From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [19]
If there is a jungle part to the advertising business, this is it – when a guy is wounded and trying to survive. But the word goes out, and there are a lot of people around town who can smell a guy who’s going to die. And they jump him. They literally jump him. No holds are barred. The minute the guy looks like he’s dead, he immediately becomes the butt of a lot of jokes. ‘He could never do it; I always knew he was a bum.’
One agency president I know has a master plan for his entire agency. The president knows exactly when each person is going to get it. This president understands that if an underling gets too powerful or controls too big a piece of the business, then he, the president, is in trouble. So he’s got a chart in his hand with a date of departure marked beside everyone’s name. I once talked to an account man working for this president and I told him, ‘You’re dead because in the master plan everybody goes, you included.’ This guy laughed. The last time I saw him he said, ‘You know, you were right. He does have a master plan. Everybody goes. One by one, everybody gets it.’
The master plan works this way: ‘This guy can take me up from a fashion agency to package goods where the real money is, but he can’t take me past package goods. And this other guy, who got me a piece of cosmetic business, is my best friend and he’s saved me and he’s helped me make an agency and I love him and he’s great, but if I ever get to be a fifty-million-dollar agency and Henry Ford walks in the door with his account, this guy can’t carry it.’
Usually the large agencies have a killer to do the firing. Most agencies have one killer; the bigger agencies might have two killers. At Ted Bates & Company the agency killer was a little guy I’ll call Billy, who started with Ted Bates when the agency opened in the early 1940s. He lived right through up to his retirement a few years ago. He fired hundreds of people in his lifetime and literally was the cause of more unhappiness than any man I know. From the outside, it didn’t look like he had a big job at the agency, but he was the killer. And this guy did a job on everybody. He really was powerful, and he got his power by being close to Bates, the real Ted Bates. Who, by the way, really exists. Most people don’t know that. The real Ted Bates is supposed to be very quiet and very shy and doesn’t like to see people. He’s the Howard Hughes of advertising. Most people think that Ted Bates is a guy by the name of Ted who met another guy by the name of Bates and when they got together they said, ‘We’ll call it Ted Bates.’
Rosser Reeves was the flamboyant genius who was out front. The guy who caused all the trouble was Billy. When he retired, they threw an enormous banquet for him and gave him a golden stiletto as a going-away gift. I’m kidding about the stiletto, but they were frightened of him. The Bates killer reportedly walked away with a cool million when he retired. Plus the golden stiletto. (People don’t realize that advertising is the greatest welfare state going in the world. If you stay in one place long enough, you’ve got to pick up an enormous amount of bread. They may give you 5 percent of your annual salary and put it away for you in the profit-sharing plan, and this on top of the enormous salary and expense account.)
The Bates killer could fire anybody – and he had balls, too.