From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [3]
Fifteen minutes later, with the small talk out of the way, I remember thinking, They’re smart. More talk, more talk on how we might get together. I remember thinking, They’re very smart.
Another fifteen minutes went by, as they told me how I might buy them and proposed a complicated reverse takeover. That’s when it hit me. Oh my God. They’re smarter than I am. I’ve got to get out of here while I still have an ad agency. I remember backing out the door, and heaving a sigh of relief as I stumbled out into the daylight. It was a close call – a street-smart Mad Man from America had just escaped the clutches of a couple of even smarter Mad Men from the UK.
A few months after my meeting with Saatchi & Saatchi, John O’Conner, a reporter friend from Advertising Age, called and said, ‘Got some news for you. Compton Advertising just bought Saatchi & Saatchi.’
Now if there was an advertising agency that would have epitomized Mad Men it was Compton Advertising. Their former copy chief/president, Milton Gossett, could have been a double for Don Draper. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Saatchi owns Compton.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘You didn’t hear me. Compton owns Saatchi.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Saatchi will eventually own Compton.’
‘You’re out of your mind’ was O’Conner’s answer. I hung up the phone after making a small bet with O’Conner that the minnow from the UK would swallow the whale from the US. A few months later, in a reverse takeover, Saatchi & Saatchi owned Compton and proceeded to take over the advertising world.
In 1986 I bowed to the British buying spree and sold my agency, Della Femina McNamee, to a British company called White Collins Rutherford & Scott. It was sort of a mini reverse takeover on my part, because my agency took over all the agencies that White Collins Rutherford & Scott had acquired in the US.
Everyone who watches Mad Men asks me the same question: Has the advertising business changed?
Yes, dramatically.
To paraphrase Mr. Ogilvy’s comment in 1968, the lunatics are back in their cells, dead or retired. The internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising. Copy has taken a back seat to design, and television advertising is shrinking because every client is looking for digital solutions. They want more and more, and want it to cost less and less. A few nineteen-year-old students from the School of Visual Arts in New York can design and produce a brilliant campaign in a few hours that once would have taken weeks of late-night creative work by fifty people to produce.
Me? I’m still in the business, running an ad agency called Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners. I’m as in love with the business as when I was a sixteen-year-old mail boy at Ruthrauff & Ryan.
Once a Mad Man, always a Mad Man.
CHAPTER
ONE
NAZIS
DON'T
TAKE
AWAY
ACCOUNTS
‘The image of advertising still hangs in. The movie Blow-Up is a good example. Here’s this scrawny English photographer – a fashion photographer – and in one scene these two chicks literally attack him on his purple no-seam backdrop. Thousands of people watch this photographer jumping from one chick to the next and they think, Wow! Imagine what goes on in advertising if this is what happens to a photographer. So another whole batch of people decides to quit delivering milk or whatever the hell they were doing and they’ve made up their minds to get into advertising …’
Most people think advertising