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This was a not particularly subtle way of telling us that we were history.

Being put up for review is akin to having your spouse announce in front of everyone you know that he or she no longer loves you and for the next several months he or she will be seeing other people—dozens of smarter, younger, cooler people, many of whom, by the way, you know quite well—and then having all sorts of kinky, experimental sex with the most interesting and promising of them, probably no more than six, often doing many of the things that you may have once suggested but were never allowed to.

Sometimes during this process your spouse will describe his or her ongoing antics in excruciating detail for you. Sometimes you’ll simply read a steamy, anonymous insider’s account of it in the press. And then, after six months of this, six months of holding your tongue and continuing to do all the dishes and dirty laundry and seeing to the upkeep of the home you once shared, the children that mean so much to you, you will finally get your chance to say—after I’ve given you every ounce of my energy and passion for so many years, after trying to rekindle better times with romantic weekends and couple’s counseling, after he or she has slept or flirted with just about every one of your friends and neighbors, not to mention several total strangers—“Here’s how I’ve changed, sweetheart, and here’s why and the extent to which I’m willing to publicly humiliate myself to win you back.”

At that point, if you were the client (or spouse), would you want to take you back?

In 1985 the length of the average client-agency relationship was more than eight years. Today it is half that. In a 2007 poll taken by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, more than half of the 825 CMOs surveyed said they planned to fire their advertising agency and change direction in 2008. This was before the markets collapsed in October.

Sometimes, in a rare instance, a client will put an account up for review to light a fire under its agency, secretly hoping that the agency will snap out of its complacency and produce brilliant, winning work. But this clearly was not one of those instances.

At that point, if our client was to light a fire under us, it would not have been with a match. It would have been with a flamethrower, and we would have been lashed to a stake, neck deep in dead storyboard kindling.

In part this is because the people who hired us—old-school people with long-standing relationships with our senior management—were no longer there. They had been replaced on almost every level, most notably by a pair of young, progressive, meticulously dressed, and ambitious marketing executives who clearly wanted nothing to do with the likes of us—an old, stodgy advertising behemoth whose upper management was bloated on recent IPO cash (the agency had recently been sold to a large holding company) and had taken its collective eye off the ball.

What this new regime wanted was what every smart brand steward wanted in 2000: a smart, nimble, young, hip, hungry shop that had some kind of handle on global branding and the world of digital—a.k.a. new-media, a.k.a. nontraditional—advertising.

“We absolutely should not participate in the review,” I told my boss (an executive creative director, who reported to a U.S. creative director, who answered to a global creative director), six weeks before the pitch. “They despise us. They sneer at the clumsy diplomacy of our global network. They detest our musty, 1950s-decor offices. They can’t stomach our—okay, my—bad fashion choices. We embarrass them. We could show them the most innovative, strategically brilliant work possible right now, and they would not buy it.”

What I didn’t say is that I didn’t blame them, because after many attempts we hadn’t been able to get a consensus on a brand campaign from our global clients and even within the ranks of our own global satellite agencies.

Plus, we really didn’t know the first thing about nontraditional advertising. At the time, asking an agency like ours to do nontraditional advertising