Nobody's Perfect

by Doris Willens

  Perhaps nothing would be said. With no one in charge, no one rises to open the meeting. It’s one thing to bitch about the agency in halls and offices; quite another to stand up and be counted by the great old art directors and undoubted Bernbach loyalists, Bob Gage and Helmut Krone.

  An embarrassed silence. Finally, a sensible and talented young copywriter, Jane Talcott, stands up. It is time, she says, to ask why so many creatives are leaving, to see if something can be done to stop the outflow. This is the occasion to speak up.

  Others then rise, in each case preceding their gripes with ameliorating words: “This kind of meeting could only happen at Doyle Dane Bernbach; if things went badly at J. Walter Thompson, no one would care enough to call a meeting. But. . . .”

  Or: “I love Doyle Dane Bernbach, I want to stay. I want to want to stay, but. . . .”

  But things weren’t like the old days. Good work was being done. But not as good as formerly. Maybe because management was running scared, and account men looked for “safe” ads to sell to balky clients.

  “Maybe I myself haven’t produced brave new concepts worth fighting for,” concedes a young art director, with a watchful eye on Gage and Krone, “but the general atmosphere discourages me from trying. Management doesn’t seem as willing as in the old days to fight.”

  And where was the famous old sense of excitement. the shouting in the halls to come see an incredible new ad? Where the helpfulness and encouragement of the old days, the chances to learn from the agency greats?

  Someone asks Bob Gage what he thinks. Gage lumbers up and in his slow baritone, socks it to them. He’d come to listen and perhaps to help. But having heard them out, he thinks the real problem is that they aren’t working hard enough. They aren’t producing advertising that measures up to Doyle Dane Bernbach standards.

  Krone follows him up. “I’ll tell you what I think. It’s hard for me to say this, but I think the trouble with Doyle Dane Bernbach is its creative department. You’re all coddled. When did anyone ever come downstairs and blame you when we lose an account? You’re not the ones who are on the line, it’s the account men. At least once a week, an account man will say to me, ‘Helmut, I need your help.’ And I know what he needs. He’s not getting good enough ads from his creative team.

  “I’d like to dispel the myth of ‘the old days.’ The old days were tough. There were lousy clients, like Max Factor, and ads that were due tomorrow and a client who didn’t know what a good ad was. But we worked. And we did great ads in spite of the client. Nobody around here is trying to do a new page. I . . . I can’t go on. This has me too upset.”

  Now the young rebels wilt, chastised by the old giants. The meeting breaks up; what else is there to say in an open meeting? Back in their smaller huddles, they try to assess the possible effects of the “town meeting.” What would Gage and Krone tell Bernbach? Presumably, they’d tell him the same things they’d said at the meeting. That the real problem was the creatives not doing good enough work.

  That was about the last thing the anxious copywriters and art directors had expected to come out of their brief rebellion.

  * * *

  “There is no fire, Bob,” Krone reassured Levenson by telephone the next morning. “There’s no reason for you to fly back. Believe me, it was not that kind of meeting.”

  I’d come to Krone’s office to suggest an article that would further the process of dispelling the myth of “the old days.” It might be done for a trade magazine, or at the very least for the agency’s in-house publication.

  “Excellent idea,” agreed Krone.

  “I’ll need some other examples, not just Max Factor.”

  Krone thought a long moment. Then: “But I used the only example I had.”

  The myth of “the old days” remained un-dispelled.

  * * *

  “Helmut is full of shit,” said Bert Steinhauser, another of the agency’s top-of-the-line old art directors. “This place has changed. They’ve all sold their souls.”

  * * *

  I needed some words about the meeting, in case the press called. Bernbach, his voice tight with anger, said to check back later; he wanted to hear from Bob Gage first. An hour later, the anger had vanished, replaced by a benign calm and Buddha-like smile. Bernbach distilled for me an official bottom line on the uprising.

  “It was a good meeting, it wasn’t a bad meeting. It was low key. The fact that Evan and Roy are leaving is just another indication that other agencies come to us when they’re looking for talent. That says a lot for us. They always have and they always will. That’s all right. We’ve always grown our own and we’ve got plenty more that we’re growing right now. . . .”

  The words proved unnecessary. The trade press was too busy covering the hard news of Grace and Stark departing to chase after soft rumors of a more general malaise.

  * * *

  What had Gage said to bring about such a remarkable turnaround in Bernbach’s attitude towards the meeting? By happenstance, Gage and I arrived early for an awards luncheon at the Plaza, and we sat at the agency table, talking about the “town meeting.”

  “The subtext of that meeting,” said Gage, “the unspoken underlying complaint, was that some creative people have been teamed with mediocrities. And they’re worried that they are considered mediocrities by extension. The agency hasn’t weeded out mediocre people. That’s the real problem. The mediocre people have to be cleared out.”

