From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [24]
Whammo! As soon as two or three agencies get the word, that word leaks out. I don’t know why, but pretty soon everybody in town knows it. There hasn’t been a new account change in years that was a surprise. The word finally reaches one of the advertising publications. Is it true that Ford is looking for a new agency? Well now, you’re at Thompson working on the Ford account and your life goes before your eyes. You see that in two or three months you’re going to be out of work, and in advertising when you’re on the beach it usually lasts for eight or nine months.
For the sake of argument, let’s say the word doesn’t get out. Maybe you just sense that the chairman of the board might have talked to the president. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a meeting and you get a feeling: ‘I don’t like the way Don smiled at me when he left that meeting.’ I’ve seen guys standing around after a meeting saying, ‘Did you notice that his last words were, “I’ll see you. It’s been nice knowing you”? What did he mean by that?’ Then somebody else pipes up and says, ‘Obviously, he’s trying to scare us.’ Another guy says, ‘Fuck him, he can’t scare us.’ And you know what? It hits them. The next day everybody’s sitting around wondering how they’re going to lose that account. Still another guy says, ‘Remember looking at that guy from the account? He didn’t smile during the presentation.’ Then they start at each other: ‘Why did you talk so much?’ ‘I didn’t talk so much; you spent too much time talking to the guy who didn’t smile.’ ‘I didn’t talk that much; you screwed up the slide projector. No wonder that guy didn’t smile.’
Now let’s take the other side of what can happen. Let’s say that the advertising manager decides to tell his agency that things aren’t going well. The opposite of when the word doesn’t get out officially; that is, the account executive is told – point-blank – that he’s in trouble, and he doesn’t have to go through all the mumbo jumbo of figuring out who didn’t smile at a meeting.
So Don, the advertising manager, meets with the account executive and says, ‘Joe, I had a little session with the president yesterday and look, I don’t want you people to get nervous but he’s really not too pleased with the way things are going.’ The blood starts to drain out of Joe’s face and his fingers go numb. He starts to nod and stutters, ‘Well, Don, don’t worry, we’ll work something out.’ Joe runs back to the agency like Paul Revere screaming ‘The British are coming. The British are coming.’ He’s screaming, ‘We’re in trouble, we’re in trouble.’ Guys begin running around. There are dozens of meetings. The whole thing is weird to watch because when that account man comes back and they close that door and he says, ‘Look, we’re in a lot of trouble, the president of the company says our ads are lousy,’ that’s the first sign of death.
Whichever way the word comes – directly from the advertising manager or indirectly from gossip in the trade papers or from something you pick up at a meeting – it immediately spreads throughout the entire agency. I was a mailboy at Ruthrauff & Ryan when they were on their way to losing the Kentile account. The kids working in the mailroom making sixty bucks a week knew a year ahead that Ruthrauff & Ryan was going to lose the account and they were scared stiff. And you know, the kids were right, Kentile moved out of there in like ten months. Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone today – nothing, it doesn’t exist. One of the reasons that it died was because of no communication. The mailroom knew they were going to lose accounts before the management did.
They were an old-fashioned agency, old-line, and they just dribbled away to nothing. When I went to work there in 1955 the big news was they hired a guy who ‘had a great book of names.’ I didn’t know what the hell that meant and then it dawned on me: they went and hired a guy who was more of a pimp than he was an account executive. This was the guy with a big fat address book who was going to save them. I mean, forget it, this guy knew how to get anybody