Nobody's Perfect
Page 8
A few in the upper reaches of management placed bets on whether he would ever finish the book he spoke of writing. But that’s a later chapter.
Account Gains and Losses, 1966-1969
In:
Alka-Seltzer
American Tourister luggage
British Travel Association
Buitoni
GTE
Hills Bros. coffee
Jack-in-the-Box
Kitchens of Sara Lee
Lehn & Fink
Life Magazine
Manpower Inc.
Mead Johnson (Metrecal)
New York Racing Association
Parker Pens
Porsche Audi
Stroh Beer
Warner Lambert
Out:
Avis Rent a Car
Barton’s Candy
Broxodent
Buitoni
Buxton leather goods
French Government Tourist Office
General Foods
Lane Furniture
Lowrey Organ
Manpower Inc.
Mead Johnson (Metrecal)
Ocean Spray
Parker Pen
Pfizer
Rheingold Breweries
Thom McAn shoes
Warner foundation garments
Whirlpool
WTS-Pharmaceutical
7
The Guy with the Bulging Muscles
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”—Abraham Lincoln
There’s nothing that says an advertising agency should become an established institution. Helmut Krone believed that companies should self-destruct after 25 years. The exciting, fresh ideas don’t often come out of institutions.
Bernbach and Doyle walked out of Grey because they wanted to do advertising their way, not to start a company that would sprout multi-national subsidiaries and listings in the daily stock tables. Their way meant superior ads to Bernbach, and gutsiness to Doyle. Coming in to work everyday, and doing it. Beyond that? Well, . . .
“Did we ever sit down or did we ever think that as of a certain date a Doyle, a Dane, a Bernbach, would have to give up the reins to someone else and who would it be?” Doyle reflected in an oral history interview. “We never did that, and dammit, we should have.”
Neither Doyle nor Bernbach was likely to believe that others could fill their growingly-legendary shoes. And perhaps the entangling underbrush of their rivalrous father/son relationship, its thorns scratching memories of an older hurt, inhibited open talks about the fraught subject of succession.
Then too, orderly management methods seemed contrary to the essence of the sensationally-successful young agency. Whence came the magic of its great work if not from the riotous high spirits, the trusting freedom? Can magic be institutionalized?
Moreover, things kept happening so fast—the new campaigns bringing new glory and a constant stream of new clients—that nobody had time to look back at the clients who streamed out, or ahead to the future of the most-admired and fastest-growing agency in the business.
No, nothing says an advertising agency should become an established institution. But a big agency has big clients, and big clients have multi-national offices and multi-layers of management. If the agency wants to stay big, it tries to provide the stability and service of an established institution.
Doyle Dane Bernbach burst into the top ten agencies in 1965, in tenth place with $130 million in billings. J. Walter Thompson, BBDO and Young & Rubicam held the top three spots, but the ground was rumbling under the old agencies. DDB had beaten out BBDO for the important American Airlines account in 1961. Unlike the small and troubled clients of the agency’s first decade, American was a great and successful airline. H. J. Heinz, Uniroyal, Mobil Oil and Lever Brothers quickly followed American into Doyle Dane Bernbach, all expressing their admiration for the agency’s Polaroid and Volkswagen work. Advertisers across the country were showing dissatisfaction with the creative output of their own agencies, and asking their account people to bring them ads with “the Doyle Dane look.”
Moreover, the giant agencies had been losing a significant advantage, as the booming television networks elbowed them out of control over programming. And as costs skyrocketed, fewer advertisers could afford to sponsor regular shows of their own. “Specials” were devised as a less burdensome alternative. Shared sponsorships became more common, eventually leading to “buying spots” on certain kinds of programs—sports, or news, or daytime, or prime time. If an advertiser did not need an agency to create programs, why not choose an agency that produced outstanding ads and commercials? The established agencies beefed up their creative departments.
* * *
Ned Doyle later said that he had wanted Doyle Dane Bernbach to stay small, to be “a Tiffany,” and that Bernbach wanted big, “a Macy’s.” Dane said simply, “If you stop growing, you die.”
There was no putting the growth genie back in the bottle. The questions now had to do with change, and whether a top ten agency could keep on doing the knock-out work of a sassy newcomer, and whether big clients wanted knock-out work.
Jay Chiat said of his own booming young agency some years later, “Let’s see how big we can get before we get bad.”
No one at Doyle Dane Bernbach was thinking that way.
* * *
Joe Daly had many things going for him; the most powerful being his absolute hold on the Polaroid account.
Somewhere in mythology wafts an image of Polaroid’s creative genius, Dr. Edwin Land, working in mutual admiration and productivity with the creative genius of his advertising agency, Bill Bernbach, to produce a glorious success story. Not so. The only Land-Bernbach encounter Polaroid people recall was a “devastating meeting” in 1973 about the Laurence Olivier commercials for the SX-70 camera.
