Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [17]
I was perplexed. What to make of “Feh!”? Perhaps in Hebrew (which I assumed it was) “Feh!” represented the highest of praise. After all, it was capped off by an exclamation point. Moses was Feh! My body copy was Feh! My future was totally, undeniably Feh!
However, since I was too embarrassed to ask anyone, and judging by her surly mood that day, I concluded that maybe “Feh!,” exclamation point or not, wasn’t such a favorable comment. So I rewrote the piece for the glorified Irish romance novel.
One day in my office I received a call from the president of Dell’s outside ad agency. He told me, “Since you’ve been rewriting most of our ads for the last few months, we want to offer you a junior copywriter’s job so you can get them right the first time.”
When I found out that the position paid $10,000 a year more than I was making, the decision was easy. However, my boss went beyond Feh! when I gave her the news. She slammed her door and told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life and it was important that I understand there would be no turning back. No crawling back. If I went through with this, I would never, ever work for her again.*5
I didn’t care. I was leaving Midtown for the West Village to work at an actual advertising agency, and I was getting a raise. Sure, it was a small specialty agency, I had never heard of most of their non-publishing clients, and my salary was still a fraction of what I’d have made as a mason’s laborer. Plus, at the time I had no idea that the creative director had one foot out the door and the whole damned place was on the verge of bankruptcy. Even if I had known, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. I was going to make ads for a living.
It’s Hard to See the Writing on the Wall of a Cubicle
New York, New York, 1986
My final interview for my first agency job took place in front of a big-screen TV in a conference room with the principals of the agency. Part of the screening process apparently had to do with my ability to drink beer and watch the Mets play the Houston Astros in the playoffs, a skill at which I was particularly gifted. In 1986 few people knew more about my beloved Mets or were as adept at the consumption of beer.
No one asked me any questions about where I had gone to college, where I saw myself in five years, what my favorite campaign or agency was, or if I had ever committed a felony. What they wanted to know is what I thought of Gooden, Carter, Strawberry, and Hernandez, and if I wanted another beer.
At one point someone clinked my bottle and said congratulations, which is when I began to suspect that I’d gotten the job.
The agency had about a half-dozen book publishers for clients as well as a handful of smaller “mainstream” accounts. My creative director had worked at large full-service agencies and made it clear that he was going to focus on new business and non-book-related ads. Much of the book stuff was beneath him and would be my responsibility. For the next eight months I wrote between three and six ads a day. Most were for book sections in newspapers and magazines. For each assignment I would simply scan the sales sheet or read some or, if I liked it, all of a manuscript. Typically, I’d give the account person a choice of three headlines—straightforward, clever, and unexpected—but eight times out of ten the client would simply ask for a quotation headline.
I wasn’t working on a big account, doing high-profile TV spots, or crafting traffic-stopping print ads. I rarely got to meet, let alone present my work to, a client, and 99 percent of the time I didn’t even work with an art director. Basically, I was holed up alone in a windowless work space, all day, every day, while my boss in the corner office overlooking the Hudson across the hall, in addition to being focused on nonbook ads, was mostly focused on the acquisition