Open With a Smile

Last time, I promised to tell you about teaching a course on advertising in Brooklyn. You can't always believe a copywriter, I guess.

I decided, in the spirit of the holidays, to offer a smile today, and one that actually relates to the continuity of this "memoir blog."

(Hope you got everything you wished for, and that your New Year's resolutions are attainable.)

Once I found comfort and confidence in just standing in front of a class and talking the students through my work, I learned to begin with a story I had heard somewhere, using it to loosen up the audience and show them that we were all going to have a good time.

The story is a fantasy about the day Einstein died. He goes straight to the pearly gates, where St. Peter, dressed in his finest robes, welcomes the genius.

He tells him how thrilled they all are to have Herr Professor among them, and that heaven has a glorious mansion for him to live in for eternity.

“Just one small problem,” St. Peter explains. “I wasn't told by You-Know-Who that we have more souls arriving than usual, and that we're asking people to share their space. So, if it's all right with you, we'd like to place three other people with you in your mansion.”

“Of course,” replies Einstein. “But I would like to meet them first, just to figure out in advance how we can relate.”

Being the genius that he is, he says he can ask just one question of each of the three, and know what they can discuss through the end of time.

St. Peter agrees, and they go off to meet Einstein's future roomies.

He's introduced to the first one, explains the situation, and asks just this one question: “What is your IQ?”

The answer is an impressive 145.

“Wunderbar!,” exclaims Einstein. “You can help me work on the unified theory – perhaps together we can finally solve that problem!”

St. Peter brings the great man to the second candidate, and this one's IQ is the average – 115.

“Good,” says Einstein – we can discuss the paradox of time travel and enjoy a good game of chess.”

The third roommate candidate turns out to be more of a challenge – with an extremely low IQ of only 65.

Einstein tries not to show his disappointment, as he searches for a subject that would engage a person with a sub-par intelligence.

After a few uncomfortable moments, his face lights up with that familiar smile of his, and he cheerfully announces, “Aha! We can talk advertising!”

It always gets a laugh, and gives me a chance to explain that my chosen profession is actually more complicated than you think, and I will be explaining why.

Next time: Teaching a college course.

Teaching & Learning

Charlie Brown would never grow up to be an ad man. He just didn't have conviction – probably the most important asset for anybody who wants to sell something to somebody else.

The reason I mention Charles Schulz's most famous creation, and probably alter ego, is one particular “Peanuts” strip that came to mind today.

In it, Charlie Brown is complaining that no one ever believes him, no matter what he says. Lucy, in her best “trust me I won't pull the football away at the last minute” mode, swears to him that he can say anything and she will believe him. “Anything?”, he asks doubtfully. She says she will believe the most unbelievable, fanciful and ridiculous thing he can say. He thinks. He bites.

“The world is made of snow.”

Lucy screams at the top of her lungs, “You're out of your mind, Charlie Brown!” (It's the title of an old book of Peanuts strips, and you can still buy it online.)

I have conviction. Maybe not enough to convince Lucy of the fanciful composition of the world, but so much that I get excited about whatever product or service I'm hired to advertise. Where does the word “advertise” come from, anyway? Latin: advertere "turn toward," from ad- "toward" and vertere "to turn."

That's what I do – turn toward the subject, wholeheartedly, and try to get you to turn your attention and your inclination toward it.

And I get to know what I'm selling. If it's a restaurant, I work there. A wine, I drink it. An airline, I fly it. And, I get excited about it. And convinced that it's the best thing since the last thing I worked on.

My dear, departed wife, Eileen, who worked in retail, had that kind of attitude. In her case, she was so convinced of the merits of whatever she was selling, that customers always assumed she was the owner of the store.

Conviction is the secret of successful selling.

When I finally got to Madison Avenue, after 20 years of experience one hundred and fifty miles north of it, I was invited to share what I'd learned. First to invite me was Deborah, a beautiful woman (of course) who taught business and communication at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

She asked me to travel back upstate from Manhattan to the tony school of mostly upper class young women for one lecture per semester. The school would pay my transportation, put me up in their guest house and she would take me out to dinner at one of Saratoga's fine restaurants.

