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Mobil is smarter than this. They’ve got games but they’re also asking you not to wrap your car up. They want you to live long enough to play their game, which is the best of both worlds. Most of the gasoline companies play it safe and stick with the heavy, starchy agencies. The heavy agencies have difficulty with unique products; and with something like gas they’re really stuck. A bright young agency might run into trouble with gas but at least they would approach it in a different way. A small agency, Smith/Greenland, got a shot at Flying A gasoline, and they turned out a very good job. Their pitch was that we design the gasoline for the way you drive in city traffic instead of country traffic. And they show a guy stuck on the Long Island Expressway someplace, trying to get through traffic. In the history of gasoline commercials, nobody has ever been stuck in a jam. You’re always seeing guys zipping down empty roads at ninety miles an hour. No one has ever hinted that you can get stuck in traffic. The campaign was good: they told motorists that most driving in the city is stop-and-go and that Flying A is the best gasoline for such conditions. It was the first time a small agency had a chance to do something with gasoline and I think they did a good job. (In January 1970 the account moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty. My guess is it’s because the copywriter who conceived the campaign, Helen Nolan, had herself just moved from Smith/Greenland to Delehanty.)

Of course some campaigns go bad for strange reasons. There’s a big New York agency about to lose a very big account in the Midwest. Nobody talks about it, but what happened is that the agency guy was having an affair with the wife of the president of the account. He got caught, and his agency got him the hell out of town by promoting him to the presidency of the New York office, which as far as I’m concerned is the ultimate promotion. Despite the agency moving this guy out of town, they’re still going to lose the account. Getting caught in the saddle is almost always grounds for losing an account.

* Delehanty changed its name to D.K.G. late in 1969, but mostly I call it ‘Delehanty’ throughout the book – which is how the place continues to be known in the business.

CHAPTER

THREE

FEAR,

SON OF

FEAR,

AND FEAR

MEETS

ABBOTT AND

COSTELLO

‘Copywriters and art directors have cold periods. If they’re not professionals about it, they show it, and they’re cold out loud – I mean, they’re cold to the whole world. They just can’t come up with anything. Instead of cooling it and relaxing, they act cold and they lose it all. That’s the time when the killers move in. They smell it. They smell it better than anybody else does. They know when a guy’s about to die …’

One Friday night a guy working late at the Marvin, Scott, and Friml agency decided to pack it in and go home about 11 or 11:30 at night. He walked out of his office, and luckily there was an elevator at the elevator bank. This guy – he was an account man – looked around and there was no one in sight so he climbs into the elevator, closes the door and manages to get it down to the ground floor. He opened the door and stumbled out of the elevator, he was that tired.

Monday morning, someone comes into his office and asks him if he had been working late Friday night. The account man says yes he was, in fact until about 11:30 p.m. ‘Did you sign out at eleven-twenty-five p.m.?’ The guy says it was about that time he signed out. ‘Well,’ says the fellow, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this. I’m very sorry, but you’re fired.’ The account man was shocked and he says, ‘For what?’ The other guy says, ‘I know it sounds crazy and I really don’t know how to explain it to you, but you stole Marvin L. Marvin’s personal elevator Friday night. That elevator you took was waiting there for him; it was his own elevator that took Marvin L. Marvin up and carried him down.’ Marvin L. Marvin is the chairman of the agency, and this story, by the way, comes to you from