From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [23]
It’s a terrible system and one of the results of it is the guy who makes that thirty or forty grand a year is a very nervous cat. Although he really is safer, he has so much more to lose. He cries a lot at night. During the day you can spot him breezing out of the agency for a fifty-minute pick-me-up from his shrink. God knows how many people on Madison Avenue go to the shrinks, but the number and percentages must be enormous. You see everyone zipping out on Wednesday afternoon, two to three, for a fix. They come back and they’re acting like real people again. They’re O.K.
If you get into a discussion with somebody about his shrink, he clams up. Going to the shrink is not any status thing. People get very uptight about their shrinks. Oh, someone might casually remember that once, about ten years ago, he paid a short visit to a shrink, but that’s about it. The advertising guy goes to the shrink because he’s worried about losing his account. The shrink is probably sneaking off to his shrink because he’s worried about losing all of those advertising guys who shell out the bucks. So the shrink has to hold the advertising guy; the advertising guy has to hold the account. Everybody’s holding on for dear life. The day is going to come when a bunch of shrinks decide that they ought to start an agency.
It’s not tough to figure out why there is so much fear in advertising. It’s my theory that much of the fear starts very, very casually. Let’s say the wife of the chairman of a board of a large company is sitting under the hair dryer one day and she hears a couple of chicks talking about a funny Volkswagen commercial. At dinner that night she starts nagging her husband. He’s got enough headaches as it is, what with trying to get a new line of credit that won’t be usury, and also thinking he’s developing a heart condition. Anyhow, there’s his wife whining, ‘Harry, oh Harry, why can’t your company have funny little commercials like they do for Volkswagen?’ He feels a little pain in his chest and he mumbles something at her.
Next day, he’s out of sorts and the president of his company walks in, and the chairman says to the president, ‘Listen, Fritz, why don’t we get some advertising here? I sign a lot of bills. We spend three million dollars a year on advertising. What have we got to show for it?’ The president suddenly feels that creepy little chill and says, ‘My God, Harry, you’re right!’
The president suddenly trots down to the advertising manager and says, ‘You know, Don, I wonder if it isn’t about time that we reevaluate our advertising. We’ve been with Winthrop, Saltonstall, Epstein and Gambrelli now for four years. They still haven’t turned out a campaign that we can be proud of and happy with.’ Now who’s going to stop passing the buck? The advertising manager, who’s making maybe eighteen or twenty grand a year and up to his ears in a mortgage in Tenafly, isn’t about to say to the president of the company. ‘You’re wrong.’ Nor is the president about to say to the chairman, ‘Now, Harry, I think maybe you’re wrong about our advertising, why don’t you take a Cert or a Tum or something and settle down?’
So that fatal telephone call is made. The advertising manager calls two or three agencies he’s been keeping his eye on and says, very casually, ‘Wonder if you fellows would like to come over and talk to us? We’ve been reevaluating our advertising and … Now we’re very happy with Winthrop etc., don’t get me wrong about that, we just thought we’d