From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [1]
‘Why?’ I asked.
His answer was delivered with a nervous smile. ‘Because this is Ford and they don’t want your kind working on their business.’
It took me years to figure out what ‘your kind’ meant.
Advertising agencies in those days were broken down among ethnic lines. The Mad Men flourished in large Protestant ad agencies like J. Walter Thompson and N. W. Ayer, BBDO and Ted Bates. These agencies monopolized all the large advertising accounts (cars, food, cigarettes, soft drinks, beer). The other, smaller accounts (dress manufacturers, shoes, underwear, small retail stores) were regulated to tiny, ‘Jewish’ ad agencies. By 1950 only one agency whose founders were Jewish had managed to win packaged goods, cigarette, liquor and car accounts. They did so by naming their agency after the color of the walls in their office, and by not using their Jewish names on their masthead – thus Grey Advertising was born.
Then, in the mid-1950s, a ‘Jewish’ advertising agency broke through the ethnic barrier. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s campaign for advertisers like Volkswagen (‘Think Small’, ‘Lemon’) and Levy’s Bread (‘You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s’) changed the advertising business. Doyle Dane Bernbach made distinctive advertising that had ‘attitude’ and respected the consumer’s intelligence. They sold products with ads that had humor, bold language and layouts with sharp, clean and stylish design. It opened the door for a totally new kind of Mad Man.
By 1961, when I got my first copywriting job, ‘my kind’ were suddenly in demand. The creative revolution had begun. Advertising had turned into a business dominated by young, funny, Jewish copywriters and tough, sometimes violent, Greek and Italian art directors.
The original Mad Men did not give up without a fight.
I once attended an advertising conference held at the Greenbrier Hotel in 1968. The dean of the original Mad Men, the great David Ogilvy, was the keynote speaker. The subject of his speech was the new creative revolution in advertising. Ogilvy knew his audience was mostly made up of desperate men who were trapped in agencies that were losing accounts to young, upstart, ethnic agencies. Ogilvy lashed out and declared, ‘I say the lunatics have taken over the asylum!’
The audience rose and gave that fighting line a standing ovation. I stood up and was clapping as loudly as the next man when I suddenly thought to myself, What are you clapping about – he’s talking about you.
It was a wonderful asylum. We were wild. We made the antics depicted on every episode of Mad Men look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Our little agency was permanently filled with the sweet smell of burning cannabis. Life was easy was back in the days before human resource departments controlled business and someone decided we all should be politically correct. Everyone smoked (I had a four-pack-a-day habit). Everyone drank martinis (I had many a three-martini lunch), and everyone screwed around.
In the business world of the 1950s and early 60s, sex was a forbidden subject – everyone did it and no one talked about it. But by 1965 the sexual revolution was on, and the advertising business went wild. I encouraged it at my agency because nothing got creative people to come in early and leave late better than the prospect of sexual adventure.
In 1967, when I opened my ad agency, Jerry Della Femina & Partners, a group of us started an Agency Sex Contest. For more than twenty-five years, one week at the end of every year was devoted to Animal House-like antics. This was, until today, the best-kept secret in advertising. Thousands of people took part in the Agency Sex Contest.
The contest had everyone in the agency voting anonymously on paper ballots for the three people they most wanted to go to bed with. They were also asked to vote on the person of the same sex they would consider going to bed with. And, of course, there was the ménage a trois category, in which they selected the two other people they wanted