  That was the subtext? Well, Gage would grasp underlying complaints that would fly right past me. But I could see how Bernbach’s agitation had been calmed. Now he could write off the uprising as the work of mediocre people, hired in the scramble for talent during the wild growth years of the late ’60s, not good enough to be called Doyle Dane Bernbach creatives. Not his children at all. This was Levenson’s problem. Levenson was added to the list of people who had let Bernbach down.

  * * *

  Behind closed doors, an agency old-timer sat me down and offered a different subtext to the Eatery meeting.

  “Nothing’s happening here. A president is supposed to bring in new business. That’s really what all the problems are about. When you don’t have new business, people can’t move up, and when they can’t move up, they become discontented. In fact, business has been going out, so the work has shriveled. That means the top creative people stay on the remaining accounts; the people below have less and less to do.

  “We need a new president.”

  In time, there would be a new president—and four more after him, all in a period of eight and a half years.

  * * *

  Bob Levenson returned from Europe and called the creatives back to the Eatery for a follow-up meeting. He spoke to their fears that “all the good people are leaving.”

  “Good people have been leaving for years. Where do you want to start? George Lois and Julian Koenig. Mary Wells. Paula Greene. Ron Rosenfeld. Len Sirowitz. Sid Myers. Helmut Krone [who had left and since returned] And those are only the ones who started their own agencies! . . .

  “Now look at what those who left accomplished. Except for Mary and maybe George at his best, the accomplishments were really minimal. And I’ll say this with Helmut right in this room: the best of Krone at DDB was, and is, a lot better than the best of Krone at Case & Krone. There’s something in the air here. Paula, Ron, Len were all better here. . . .”

  Doyle Dane Bernbach was still the best place. Talk to some of the people who’d left for other agencies, and they’ll tell you the same thing.

  Some things needed improving. A new creative management supervisory system would help get good work through. “And I assure you that we are starting to be a lot less patient with mediocrity.”

  Creatives who felt they weren’t getting enough work should “put together all the stuff you’re proud of, whether it got produced or not. So we will know you better and know your work better and we’ll know your ability to do great work better.

  “This is not a vindicti
ve thing. It is not a purge, or punitive, or anything of the kind. It’s something we probably should have been doing all along.” (The insecure suddenly felt more insecure.)

  Levenson wound up with promises of higher salaries, which “I must tell you, were in the works before your spontaneous, impromptu meeting.”

  “Yeah, sure,” muttered more than one skeptic.

  * * *

  The creatives had risen to cry “something’s going wrong,” and the response had been, “if so, it’s the creatives.”

  “Do great work, and the business will come,” Bernbach often said.

  Doyle Dane Bernbach still won the most awards, still had the reputation as the top creative agency. The stars who had never left—Gage, Phyllis Robinson, David Reider, Jack Dillon, Bill Taubin—and many of the bright young talents still turned out superior work. Yet new business wasn’t coming, and old business was leaving.

  And agencies that did consistently mediocre work often kept clients forever.

  More than weeding creatives needed doing in Doyle Dane Bernbach’s garden.

  12

  The Basic Stump Speech

  “The most freshly sculptured phrase will eventually become a cliche.”

  —Bill Bernbach

  It became known as “The Speech.” New York Times columnist Philip Dougherty, covering an industry conference with Bernbach on the program, would archly ask, “Is he giving Speech One or Speech Two today?”

  Trade reporters eventually stopped calling for advance copies of Bernbach speeches. They learned that none was ever available. When they attended and took notes, they realized that the material was familiar; whole segments were repeats from earlier speeches.

  To Bernbach’s closest associates, his speeches became another puzzlement, another area of sensitivity, another source of discontent. Joe Daly remembered it as “always the same speech, and to this day I don’t understand why he always read it. Because he knew it by heart. I always wondered why. I guess he didn’t have enough confidence.”

  Daly never asked Bernbach why. Like so much else in the upper reaches of the agency, questions about The Speech were strictly off limits.

  * * *

  If the grid of The Speech never changed (being, after all, Bernbach’s core philosophy on the art of persuasion), the embellishments did, constantly. Bernbach built the structure taller, broader, stronger. He tested new segments, tossed out old ones. By the time he summed up, he’d created “a stunning tour de force, a compelling presentation that should be required reading for anyone connected with creating advertising,” in the words of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (the 4As), which published it as a booklet in 1980.

  But to a biographer, it is the changing anecdotes, quotations, observations and comments over the years that offer glimpses into Bernbach’s heart.

  * * *

  Early in the 1950s, before he’d ever spoken at an industry event, Bernbach was called to the podium at a Max Factor convention. He was handed an award for a Max Factor ad, and invited to say a few words. He shook his head and flushed, “I make ads,” he said, “not speeches.”

