Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [18]
So I was making ads like a demon. Often writing fifty or more headlines a day. Block after block of body copy. I was experimenting with styles, from bold and brash to highbrow and witty, to staccato, jazzy, and unabashedly sentimental. I got the bad pun and wordplay phase of my career out of my system in a matter of weeks. I saw what types of ads got a rise out of clients and could enhance your reputation, even if no one had the guts to run them. Then I started doing radio, which was a whole other way of thinking and writing. I learned to write for the ear and to a clock, and to edit on the fly with a pissed-off voice-over talent (Lawrence Taylor, Bowie Kuhn, Suzanne Somers) sitting in a booth waiting to get to his or her next gig.
For the most part, as long as the clients were happy, I was left to my own devices. Soon I got a raise. Then the creative director, out of laziness and respect, began asking me into his office to brainstorm real, nonbook ads with his art director.
One night he asked me to hang around to meet two guys who had a few small accounts of their own, and who might be interested in merging their fledgling agency with ours. Deep into the next two nights we created ideas with them for a campaign for a brand of Italian condom (this is before every aspiring and junior creative felt compelled to have a condom ad in his or her book). These guys were smart and funny and passionate. I’d never seen people get passionate about ads before, and I was transfixed by the process and feeding off the vibe.
I wanted to be funny and passionate, too. When it’s working, brainstorming fuels a unique kind of rush: at once competitive, entertaining, surprising, and intellectually stimulating. Sometimes it’s like an intense game of Jeopardy! or Pictionary (interrupted by jags of late-night dorm room small talk); other times it’s like being an inventor perpetually on the cusp of discovery. Those two nights had elements of all of the above, and if this is what it was like to work at a real agency, I wanted in. Ultimately, we came up with dozens of concepts, several of which were mine.
After a week passed without any word from our prospective partners, I stood outside my creative director’s office and waited for him to get off the phone with the travel agent who was securing a personal chef for his Caribbean vacation villa. I asked what happened to the other guys, if they were still thinking of merging with us. He told me it wasn’t going to happen. Richard Kirshenbaum and Jon Bond had decided they were going to start an agency of their own. Within months their headlines were making headlines, with a series of controversial, industry-shaking ads for Kenneth Cole that had fun with of-the-moment pop-culture characters like Imelda Marcos, Ivan Boesky, and Corazon Aquino. Twenty-two years later Kirshenbaum Bond is a global agency whose work is part of the advertising canon and still going strong. Often in the years that followed, especially when things would get trying for me in adland, I would wonder what could have been if I’d just written a more provocative Italian condom headline.
A few weeks after the encounter with Kirshenbaum and Bond, my creative director resigned to take a big job at another, “real” agency. Several weeks after that, the president of the agency sauntered into my cube for the first time since I’d been hired.
He told me I was being laid off. He assured me that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the state of the agency, which was not good. I immediately called my former creative director, who was already at his new agency.
He was not at all sympathetic. “You should have seen the writing on