I said yes, of course, mostly to have the chance to sit and look at her over dinner for an hour or two, and immediately got very nervous about what I would present to her class. I actually scripted what I would say, rehearsed it, and thought that would be that. It wasn't.

I stumbled through the dry and lifeless prepared text in about 20 minutes, flop sweat running so freely that the front row should have had the same warning as Seaworld's splash zone.

Deborah saved me, by asking questions about things I could answer with conviction, and I came through it well enough that I was asked back the following semester.

From then on, I just brought my portfolio of work with me, wherever I went – The Center for Media Arts, State University of New York and St. Rose College in Albany – and just talked about how each ad or campaign came about, the thinking behind it and the processes involved it bringing it all to life. It was fun for me, and it gave the students an insight into the real world of a real Mad Man.

That worked for me until I had to actually teach an entire course on advertising together with an Account Executive at St. Francis College. For that, we needed a plan.

Next time: Hitting the heights in Brooklyn.

California Weather

Before I begin today's history lesson, some contemporary comments.

First, I notice that the New York Times has printed a correction about the price of squid-ink tagliarini at the Tarry Market in Port Chester, N.Y. I quote: "It is $5.49 a pound, not $29.99 a pound." I'm sure you're relieved to know that.

Next, I would like to direct you to two other blogs, both of which have much to do with my hometown of Troy, NY, and which mention the Saturday Farmers' Market there: Christina's foodie blog, and David's blog about Sage in Troy.

Now, on to today's "Mad Man" topic.

MacArthur Park Wasn't Melting in the Rain That Day.

Let me begin with a couple of very important lessons, learned early in my career as a Mad Ave copywriter: One: if you write on-camera dialogue, you get to go to the shoot. If you write voice-over copy, you get to go as far as the local recording studio. I learned to write dialogue.

Two: if you write outdoor commercials that have to be produced in the winter, you will shoot them in warm locations.

Here's how fate can play tricks, even when you follow those rules. We had one day to shoot three on-location commercials in Los Angeles. It was a day in March.

Everybody knows why the film industry settled and prospered in southern California -- the weather. So we didn't worry.

Across the street from MacArthur Park is a fabulous old building, now the Park Plaza Hotel, built originally as an Elks Club. It's a favorite location of filmdom, and in fact, the day we were shooting in front of the building, because it could look like a bank, two other companies were shooting there -- Steven Seagal's crew was setting up a drug lord's lair in the building's indoor swimming pool on the lower level, and up on the roof Robert Stack was filming an intro to a segment of Unsolved Mysteries. And you've seen the staircase to the mezzanine level in countless movies and TV shows.

For the main commercial we were to shoot that day, I had written a “one take” commercial, which is a spot that requires an actor to do the entire spot without a cut -- always a difficult task, but, when it works, very effective. The commercial, conceived by my art director, was ostensibly a stand-up -- an announcer talking to the camera. But this one had a twist -- what he was promoting was a giveaway promotion at Krystal, a chain of hamburger restaurants -- sort of the White Castle of the South.

The copy went something like this: “peel off the tab from the soft drink cup and you could win up to five thousand dollars.”

As the spokesman walked from the guarded armored car in front of the “bank,” he held up the winning tab, then announced that if you found a “double the prize” tab, you'd win ten thousand dollars. This makes his eyes light up, as he realizes he has the actual winning tab in his hand, and he starts running away, with the armed guard chasing him, and the spot dissolves into chaos and the product shot.

The problem was, it was a lot of copy and a lot of precise movement, and it was cold. Not just morning mist cold, but exactly like this very mid-December morning in the suburbs of Albany, New York – cold enough that if it rained, the water would freeze before it hit. And it did rain.

Here we were, agency people and production company from New York, in summery clothes, shivering with cups of coffee in our hands. We shot the commercial, in between downbursts of ice, and ended up with just one good take, which we used. The other spots we shot that day were shot in other parts of MacArthur Park, and were all MOS (an old movie term that means silent, but allegedly comes from the mouth of a German Director who abbreviated his own term, Mit Out Sprechen, and it stuck), so we got them out of the way quickly and headed back to our hotel bar for warmth. One of our beautiful models cavorting in one of the spots was one of the two gorgeous daughters of Tommy Chong, either Robbi or Rae Dawn, and I wish I could remember which one.

