement as the marketing director drones on. He is no longer the agency’s pal. He has reverted to type. He’s a client.

  The Eunuch in the Harem

  There are two characteristics that identify this particular pest. The first is a reflex action: As a script or a piece of copy is presented to him, he produces his gold pen and holds it poised over the paper like the scalpel of a surgeon about to remove a malignant growth. After a few moments of slashing and scribbling, he looks up with a rueful smile and a sigh, as though he has just averted a disaster. Here comes the second characteristic:

  “Well, I’m no copywriter, but I think I’ve made some improvements.” He slides the defaced text across to the account executive and sits back. God, sometimes you have to do everything yourself.

  He’s quite right, in fact. He is no copywriter. He can’t even write a short, lucid letter. His “improvements” are gobbledygook, great chunks lifted straight out of the marketing strategy and dropped on the page like dead mice. The agency may duck and dive, but to no avail. He won’t allow a word to be changed. He is bursting with the pride of authorship. He has written an advertisement.

  A variation is sometimes slipped into this performance in the shape of “my wife.” She has been shown or told about the new campaign, and she is unimpressed. Her opinion carries considerable weight because of her dual qualifications in the matter of judging advertising: She is not only “my wife” but she is a housewife, too, and therefore possesses some secret knowledge denied to the rest of us.

  At least in this case the agency is not obliged to accept gibberish verbatim, but the revised brief from “my wife” is impossibly vague and causes much discussion in the creative department.

  All this springs from the widely held view that any fool can write copy, which is partly true. Any fool can write bad copy, and many fools do.

  The Thug

  He acts the part of a bluff, no-nonsense man of the people, too shrewd to be manipulated by a slick bunch of kids with marketing degrees, whom he invariably addresses as “you admen.” “Don’t play any games with me,” he says. “I like the straight-talking, direct approach. I call a spade a spade.”

  This may initially be quite refreshing, but it is not a reciprocal arrangement. He can and does call a spade a spade, often using blunt and insulting language to do so. But should the agency take this as a cue to respond in the same way, the bluff veneer disappears and the thug is revealed, a crude bully who will not tolerate argument and who uses his advertising budget like a cattle prod.

  He likes to make his agency jump, and he doesn’t bother with any of the conventional forms of commercial politeness. He will call up on Tuesday night to summon the agency to an out-of-town breakfast meeting on Wednesday. And then, just to show who’s boss, he’ll be late. He will demand complicated revisions to commercials, revisions that must be done in twenty-four hours so that he can see them before he leaves the city, and then refuse to approve the overtime bills. “You should have gotten it right the first time,” he’ll say. “That’s what I’m paying you for.”

  When he visits the agency, he treats it as his personal domain, using secretaries to make his dinner reservations, to go out and buy his cigars, to get his theater tickets, to confirm his travel arrangements, and to order his limos. Curiously, for such an important man, he never seems to have any money with him to pay for these small services. If anyone has the audacity to suggest reimbursement, he will fix them with his bully’s stare and mention the vast profits that the agency is making from his business.

  He likes loud, aggressive advertising. Any attempts at subtlety are dismissed with a sneer as being too clever by half (one of his favorite bluff, no-nonsense expressions). He assumes that the public, like his agency, can be browbeaten into submission. If the agency should dare to dig its heels in, he will unveil his secret weapon: a man he plays golf with every weekend who runs a small provincial agency and who would be delighted to take over the account and bellow to order.

  Thugs are common in advertising and always will be. For every agency prepared to throw them out, there are half a dozen others willing to pocket their self-respect along with the commission.

  The Man with the Outstretched Hand

  A certain amount of petty bribery exists in any business, whether it’s described as entertainment, oiling the wheels of commerce, or a token to mark the sincere appreciation of a wonderful working relationship. The odd case of champagne, the days at the track, the evenings at the Met—these are all considered perfectly harmless and acceptable.

  But it doesn’t always stop there, because every once in a while (rarely, it’s true) the agency will find itself dealing with a client on the take. He won’t be the top man in the client organization, but he covets the top man’s salary, the top man’s suits, and the top man’s car. He knows to a penny how much the agency is making from his business, and he will start referring to it more and more often during those informal chats at the end of the working day.

  At the same time, he will drop wistful and very clear hints about some desirable object he can’t afford. If the agency man is sufficiently alert and naïve, the hint will be picked up and the desirable object will be given as a Christmas present. After all, he’s an amiable client (they always are) and it is a good, profitable account.

  But the hints don’t stop. They become more blatant and demanding, and the naïve agency man begins to realize that he and the agency are being blackmailed. Either the presents keep coming or the client will initiate an agency review, and we can imagine what that means. No need to spell it out, old boy. I think we both know where we stand.