“It was big people trying to impress each other with name-dropping,” said a client participant. That vein running out, Land handed Bernbach his camera and asked him to look through the view-finder. Bernbach took the camera gingerly, as though he’d never seen one before. He studied it a moment, then held it up to his eyes. Instead of the view-finder, he peered into the lens. “We all died,” our source said, “Land lost all respect for Bernbach because of that.”
Daly brooked nobody’s intervention in his running of the Polaroid account. His aura projected the message that, if badly crossed, he would walk, with Polaroid, Bob Gage and Phyllis Robinson, to open his own agency. Could he have? Nobody knew for sure. But the possibility had to haunt Bernbach. Often he wished, and occasionally he tried, to move Daly aside. He couldn’t, until the end.
Meanwhile, Doyle Dane Bernbach’s account staff absorbed the lesson—familiar at old-line agencies, but unexpected in this idealized and iconoclastic place—that winning control over a big and profitable account was 1) possible at the agency, for all the puffing about creative work being everything, and 2) the route to invulnerability and fortune, whatever one’s imperfections.
Joe Daly personified that.
* * *
He was smart, gutsy, forceful, quick, attractive, egotistical, so bursting with life that his job and a family of seven children couldn’t begin to absorb his energy. Daly womanized brazenly, though with consideration for consequences at the agency.
“I had a standing rule,” Daly said years later, “which I have kept all my life. ‘Never put your prick in the payroll.’”
On the other hand, stewardesses on American Airlines, one of Daly’s major accounts, and the scrubbed blond demonstrators at Polaroid conventions were among Daly’s favorite targets. Clients, watching this, were not especially amused. Daly “lost stature” at sales meetings and conferences, said former Polaroid client Ted Voss, long after.
Daly’s wife vented her anger one night by piling all his suits into a bathtub and running steaming hot water until they shrank beyond salvation. Like Doyle’s wife, and for similar reasons, Daly’s wife
eventually gave up on him. Womanizing and heavy drinking. A world apart from the loyal family devotion of Bernbach and Dane.
* * *
Art director George Lois, encountering Daly in 1960, described him as “a tough-looking bird with a military crew cut . . . [whose] muscly arms bulged in his short-sleeved shirt.” Daly—younger, taller, more conventionally handsome than Doyle—often lost out to Doyle in their approaches to women at out-of-town sales meetings. Decades later, Daly still spoke with awe about the way women responded to Doyle.
“He’d go up to a woman and say, ‘Hey, you,’ and POP! I tell you, that guy was very, very wicked with women.”
Here was another rivalry, this one between men cut from the same cloth. City tough, Irish competitive, brainy, cocky—the stuff of dazzling courtroom lawyers and super pols, or, in other times, of argonauts and astronauts. “Star quality,” admirers said.
Both men swaggered when they walked, Doyle burdened by his outsized football shoulders, Daly with the intriguing limp of a dashing war hero. Daly had joined the Navy in 1940, after graduating from Fordham University, and trained as a fighter pilot. Stationed on the carrier Enterprise, he’d fought at Midway and Guadalcanal, risen to the rank of lieutenant commander, won the Navy Cross, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart.
War heroes and jocks. The kinds of men Bernbach looked up to, felt drawn to—until they let him down. Daly could have been a younger version of the Doyle that Bernbach had admired and envied. Not surprising, then, that Doyle never stopped resenting Daly’s replacing him, any more than Daly ever stopped feeling competitive with Doyle’s legend.
* * *
Everybody agreed that Daly ran accounts brilliantly, devising superb tactical ideas, orchestrating on his clients’ behalf the best agency talent.
“You want to know the single most important reason for Daly’s greatness as an account man?” a close co-worker asked. “Very simply, it’s that every one of his clients has always known that he would never put the agency’s interests ahead of theirs.”
Would he show greatness as an agency leader? That question never got asked. There were other candidates, men with different virtues and abilities. They might, of course, have turned out worse. But in Doyle’s opinion, “Joe did more to crack the place up than almost anybody.”
* * *
Daly brought a Manhattan glamour to the accounts he ran. Chemstrand moved into the agency late in 1952, with a budget of $1 million, far larger than any other client. The company made fibers, Chemstrand nylon and Acrilan. These were bought by mills, which spun them into fabrics for apparel makers, or into blankets and carpets for retailers. In short, the target was the trade. Anywhere else, the advertising would have been placed in trade media. Not at Doyle Dane Bernbach, and not under Daly. They took a product three stages removed from the consumer and turned it into a consumer product.
Daly: “We felt Chemstrand had to go to the consumer, and then merchandise their consumer advertising to the mills, to the cutters, and through to the retailers.”