Another footnote to the day and place -- MacArthur Park was the hangout of a lot of homeless people in the eighties (it might still be), and the catering that was provided for cast and crew, as usual, was much more than any such group of people could eat in a day.

It didn't go to waste -- we provided a veritable feast for the homeless of the area that day, giving them every edible morsel that was left -- and it was a lot.

Next time: Teaching and Learning.

Go West?

Seven years in Manhattan, surviving advertising's merger mania, and you'd be worn out, too. I needed a change of everything. Rich Capparela, the friend I drove west with, had made a name for himself in LA radio.

He was hosting an advertising awards show around the time I was involved in a commercial shoot out there, so I stretched my time in LA -- on my own dime -- and went. I had an idea that if I saw the kind of creative at the show that I would like to do, I might try to work at the shop that created it.

I did see some very well crafted, long copy ads for the Times Mirror. Thinking it was an LA agency, I wrote a note complementing the campaign, and received a letter back from the head of an agency in San Francisco. He was running a boutique shop inside a bigger shop, and was looking for someone to share the load.

TWISTED.

The man in charge wanted to fly me and my girl friend at the time, Wendy (a pretty, voluptuous research maven who worked at the Wall Street Journal) out for a series of interviews. This was flattering. I asked my friend Mary Van about this mucky-muck. (Mary is the one who had moved to New York on my advice, who later found for me my first real New York job at a real agency, and who was now in San Francisco with her British computer whiz husband and running a nice little ad consulting business of her own.)

She told me in very certain terms not to consider it. She said he was extremely difficult to work with, and had a bad reputation among creatives in the Bay Area. But he was willing to pay for two of us to come out for a long weekend, for a series of interviews. And, I thought, if this is my job, I can make it work. And if it's not, it's a free vacation for us.

Well, it wasn't my job, and it was no vacation. I knew that as soon as I realized what was going on. The mucky-muck, who was married, was having a relationship with his Italian-American Account Executive. The small group that worked for him were like his children. He was the bad daddy, taking up with the hussy.

In separate meetings, I realized what a dysfunctional family this really was. Wendy and I met with the mucky muck and his hussy for dinner. His snobbery was only exceeded by his petulance.

Wendy and I met with the art director and his wife at a beautiful waterside restaurant in Marin County. The AD was miserable, wanted to stay on his farm and never leave. I told him he should.

I met with the mucky-muck's mentor in the office. He took advantage of my nervousness, and put me through hell.

I met with the group for an input session, and then was ordered to go away and create an ad on my own. Advertising agencies don't work that way -- it's a cooperative effort, everybody adding something to the mix until the final outcome is greater than the sum of the parts. I did my best, which was pretty good, considering the pressure.

The final meeting was with everyone except the mucky-muck, at a lunch. It was like facing a firing squad, except over a nice, trendy, California meal. They all had rehearsed their questions, and fired them at me -- fortunately, one at a time instead of in a single, deafening, mortal volley.

By now, as much as I wanted to leave New York and be anywhere else, I knew this was exactly the wrong job for me. So about halfway through their questions, I formulated one sublime question of my own, and waited to ask it.

When their ammunition finally ran out, I asked them each to respond.

“What will the person in this job do?”

Each one responded just as you might expect – the prospect would solve all their problems, have the all answers, insulate them from nasty clients, speak for them, listen to them, advise them. Their cumulative picture of this person became crystal clear to me. And even if there had remained a slim chance of my getting the job, I willingly threw that away with my response.

“Well, the last person who answered that description was,” I said, carefully pausing for effect, “crucified.”

The meeting ended with embarrassed niceties, Wendy and I flew back to New York and the declination call came about two weeks later.

Next time: location, location, etc.

Loser #3

My father, who came of age in the Great Depression, had a favorite phrase he would use whenever someone bugged him. He'd say, “Get a job!” – with obvious disgust in his voice. To a man who experienced unemployment two or three hundred times worse than today's, and its resulting breadlines, the most insecure thing for a man back then was to not have a job.

