From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [25]
Now sometimes an account takes advantage of all this fear of losing an account. TWA is the classic example. In 1967 TWA was at Foote, Cone & Belding, and they were doing a pretty good job on the account. Most of the airlines are losing money hand over foot, not because their advertising is good or bad, but because the Government has screwed up the business so. The airlines live on Government handouts and subsidies and on airmail contracts. And the Government tells the airlines where to fly. Give me an airline that the Government says must fly to Buffalo and I’ll show you an airline losing money. I mean, nobody goes to Buffalo. Anyhow, someone gets itchy at TWA and they decide that maybe what they need, besides a couple of routes to Hawaii, is some new advertising. So they call up Foote, Cone and say, ‘You’re a swell bunch of guys, Foote, Cone, but we’re not that happy …’
I guess TWA at that time was billing $22 million. Do you understand what that means to an agency? Any agency? Something like $4 million a year in income. Well, the panic spread through Foote, Cone like wildfire. I was a creative supervisor at Ted Bates at the time and the calls started coming in. Copywriters, art directors, creative people – the big scare was on. That afternoon I met a girl from Foote, Cone in a restaurant and she said, ‘It’s true, it’s happening. We’re going to lose it – in a day or so.’ She was petrified. She was making forty grand a year as a writer and TWA was the only account she was working on, and she had to find a job fast. She had a whole list of people she was going to see about a job.
What happened in those next few weeks was the second most public rape since the Sabine women got it. Never before in the history of advertising were so many guys taken at the same time. TWA really did a first-rate job. A lot of very smart, very wise guys got taken. The whole thing was a big flimflam.
TWA was looking for freebies – presentation of agencies’ work without paying the freight. To get the freebies they went to nervous agencies – Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample; Benton & Bowles; Ted Bates. And they were such nice guys they even let the poor bastards at Foote, Cone compete for their own account. William Esty, N.W. Ayer, Sullivan Stauffer, and even McCann-Erickson were in there, too. They went to the old-line agencies who were beginning to feel the pinch from the new agencies coming up. Now these old-line agency fellows are not dummies; they’re sharpies.
I don’t know how many guys called TWA and said, ‘We want in on the presentation,’ and I don’t know which ones were called specifically by TWA and told, ‘We’d like you in on this.’ TWA was pretty smooth, too. They never would come out and say go out and spend $40,000 or $50,000 on a commercial. No, they would say, ‘We’d like to see some examples of your work, the work you would be doing for us.’
TWA never said, ‘Don’t spend the bread.’ They just smiled and sucked everyone in.
They didn’t get any response from outfits like Doyle, Dane. Or Ogilvy. Or Mary Wells. Agencies like these show possible new business what they’ve really done in the past and let it go at that. If anyone ever asked Doyle, Dane for a sample campaign, Doyle, Dane would say, ‘We don’t play that way.’ They