  The agency can report the man to his boss, possibly ruining his career or losing the business. Or it can continue to pay the squeeze, which will become progressively more severe: After the TV set and the stereo equipment, there might be two or three Armani suits, airline tickets, and a new Volvo. It has also been known for a child’s tuition to be taken care of in order to cement the bond between client and agency.

  Of course it’s dishonest and stupid. But it can be so gradual and insidious, when practiced by an expert in the art of the backhander, that an agency can be compromised while it is still trying to decide what to do. And where do you draw the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable? The difference in cost between a case of champagne and a car is enormous. The difference in principle is not that easy to measure. A man once asked a beautiful woman if she would sleep with him for a million dollars. She agreed. When he reduced his offer to five dollars, she was outraged. Did he think she was a prostitute? “Madam, that principle is already established,” said the man. “All we’re discussing now is the price.”

  The Good Client

  Yes, he is out there somewhere. He is reasonable, receptive, and intelligent. He assumes that his agency has skills that his company does not have, and he is happy to work with people rather than dictate to them. He has his opinions, but he’s prepared to discuss them and is not afraid of changing them if a valid argument for change is presented to him. He doesn’t require lunch every time he meets the agency, he doesn’t pass the buck, and he’s honest.

  One of the best of the good clients I’ve known, Anthony Simmonds-Gooding, was in charge of the Heineken account when it was small beer. He approved and stayed with a campaign that is still running after thirteen years, winning awards, helping to increase sales every year, and becoming part of the language.

  He got the a
dvertising he deserved. It sometimes happens.

  Growing Pains

  The three young men whom we last met as they were planning their new agency have prospered. Their bank loan has been paid off and they have a long lease on some breathtakingly stark office space. Their client list is a mixture of small, high-visibility accounts, including an adventurous wine merchant and an aggressive charity, a solid assortment of medium-sized but growing brands, and a couple of blue-chip names. Their work is considered highly creative, and their billings this year will pass $40 million. They are profitable, well established, and dissatisfied.

  The problem is that they now find themselves on the advertising plateau. Their growth rate has slowed down after the rush of early successes. They are past the days of being known as a hot young agency but still a long way off from being big enough to compete with the international monsters. And, almost worst of all, their neighbors on the plateau are all those dreary agencies they used to sneer at—the plodders who somehow manage to hang on to their clients every year despite their pedestrian campaigns and middle-aged reputations, the agencies that will never really make it. The very thought of being in the same league as they are is enough to make you rush out and order a flame-red Ferrari just to show the world that you’re not pedestrian and middle-aged and gray.

  Life on the plateau brings other, more insidious problems than the cooling of a hot image. The agency’s metabolism has slowed down now that those initial adrenaline-inducing worries of failure and bankruptcy have been left behind. It is taken for granted that there will be a steady improvement in everybody’s personal circumstances: raises and bonuses, cars and promotions. And once these are taken for granted, it is only human nature to want more. Other people in other agencies are getting more. Maybe it would be worth taking a nibble at the grass on the other side of the fence.

  Accompanying these stirrings of unrest is often a certain complacency, which shows itself in different ways according to position and salary level. Junior members of the agency arrive later in the office and leave earlier for the health club. The middle ranks take longer lunches and conduct their affairs on expenses, while the top people cultivate top people’s hobbies and interests. These will vary: collecting art, buying shares in racehorses, or acquiring country houses—the only common factor being that they cost enough money to necessitate substantial personal loans, which will influence the agency’s decision-making process in the years to come as the interest payments bite deeper and deeper.

  For the three proprietors of the agency, there is a sense of limited achievement, which becomes more limited as time goes by. After all their hard work, they’re sitting on a moderately successful medium-sized agency that is in danger of losing its edge. Life is comfortable enough, but they don’t have any real money. And to get into the big league, where billings are a billion dollars or more, could take forever. (In advertising, this is a period that exceeds five years.) What is to be done to regain the momentum of the agency and to make its founders the rich men they deserve to be?

  There are four options.

  The first, to carry on with renewed vigor and build the agency over the next ten or twenty years into a colossus, is dismissed without much discussion. It’s not quick enough.

  The second is to go public. Given Wall Street’s current fascination with advertising, this might be possible despite the agency’s relative youth and its comparatively modest profits, and the money would certainly be useful to pay off the mortgage on the place in the Hamptons. But there wouldn’t be enough to make a real fuck-everybody killing, and there would be some long and restrictive service contracts. On the whole, it wouldn’t be that much better than the first option.