That they did with a string of news-making television specials. With Daly at the controls, Princess Grace of Monaco agreed to star in her first TV special. Elizabeth Taylor, who had declined all previous proposals, agreed to do Chemstrand’s second special: “Elizabeth Taylor in London.” (She asked Daly to rub her back when it went out of whack in her hotel room.) Chemstrand’s third was “Sophia Loren in Rome,” another superstar’s first TV appearance. (Loren and Daly lunched in the back seat of a limo, on one of the hills of Rome.) Judy Garland made her comeback on a Chemstrand special.
So heralded and glittering were the events that mills and cutters readily sold all their Chemstrand fabrics (identifiable to consumers by Bob Gage-designed tags) to retailers before each special went on air.
Daly’s tactics, often copied since, were unique then. And their impact, in these days of celebrity overexposure, is not likely to be equaled.
* * *
Daly orchestrated a different kind of TV excitement, live action demonstrations, for Polaroid when the half-million-dollar account came to the agency in 1954.
“We bought only shows where we could do live commercials,” related Daly, who wrote the early copy and stayed at the studios to oversee the presentations, “because at that time it was still a great gimmick that the picture developed in 60 seconds. For a one-minute buy we’d usually get about three minutes of talk by the show host. We were the first sponsors on the Steve Allen show, on the Johnny Carson show. Gary Moore, Jack Paar—any show we could do live. We did live commercials at football games with cheer-leaders and coaches. We did them at Grand Prix races with the race stars.
“The excitement and suspense were, What if the picture didn’t come out? What a gutsy thing Polaroid was doing, leaving itself open to failure on live TV.”
At first, the agency had a protective shot ready to slip to the show host if he bungled. Daly said, let’s go cold.
“The point became that with a Polaroid picture at least you know when you miss, and you can take the picture again. Once, Gary Moore made a bad goof. He got gunk all over his hands, and his reaction was, ‘Yuck.’ So the next week we brought a little eight-year-old girl on. And when Gary started to do the commercial, she went up to him and said, ‘You made such a mess of it last week, let me show you how to do it. It’s so easy.’ And she took the picture. It was wonderful.”
For ten years, Polaroid did live shows. Every demonstration produced tension, drama, suspense, and ultimate success. Simultaneously, the agency’s print ads for Polaroid said “quality, quality, quality.” Polaroid sales soared; Polaroid’s budget at Doyle Dane Bernbach soared. For client and agency, a great American success story.
Green-eyed competitors put down the agency’s contribution with comments such as, “Oh sure, it’s easy with a unique product like a Polaroid camera.” (Or a Volkswagen car.)
But Polaroid had an agency before Doyle Dane Bernbach, the Boston office of BBDO. Tacky ads in undistinguished magazines portrayed the camera as a kind of party trick. (And other small cars popular in Europe made little impact in the U.S.)
Polaroid’s then-marketing head gave “fifty percent of the credit to the product and fifty percent to the way DDB bought and executed time.” The client-agency relationship was the strongest, soundest, and one of the most profitable for DDB during most of the 30 years it lasted. Its end would help precipitate the agency’s downfall.
Meanwhile, it was a helluva power card for Daly.
* * *
Ex-Navy pilot Daly was a natural to supervise the American Airlines account when it landed at the agency in 1961. With Polaroid and Volkswagen, American would become one of DDB’s three most profitable accounts. But it never settled in as comfortably as Polaroid and VW. Often the press reported that the airline was eyeing other agency suitors, on the verge of leaving DDB. Remarkably, the airline remained on board for 20 years, and then the agency did the resigning. But through the years, the airline’s restlessness unnerved Bernbach, undermined his trust in Daly, and nearly led to the sale of the agency in 1974 (see chapter titled “William and Mary”).
One example of Daly’s strategic thinking and quick action for American: When Chet Huntley, NBC’s esteemed news anchor, announced his retirement, Daly got on the phone to network contacts, pumping for information, laying plans to snare Huntley as a spokesman for the airline. A respected newsman turn flack? It seemed unthinkable in those halcyon days. Nothing was unthinkable to Daly. He pressed, and harnessed Huntley’s authority and presumed journalistic objectivity into the service of American Airlines. It was, at that time, an unprecedented coup.
A revealing aside about the American Airlines account: Daly and Bernbach each believed the account stayed at the agency for only one reason—himself.
* * *
While Daly scored triumphs for his clients, Doyle sat in smaller client meetings, working the New York Times crossword puzzle and barking, “Let me know when you get to something important.�
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Doyle, like Bernbach and Dane, had signed a five-year employment contract as part of the agency’s going public. So he was wired in until 1969. His title was executive vice president, in charge of account services. He probably considered himself in charge of backbone.
Bernbach, fretting about Doyle’s idiosyncrasies, found a way to outmaneuver him. He would give his own title, agency president, to an account man, who in a leap would be over Doyle. The number one account man, hands down, was Daly.
So on January 1, 1968, Joe Daly became president of Doyle Dane Bernbach. In that role, his notices were far less compelling than the raves he drew as an account man.
Said one DDBer a few years later: “If Joe Daly was president of the United States, his first interest would be Polaroid.”