Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [28]
The shoot went even better than we’d expected. One poignant moment after another beautifully captured, framed by sea and cliffs and monuments to freedom and the fallen. Going back to New York, we knew that unless we really botched the edit and postproduction work, we’d have the powerful commercial we had hoped for all along. What we were less sure about was what kind of agency we were returning to.
The D-day spot was a success in all respects. It won several awards. It won us a chance to do more business for our increasingly estranged client. It raised awareness and money for World War II veterans. Also, it won me a promotion, a token raise, and more opportunities.
The agency, however, continued its death spiral.
In the next few years after that fateful call from AT&T in our CEO’s office, we became a shell of the organization we had been. A slew of senior executives had come and gone. More clients had followed AT&T’s lead and were jumping ship, and new business prospects were being steered away by their pitch consultants, the client advisers who, rightly, saw our instability at the top as a risk not worth taking.
At one point in early 1996, I was offered a creative director’s job and a substantial raise at the agency Wells, Rich, Green, working for Linda Kaplan Thaler (now head of the Kaplan Thaler Group). I was doing well at Ayer and I liked and respected my coworkers, but Ayer was obviously in decline and Wells, Rich, Green was not,*2 and raises were especially hard to come by at an agency on a losing streak.
I went back to Ayer and gave my boss (who would later be my boss at Y&R) the news. She in turn called Mary Lou Quinlan, our new president, who barely knew me. Quinlan was in a town car on her way to a client meeting with our new CEO, who knew me even less. Considering the dire circumstances at the agency and my relationship with its new leaders, I was expecting that to be my last day at Ayer. But I was surprised when, a few minutes later, my boss called back to tell me that they wanted to match Wells’s offer. Quinlan said they were determined to turn the agency around and wanted me to be a part of it. Plus, she said, “Wait till you get a load of the guy we’re going to bring in here as the next creative director, it will blow your mind.”
Back then I was a sucker for that kind of talk.
Greetings from the Nincompoop Forest
“You are all lost in the Nincompoop Forest, and I am the only person who can show you the way out.”
It was October 1996, and Mark Fenske was standing at the front of a conference room filled with the leadership of the once-outstanding and presently struggling New York advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Partners. There were dozens of us, many of whom had had long and successful careers, and here was this West Coast guy telling each and every one of us, by way of introduction, that we sucked.
Fenske had just been hired as our chief creative officer and was charged with nothing less than overhauling our entire creative output, and saving America’s first and oldest advertising agency from extinction. He was wearing an untucked flannel shirt and blue jeans, and he held a large leather-bound journal, much as a preacher would hold a cherished copy of the Good Book. Standing more than six feet four and built like a retired offensive lineman, Fenske was a former creative star at shops like Wieden+Kennedy and his own agency/ commercial-production hybrid, the Bomb Factory. He has a basso voice that is easily recognizable from the number of commercials he’s read