Being a pre-war baby – World War II, that is – I rarely, if ever, had a problem finding a job during my employment years. According to Malcom Gladwell's “Outliers,” that's partly because I was born “in a trough” – the opposite of the post-war baby boom, so that when it came time for my generation to go to work, there wasn't as much competition. But when I did go to work, first in radio and then in advertising agencies, I worked. And that, according to Gladwell, is equally important – do the work. Gladwell makes the point succinctly in this brief clip with Charlie Rose, about Derrick Coleman.

Well, I discovered that not everybody in my field did an honest day's work. So, over time, my phrase of disgust, different from my father's, became “Do your job!”

I firmly believe that if you do your job, you will win. And the converse is true, too. Today, I want to tell you about the biggest loser I ever met. He lost an entire ad agency, because he didn't do his job.

Going, Going, Gone.

The end came for USAdvertising about six months down the road. Clients don't like to be told they have to switch agencies -- especially when they've been with one agency for a lifetime, as in the case of Quaker State. Fifty-three years at one agency, and then they're shunted off to the side? It couldn't have lasted, and it didn't.

Air France was at K&E because of a relationship with K&E people, and they were no longer in charge. American Airlines was a much bigger account, so Air France was forced to move. They began a search for another agency almost immediately.

But we were a full service agency; we could have gotten other accounts. In fact, we were offered one. I didn't learn about this until after USAdvertising, or the remnants of it, were folded into Poppe-Tyson, another agency that was cut loose because of merger mania.

Here's how USAdvertising's General Manager drove us out business. Believe it or not, our patron agency, Bozell, handed us a prestige automotive account that was a conflict with its largest account. All we had to do was take on additional personnel -- a creative director and a account supervisor. We could have replaced our blabbermouth account supervisor with no problem.

But our General Manager didn't want to “put his creative director's nose out of joint.” (She was the one who had to have matching trees!) His other excuse was that he was going to get the new Hyundai account. That was totally unrealistic, because the Hyundai account was already assigned. He had no chance chasing that car.

Remember, the very purpose of our agency was to take accounts that conflicted with Bozell's, and he said no! Even after all these years, it hurts to write the next sentence.

The account he turned down was Jaguar.

I have to spit this out in one sentence: he turned down one of the most prestigious accounts, which probably would have led to other prestige accounts, which would have made USAdvertising a premium agency with a great reputation and we all could have worked there as long as we wanted and made a lot of money and it was gone in that one refusal.

Gone? First the General Manager was gone. Replaced by a company man from Bozell. But USAdvertising couldn't be saved. Then thirty people were let go in one day. They brought in an exit interviewer, and we all waited our turn. Ten of us were spared, just to keep the agency on the books for what turned out to be a mini-merger.

By the time the Poppe-Tyson deal came through, there were just four of us left: myself, an art director, an office manager and a secretary, and we were forced on the new agency. The welcome wasn't gracious, but we were there for a purpose, and we fulfilled our purpose.

Next time: Go West?

Loser #2

All Creative Directors Are Not Created Equal.

The ad agency that was created to handle overflow accounts of the newly-merged Bozell Jacobs Kenyon & Eckhardt was on the fifth floor of a bank office building on Fifth Avenue.

Her office was bizarre, to say the least. Of course it was a corner office. Creative Directors in New York get corner offices. But it didn't have a desk. It had a white, marble top table, surrounded by red chairs. It had one tall red chair, hers, and a tall easel, laid almost flat to hold her portable typewriter.

On one wall was a huge blowup of a few lines from a wonderful Tom Stoppard play, The Real Thing, about crafting words to present ideas that soar, like building cricket bats so well that without much effort, they make the ball really fly.

“What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might . . . travel .. .”

Everything in the room, including what she wore every day, was either white or black or red. Except for the two living ficus trees. Despite the fact that they were serviced regularly, one or both would die regularly.

We figured it had something to do with her vibrations, which weren't exactly steady, as this incident will demonstrate.

She liked copy to be presented to her aurally, by the copywriter. As far as I could tell, the presentation I was about to make wasn't any different than any that had gone before. In fact, I was proud of the copy. I had worked on it, crafted it and otherwise fine tuned it until it really flowed smoothly and effortlessly. It's a style I've cultivated, which I call “simulated conversation.”

