From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [34]
What’s going on in advertising today – the real revolution – is that the younger agencies, the Mary Wellses, the Doyle, Danes, the Carl Allys, eliminate jobs. This is what is causing the upheaval on Madison Avenue. Every time you read of an account moving from an older agency like Foote, Cone & Belding, Compton, or Lennen & Newell to one of the newer and smaller agencies, jobs are eliminated. And account men are affected most of all in these moves.
Let’s take TWA when it was at Foote, Cone. Here is an account billing about $22 million a year, and although I don’t know the exact figures I’d be willing to bet there were about seventy-five people having something to do with the account. Again, I don’t know how many people Mary Wells has on the account, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a hell of a lot fewer people – maybe no more than fifty people. And doing a good job. The point is, you don’t need twelve guys servicing TWA and holding their hands and fifteen guys running around wondering if their coffee is warm enough and what they can do. A Mary Wells eliminates jobs. She produces good advertising which is what the game is all about, so she doesn’t need account guys jumping out of their skins every time somebody from TWA calls the office.
Let’s take TWA one step farther. As a hypothetical example, let’s figure TWA moves out of Wells to Daniel & Charles. I don’t think Danny Karsch would have fifty people working on the account. I’d estimate that he would get by by using maybe thirty or thirty-five people: four copy and art people, two promotion copy and art, three or four in media, two or three in research, three in marketing, three in production, and then secretaries and bookkeeping people. So, from an original one hundred people you’re down to maybe thirtyfive. And there are sixty-five people on the beach. What I’m getting at is that the number of people working on an account is in direct relationship to the quality of the work being turned out. If you can find four great writers and four great art directors, you can have yourself a fantastic campaign. And let TWA worry about its own hot coffee.
There’s a very good account in town in terms of the prestige attached to it. The billing is nothing, but the prestige is terrific. This account has been with an old-line agency for almost fifty years. Well, the grandson of the founder of the business is comparatively young, maybe forty-two or forty-three, and he has come to the conclusion that maybe the people at this old-line agency don’t understand his problems. Now after fifty years, this is the equivalent of a guy going to his wife and saying, ‘Tootsie, I want a divorce.’
The wife, sitting there with her fifty-year-old varicose veins, says, ‘Divorce?’ And the guy says, ‘Yeah, it’s very strange. I want a divorce to marry a young chick who’s about seventeen years old and who’s making a lot of noise. Right now she’s about to be arrested for running nude down Madison Avenue. You know, I realize that we’ve lived together for a long time and you’ve done an awful lot for me and we’ve grown up together, but I want a divorce. I mean, I see something down the block that’s really fantastic. I want to try it.’
You can see the desperation that’s going on in the older agencies. They rant and rave at agencies like mine, like Leber, Katz, Paccione, Carl Ally, Delehanty, all the newer agencies, even Doyle, Dane, which is only twenty or so years old. In a sense guys are coming to the older agencies and asking for divorces, and then they’re running out with these young chicks. And so what the older agencies do is try to act like a woman who is trying