Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [31]
But in every other regard it was depressing. Because, unlike the young writers and art directors who were, at the very least, building great spec portfolios that could lead to a job at a more creative agency, most of us who had hoped to stay at N. W. Ayer for a while knew better. We knew that our clients, with whom some of us had been working for more than a dozen years, would never go for this stuff. We knew that the future of the agency was hanging by a thread and what Fenske was attempting was audacious and reckless.
And, ultimately, a failure.
Despite writing hundreds of scripts, I never sold one ad, one headline, while working for Fenske. At first he convinced AT&T to give us another chance, but the work he did for them was inconsistent, occasionally brilliant, and ultimately the type of work they would never be brave enough to buy. Finally they deprived us of the last scraps of their business, tossing it off to BBDO.
One day, after a particularly bad internal meeting in which our work, especially the art direction, had been brutalized, I told Kenny, my partner and friend, what Fenske had said about his being harder to fire because he had kids. I suggested that maybe he should cover his ass by getting his portfolio together and testing the waters for another job. Within a month, my friend, who had loved his job at N. W. Ayer, left. Fortunately, with his portfolio, he had no problem landing a job.
Of course, soon after he left, Fenske left, too.
Something Amish
In 1997, after AT&T had cut its final ties with us, we were determined to find another phone company, preferably one that would appreciate an agency with almost a hundred years of telecommunications experience. We targeted one of the Baby Bells, US West, a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) that had been spun off from the AT&T mother ship after the industry had been deregulated. US West, which serviced more than a dozen states in the Southwest and the Northwest, had recently put its account up for review and was about to break out national offerings.
Since at the time of the US West pitch we were an agency without a creative director (a makeshift creative board had been formed in Fenske’s absence) and our newest CEO incarnation was the passionate and ambitious but relatively inexperienced Quinlan, it should have been a disaster.
But of course, this being advertising, it was the opposite.
This was largely because the people left at N. W. Ayer were survivors of a long series of wars, internal and external. We had won and lost cherished accounts together. We had weathered one series of layoffs after another. And we had worked for every management type in the books, from tyrants and taskmasters, to cokeheads, executive greenhorns, and the occasional fair and talented leader, which made all the others that much harder to endure. And my creative peers, while not yet top-level executives, were for the most part skilled veterans who knew good work and formed a group unlike any I’d ever been part of, not only because we liked one another, but because we trusted one another.
Additionally, whether we wanted to admit it or not, the last creative director for whom we’d worked, Fenske, had changed every one of us. Yes, he was probably a bad choice for an agency like Ayer, and he had told us we all sucked and had made most of our lives a living hell, but he had also