  Before long, he was making speeches too.

  He would never be comfortable in front of audiences. He would always clear his throat before he began. And even with the most familiar passages, he would peer through his glasses and read, as though seeing the words for the first time. His lack of ease would create tension in audiences, so used to the confident charm of more typical agency leaders. Audiences filled with admirers of the agency’s work would be quick to laugh at the small jokes he told; they were on his side. A wind-up with a reel of agency commercials brought audiences to their feet in a standing ovation. Speaking did have its rewards.

  * * *

  A winning touch of self-deprecation, so rare after Bernbach’s elevation to full-fledged legend, opened a speech in 1960.

  “For some reason which is not altogether clear to me, I have been in some demand as a speaker these days. Perhaps because I know my limitations so much better than those who ask me to speak, I have turned down virtually all of these invitations. In this case, my great desire to spend some time in your wonderful San Francisco has overcome my natural discomfort at addressing large groups. . . .”

  For the rest of his life, Bernbach turned down many more speaking invitations than he accepted—not surprisingly, given his discomfort before large groups, an aversion to travel, and an unwillingness to discard the basic stump speech and start from scratch.

  * * *

  The earliest version of The Speech, delivered at a 4As regional conference in 1956, quotes Albert Einstein on the supremacy of intuition over logic in arriving at cosmic laws. That quotation remained a fixed part of The Speech to the end.

  In 1965, however, an additional Einstein reference appears, for no apparent reason.

  “Someone once approached Einstein and said to him, ‘Master, how do you keep all these things in your mind, all these equations, these things that you have to think about and work with?’ Einstein turned to him and said, ‘I have had to keep very few things in my mind. I’ve only had two ideas in my whole life.’ Everything else to him was just a tool to work with.”

  The “two ideas” anecdote had a respectable run, repeated into the 1970s. Inasmuch as it seemed to connect with nothing else, one can’t help wondering if this was Bernbach’s preemptive justification for repeating his own ideas in The Speech.

  * * *

  The puzzling part, to those paying close attention, was trying to reconcile the points Bernbach made with the unvarying words in which he made them.

  “In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.”

  “What is the use of saying all the right things in the world if nobody is going to read them? And, believe me, nobody is going to read them if they are not said with freshness, originality, and imagination.”

  “The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you, and they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying and they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you and they won’t listen to you if you’re not interesting. And you won’t be interesting unless you say things freshly, originally, imaginatively.”

  “No matter how startling or provocative or effective a new idea may be, it is the nature of the human animal to soon tire of it. Was there ever anything more exciting than the first space trip? All of us took our little transistors to lunch so that we wouldn’t miss a minute of it. Did we ever feel that way again? Didn’t most of us say about the later trips, ‘Well, we’ll see it on tonight’s news’? If our interest in such an historic adventure could diminish so rapidly, how do we expect lesser things not to grow stale? Only the new, only the fresh can continue to provoke interest and excitement.”

  But if our interest in space trips diminished so rapidly, how did Bernbach expect his use of that image, over and over, not to grow stale?

  “Do it different,” urged Bernbach. Otherwise, your message won’t even be heard.

  The industry press tuned out at moments like these:

  ¨ In 1964, speaking at the 4As annual convention at The Greenbrier, Bernbach tells the audience he is going to re-read what he said in San Francisco in 1960. And he does, six full pages.

  ¨ A week later, at the Copywriters Award dinner, he re-reads what he said at the Greenbrier, another re-reading of his 1960 talk.

  ¨ In 1965, at a regional 4As meeting in Pebble Beach, he says he’d “like to begin this talk by repeating some of the things I said at the Copywriters Award Dinner.” And having done that, he introduces another portion with, “Let me read you what I said on this subject [the need for freshness and originality] nine years ago at a 4As meeting.”

  ¨ In a 1970 speech to the Association of National Advertisers: “At the Greenbrier nine years ago I said. . . .”

  ¨ At the 1971 annual meeting of the 4As: “What I had to say at the last A.N.A. convention is perhaps relevant here. . . .”

  ¨ In a
1978 speech to the A.N.A.: “What are our responsibilities [to our clients]? I first talked of them to a group of writers and art directors in San Francisco some years ago. I would like to re-read them to you here.” And he did.

  And yet Bernbach would also say, “Even a truth must be told in a new, fresh, artful form or it will bore the beholder . . . Joyce Cary said it clearly, ‘The prayers said every day tend to become a meaningless gabble, and the cathedral seen often tends to become a mere building. So churches invent new prayers to carry the old energy and architects invented Rheims to succeed Notre Dame.’”

  Why, his colleagues wondered, if churches had to invent new prayers to carry the old energy, did Bernbach consider himself exempt from this imperative?