Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [34]
The first sign that I was completely burned-out occurred when, after getting a call on Christmas Eve telling me that the CEO of US West had canceled the best two commercials in our three-spot, potentially career-enhancing shoot with an A-list director (the talented photographer and director Peggy Sirota), I wasn’t crestfallen. I was relieved. I would have to be away from home only half as long as I’d imagined. Soon after this I found out that management was bringing in a senior creative executive from Ogilvy to take over the account. I was angry and jealous. The move was clearly a reflection on my performance. The second sign that I needed a time-out was how quickly my anger and jealousy again turned to relief.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if we had been wildly and immediately successful with the US West business. If I had solved the retail-brand problem and shot the rest of those spots with Peggy Sirota and made all the clients happy and won awards that would have won us new business, and perhaps helped turn America’s first agency around.
But of course, that wasn’t the case. Before my daughter was born, I did something that was not common for a male advertising executive in 1998. I told my ambitious, driven, unyieldingly dedicated boss that I was going to take an unpaid yet totally legal three-month paternity leave. I told her I was going to stay at home and enjoy fatherhood. I was going to take a break, a sabbatical, catch my breath, recharge the old batteries.
I knew this would not be a popular or particularly smart career move. Although I was legally entitled to it, it screamed I give up to my creative director and to Quinlan, a young (by CEO standards) woman passionately trying to make the most of her shot at advertising stardom and not known for her tolerance of outside commitments, let alone breaks or sabbaticals.*3 Plus, she was embroiled in high-stakes internal and external political battles that I was oblivious to, and she was fighting for her job every day. Shit was hitting fans of every size and oscillating range in every part of the agency and I was going home to change diapers? So it’s understandable to an extent that she would not be pleased, that her response to my words could best be described as looking at me as if I no longer mattered.
Ayer’s management team was even less pleased when, three months later, I came back to visit the office to announce that I was going to further exercise my rights under U.S. law and take an additional three months of unpaid paternity leave.
My creative director, who would soon be let go, folded his hands on his desk and told me that this was not a good thing. He told me that because of the way the agency was structured and its current financial situation—not, lawyers note, because of paternity leave!—they were going to have to let me go. I knew this was coming. In fact, I already had a job lined up at Y&R. But still, it was no fun being let go. It had been a flawed, difficult place to work for some time, but I knew that I’d had my chances—chances that few people my age were offered at a major agency—and I had failed.
Before I left his office, my creative director, one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, said, “You know, at some point you’ve got to decide whether you want to be a great adman or a great novelist.” Despite his intelligence, I still think this is one of the dumbest things anyone has ever said to me.
Three months later I was hired as a creative director at Young & Rubicam, with the understanding that I would