  The third choice is to take over another agency—a nice sleepy old agency with its own office building—and leap from medium to big overnight before going public on the back of the combined profits and assets. A perfect solution, except for two major snags: Taking over another agency requires more resources than our three young men can raise without signing away their lives, and in any case there is nothing left to take over. The Saatchis and their ilk have been out shopping for years, and there are no more bargains available.

  This leaves one last option, and it looks increasingly attractive as the possibilities are explored. It is to be taken over by a bigger agency, but taken over only in a technical sense. The practical result would be a reverse takeover, with the three young men ending up on top of the heap.

  Obviously, the victim must be chosen with great care. It has to be an agency that knows it lacks what the young men can provide: a reputation for good creative work. It has to have a base of docile clients who won’t stampede as soon as the new regime moves in. And, ideally, it should have tired or soggy management that won’t offer much of a struggle over the transference of power.

  At any given time, there are always two or three agencies around that more or less meet these requirements. Advertising is a business that demands constant enthusiasm from top management. When this flags, the agency starts to wallow, and without an injection of fresh blood, it will eventually lose clients and staff. It has happened a hundred times, and has provided a hundred opportunities for the kind of maneuver that the young men are now planning with such excitement. The adrenaline is back! It’s like the old days, except that the potential rewards can now be measured in millions.

  The publicly known facts about the likely agencies are studied. One of them seems to be sufficiently moribund, and its client list is analyzed to see whether there would be any serious areas of conflict between brands or companies. It would be miraculous, for instance, if their disposable diaper client was to stay with the merged agencies once we’d arrived with our disposable diaper client. And so client lists are compared, only superficially at this stage, to see whether they mesh.

  Once it looks as though the two agencies could be put together without any significant client defections, the next step is to make contact with the victim agency’s owners to get an idea of their levels of interest, competence, greed, ambition, and usefulness. (Occasionally, the first overture is made by the victims, who have seen the writing on the agency’s wall and who are looking for a comfortable retirement. This can save a lot of time and lunch bills.)

  A drink is suggested in a suitably quiet bar, somewhere that requires a tie and is thus unlikely to be full of other advertising people, and the preliminary circling begins. Each side is at great pains to be flattering about the other side’s agency, and under the cover of small talk there is an almost-audible whir of brains as personalities are assessed to see how things might work out in the event of a deal. If each side is hopeful that it can get what it wants out of the arrangement, whether power or money or an important and well-paid but undemanding title, the meeting ends on a cordial and promising note: We must talk again soon.

  And talk they do, in greater and greater detail, at lunches and dinners held in progressively more secretive circumstances. It might spoil everything if the cat was to jump out of the bag before the clients had been primed, and so private suites are booked in hotels and enormous trouble is taken to keep well away from prying eyes and flapping ears, which is not at all easy in the advertising business. This search for the totally discreet table was once taken to extremes by the principals in a deal involving two London agencies; they decided that the only safe place to have lunch was Miami.

  The greatest imponderable, chewed over endlessly, is how the clients are going to take to the news of their chosen agency getting into bed with a bunch of strangers. While the merger will be presented as a marriage made in heaven that will benefit absolutely everybody (“complementary areas of expertise, greater depth of management, improved creative resources”), it would be wildly optimistic, even by advertising standards, to assume a zero casualty rate. But how many clients will feel that their noses have been put out of joint? How many can be soothed into a state of acceptance? How many will decline the advances of other agencies that will be made as soo
n as the merger is announced? Conjecture can go on indefinitely, but conjecture is no substitute for action. You have to try it and see.

  A lesser imponderable is the reaction of the staff. Some will stay and some will go, but, unlike clients, they are at least subject to some forms of control, and most of them are susceptible to inducements of one kind or another to keep them in line. Nevertheless, it’s a problem. When two fully staffed agencies get together, there are two sets of everyone. To make financial sense of the merger, the combined payroll will probably have to be cut by a minimum of 25 percent. Naturally, each agency is reluctant to sacrifice its own people, sometimes out of loyalty and a genuine belief in the abilities of its staff, sometimes out of a crude instinct for self-preservation: If we outnumber them, my personal position is likely to be stronger.

  But before the haggling over staff can begin, there are two matters of the utmost importance and delicacy to be decided, so fundamental that lack of agreement can bring the cozy negotiations to a sudden and permanent halt.

  The two are closely linked, and the first is the choice of a name for the new agency. There are many possibilities here, since each agency is bringing to the merger its own precious collection of names or initials; the combined total will never be fewer than four, and it could be as many as eight. The logical solution, one might think, would be to string them together in alphabetical order and get on with something more important, but that seldom happens. The order of the names and initials is crucial because it is a public statement about who is in charge of the merged agency. Also, everyone involved in the merger is experienced enough to know the fate that lies in store for the names on the end of the list: dropped from daily speech and relegated to the letterhead.