I settled in to one of the chairs at her table, but turned it to face her as she sat in her high chair. The ficus trees were behind me. I wasn't a third of the way through reading my copy to her, when she picked up her phone without warning, punched two numbers and screamed to our office manager who was on the other end of the line, and only about three offices away. The intercom wasn't really necessary; all 40 employees heard her shout, “Peggy, I can't work like this!”

There was a pause while Peggy said a few words, trying simultaneously to calm the situation and find out what the problem was. Because I was in closest proximity to her and her portable typewriter, I held my breath.

I didn't know what else she was going to say or do. I was sure I had bathed that morning. Had I misunderstood the advertising strategy so much that she hated the copy and the copywriter? Was my fly open? How had my presence or my copy or both offended her so much that she had to call and tell the office manager? Turns out it wasn't me, or anything I said or wrote.

She finally revealed the problem. “These trees are not even!,” she cried.

That was it. The company that was responsible for the trees had replaced them with two that were not the same height. I don't remember if I finished reading the copy to her then and there. But I do remember going out for a drink directly from work that night.

For this, and other reasons which I'll chronicle next time, the ad agency lasted six months.

Next time: The Champion Loser

Loser #1

These days, the news often carries a warning story about what people post on social media sites. Right now, there's a case of someone being fired for complaining about their boss.

It reminds me of an incident like that, back in the 1980's – when “social media” simply meant blabbing in public.

I believe it happened at the Oak Room Bar at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the same place where Cary Grant, playing an ad executive, began his (mis)adventure in Hitchcock's “North By Northwest.”

Of course, it could have been any upscale watering hole. Here's what I remember.

If you don't have something good to say about someone, just shut up.

It's a lesson you learn early in the advertising business – don't name names in public. Whether you're talking about the place you work, the clients you have, the clients you lost or the clients you're pitching:

Don't. Name. Names.

It's a lesson you're supposed to learn early. But somebody didn't. Somebody with an MBA from the prestigious Wharton School of Business. Somebody who, I think, cut class.

There we were -- forty people who had survived the downsizing caused by merger mania in the advertising business. Kenyon & Eckhardt and Bozell, Jacobs, two fairly big agencies had just merged, and each had an airline, a restaurant and a motor oil account.

Chuck Peebler, who passed away in 2009, was the man from Bozell, and he had the upper hand in this merger, which meant that K&E's conflicting accounts had to go. Instead of setting them free, the combined management came up with a plan to keep the accounts in the fold by creating a brand new agency, and staffing it entirely with people who otherwise would have been out on the street. That's how USAdvertising was born: Forty people plucked out of K&E and plunked down in new offices, on 5th Avenue in the heart of Manhattan.

It would be our job to take those conflict accounts, and any others that Bozell couldn't handle. It was exciting to be part of something new. But excitement isn't always something to be desired.

The first week we were in business, we had a visit from one of the major officers of the merged company. He didn't look happy as he led all the titled people of USAdvertising into a private office. He told us a dark tale of an amazing, and almost disastrous incident that had occurred the night before.

Someone from USAdvertising -- someone in the very room we were sitting in -- had been having a conversation in the Oak Room Bar.

The culprit was talking about Chuck Peebler, and the things he was saying were far from nice. He accused Peebler of deceit and trickery.

This was the man whose approval was needed to save our jobs. Our man called him an asshole, among other, worse things. When the tirade finally wound down, our man felt a tap on his shoulder. The man sitting at the next table, right behind him, said to him, “Would you like to meet the asshole you've been talking about? I'm Chuck Peebler.”

That's the only part of the story we were told. Then we were warned never, never to talk in public about the agency, the clients, anything that related to our business, or the consequences would be disastrous. We all knew what that meant. Everyone soon learned just who had been mouthing off in that bar that night -- one of our Account Supervisors. To my amazement, he wasn't fired.

Not that day, anyway. If he had been replaced then, we might have survived longer. But it was that kind of flawed decision-making that doomed USAdvertising from the start. As you'll see in the next couple of weeks.

Next time: Loser #2