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It was raining when I left Citizen’s office space on Pine Street. I’d hoped to take the BART train out to the airport, in part to save money, but also, after speaking with Raj, I thought it was about time I started to green my ass. But I was running late, and shit, there was a cab right there. I waved it down and got in. As we drove to the airport, I thought about ethics and compromise, white lies, gray areas, and greenwashing, capitalism, and democracy.

As I got out of the cab at the airport, I noticed an official-looking seal on the door that I was about to close.

It said that this was an official “Bay Area Clean Energy Natural Gas Taxi.”

Approaching the terminal, I wondered what the Greenwashing Index or the government of Norway would make of the tagline for the company behind the program: “North America’s Leader in Clean Transportation.”

Reunion

An Unbranded Moment of Cultural Importance with a Shared and Authentic Sense of Community

Ten years after I walked out of N. W. Ayer for the last time, in June 2008, I tracked down and e-mailed a group of former Ayer employees. I told them that I was writing this book, some of which would be about my memorable and confounding years at Ayer, and that I wanted to ask them … what? For their perspective? To corroborate my account? Tell me how horrible/wonderful it was? To play the blame game?

I wasn’t sure.

And my e-mail—which was filled with questions such as “Why did America’s first and oldest agency fail?” and “Who or what was most responsible?”—didn’t help garner a lot of forthcoming, attributed responses. The e-mail made it seem as if I were writing a juicy, accusatory tell-all titled, as one off-the-record executive called it in a letter to me, “Fall of the House of Ayer: A Tragedy in Five Acts.” And while the story of my time at Ayer was fairly straightforward if not unfortunate—young guy bit off more than he could chew and went down in flames—those of others were far more tragic, litigious, and contentious. Their memories clearly reflected this.

For instance, one former colleague, also under the promise of anonymity, recalled one of Ayer’s later, short-term leaders: “When a poseur takes the reins, spends precious cash on golf lessons for the staff, hosts dress-up days, and parades knee-high-boot-wearing hookers through the executive halls on Friday … then goes off on a binge … it’s easy to see why that ship lost its rudder.”

And Andrew Donnelly, who worked with me at Ayer during the early 1990s and is now a popular stand-up comedian living in L.A., offered this: “Seeing the head of account management rollerblading through the halls of the 34th floor was either a symbol that things were getting considerably better or about to get a whole lot worse.”

Some blamed a string of bad management choices that began in the late 1980s and lasted through the millennium. Others blamed management for being late to the game in building a global network at a time when every major player needed one, and then spending too hastily and foolishly playing catch-up. In a matter of hours, mostly from off-the-record colleagues, I learned more about the feuds, politics, arrogance, hubris, sexual escapades, and tactical misfires at the agency than I did in my eight years inside its walls. Who knew?

A few days after I’d sent out my e-mail query, I had lunch on Hudson Street with John Bowman, now executive group planning director at Saatchi & Saatchi New York. Bowman is an optimistic, effusive man who started his career in the traffic department at Ayer in Philadelphia before following the company to New York in the late 1970s. In New York he worked his way from traffic, to copywriter, to the head of account planning. We’d worked together for years on AT&T, US West, and a number of new-business pitches.

As soon as we sat down, Bowman told me that he had no desire to play the blame game. The most negative thing he’d say (and I certainly wasn’t pressing) was “I loved the art that was Ayer and the art that Ayer made, but I came to