Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [113]
Besides, I’m sure some muckety-muck at Publicis is aware of the value of having an innovative, globally celebrated, socially responsible creative star to shine upon a cynical industry.
Got (Insert Annoying Parody Word Here)?
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
No matter what agency I worked at during my time in advertising, there was always another, better agency where my co-creatives and I would rather be. The It Agency. The shop that was producing the work we most admired, for the clients we most coveted, in an environment that appeared to be downright desirable.
Fallon, Mullen, Riney, Wieden, Cliff Freeman, Chiat, Ammirati (at the beginning), and Crispin (at the end) are just a few of the places I lusted after, agencies whose names began and ended so many of my whiny, frustrated, pathetic sentences over the years.
“But if this were Wieden …”
“Fallon would have been able to sell that idea.”
“Ammirati would have resigned the business before subjecting itself to a review.”
As if I knew.
But of all the agencies I admired, my favorite and longest-running crush was on Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. Not taking anything away from any of the above or any of the dozens of great shops not mentioned, it’s just that to me, Goodby was different. Beginning with its brilliant “Got Milk?” campaign (now in its sixteenth year for the California Milk Processor Board), to its work for everyone from Polaroid, The New Yorker, Chevys Restaurants, and Norwegian Cruise Line to Hewlett-Packard and Rolling Rock, Goodby never seemed to rely on the wacky, flashy, forced creative vibe that so many agencies went out of their way to project. To me, Goodby was always smart and cool, funny and somehow humble.
For twenty-five years they have been like the Coen brothers of advertising, producing smart, award-winning work that you wish you had done yourself. Goodby projected integrity, intelligence, and confidence rather than arrogance, bullshit, and insecurity.
To me, Goodby was the ultimate idea factory.
More than twenty years after my man-crush on Goodby began, on the first day of the summer of 2007, I finally landed a date. It had been an uncharacteristically tumultuous few months at Goodby, which is now owned by the Omnicom Group. After losing its showcase Saturn car business and faced with the prospects of substantial layoffs in January, it had gone on a stunning new-business tear, winning more than $2 billion in less than a month. This included Sprint ($400 million in billings), Hyundai ($600 million), and the National Basketball Association ($40 million), as well as a number of additional assignments from existing clients.
I visited Goodby’s offices on California Street on a Friday morning, and even though this was a summer Friday and this was advertising, the halls were buzzing. At one point after the new-business wins, the agency co founder Rich Silverstein said they were hiring two people a day, and since then the agency had grown from four hundred to more than six hundred employees.
After finishing up with a creative team, executive creative director Jamie Barrett explained how Goodby had managed to refresh and reinvent itself. From regional boutique to TV-driven powerhouse to global super-agency. And now digital impresarios. Somehow, seemingly overnight, Goodby had figured out interactive without buying a digital shop or opening up a sub-brand called, say, Goodby 2.0. How had the perennial Agency of the Year finalist/winner become Advertising Age magazine’s Digital Agency of the Year?
“It’s very ironic to us that we’re being held up as this progressive agency that has figured out digital,” Barrett said, “when two years ago we were kicking ourselves, saying, ‘We’re fucking dinosaurs, we’re always gonna be these thirty-second TV guys.’”
Rather than farm out its digital work, or gobble up an interactive shop, the agency