• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“We figured we might as well go for it and do what we believe in,” Webb said. “So in the last six months we’ve been broadening our interests, and have almost sold as much in the first quarter of ‘08 as we did in all of ‘07.”

Webb said much of this had to do with letting the leaders of the company do what they do best. For instance, he said, “With Ben. He is so good at inspiring people. Agency people. VPs at Viacom. He’ll just blow people away in meetings with these extraordinarily visionary ideas—for instance, we just spoke at the World Economic Forum in Tokyo—but we needed someone to follow up and close those deals, which is why we’ve hired a corps of client-service people.”

The World Economic What? In Tokyo? I tried to picture Webb and Palmer in T-shirts and jeans speaking in front of the most powerful financial figures in the world. “No fucking way.”

“Way.”

“About what?”

“The convergence of media, entertainment, and advertising. And it was awesome.”

“So then,” I asked, “what are you now, if not a digital agency, after the six months of soul-searching? And what is it that you’re ‘going for,’ that you believe in?”

“Oh,” Webb said, smiling, rubbing his hands. “So many people are terrified of all of this, convergence, digital advertising, the future of TV and music, because they don’t completely understand it. But that’s exactly what makes us so excited, the uncertainty. We want to play in all of those areas, media, entertainment, and advertising. And it’s gonna be …”

Critical Mass

August 2000

“Fucking horrible.”

We were sitting on couches at the editor’s suite in Chelsea. The client, my boss, the head of the account, and a managing partner at the agency were there, too, and we had just previewed rough cuts of the three commercials. I waited for someone to speak, but no one did. Finally I said, “I think they’re really funny. In fact, I think they’re unlike anything in the category.”

The senior account guy shot me another look. The managing partner glared at me. Who wants to be unlike anything in the category? The goal, I was beginning to realize, was to be just like everything in the category, which, with this account, would be a marked improvement.

According to the client, the basic problem was too much humor and story, not enough food. The logo was too small, the price point came up too quietly and was also too small. And the food, there was not enough footage of the food. Where was all that beautiful film we’d shot of chicken and honey and chili peppers? After some discussion, the editor, my friend, trimmed some of the scenes that the client called superfluous. We lengthened food shots, zoomed in closer on the chicken, and increased the size of the price offer of so many pieces for $3.99. Still the client was not satisfied. “This isn’t working,” he said. “And we have to get this in front of the franchisees in a few days.”

We spoke some more. I stood up for the work. “We can’t just run thirty seconds of food footage, can we?”

He looked at the people in charge of me and then at me. “I’ve got a flight to catch. You know what I’m looking for.”

This is probably a good time to discuss why many, if not most, ads suck.

Why don’t we see clever, entertaining, Super Bowl–quality, award-winning work all the time? Why didn’t the leaders of the agency take a stand, as they seemingly do at all the great agencies, and tell the client to chill out, to fuck off, to trust us?

In this case, I imagine that at more than one time during the long relationship between this client and our agency, when sales were up with the client and the agency was thriving, people would have taken more of a stand. People would have said, “Trust us, we know best.” But, as previously mentioned, sales at KFC had been in the tank for a while, and my agency, once a blue-chip new-business-winning global force, was on a prolonged losing streak. On top of that, my group within the agency had already recently lost the huge financial-services mega-bank client, and our once independently