• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 365 0

to hold onto her husband. Like a fiftyyear-old woman hanging onto the breadwinner. The older agencies go out and buy a load of cosmetics and eye shadow and they put all this stuff on and do their hair – this is what they’re doing when they start hiring freaky young kids at star salaries. This is the façade, they’re putting on all this stuff and saying, ‘Well, if this is what it takes to hold my guy I’ll just hold my nose and do it.’ But they wind up looking like a fifty-year-old lady who’s wearing a miniskirt and dressed like a kid. They can’t make it that way, but they try, and the try costs them a lot of bread.

The agency president who has just lost an account worth a million dollars to his agency is not going to be the friendly, warm guy who the day before thought he had that million dollars locked in, and he’s going to transmit his feelings to his creative staff, right down to the account people. The account people know what to do – tranquilizers or aspirin. Big aspirin-takers in the advertising business. Advertising is a fantastic source of revenue to the aspirin business. Librium, Miltown – but heavy on the aspirin.

I’ve worked with guys who just pop aspirin as though they were going out of their minds. They have headaches, that lousy feeling – they don’t know what it is – and they sit there and pop aspirin all day long. In turn, they sell aspirin. When I was up at Bates, we probably sold more aspirin for the Anacin account than any other agency in the United States in the aspirin business, and we also consumed more Anacin than any other agency, too.

A good example of having that uneasy feeling is now taking place over at Foote, Cone. Now they’re a very good, very big agency that has been having tough luck and there’s uneasiness all over that place. I know, because I’m talking to account executives from there. Doors are kept closed all day long. Everybody has their door closed. The account guys don’t come out in the halls. That’s where the shrapnel is. Guys sit in their offices. And it becomes boring. It becomes tiring. You want to go to sleep. Your arms are tired. So are your legs. A boredom factor sets in at any large agency when the luck is going bad and when everything tastes a little rotten. There’s a lot of yawning and people can’t quite get with it. Guys are walking around saying, ‘Ah, what the hell, this is a lousy business and I think I’m going to get out of it.’

There is a physical change in an agency when the business starts to go. I saw it at Fuller & Smith & Ross when they were starting to blow business. Not only were guys logy – they actually started to get sick. Guys stay out with a bad back. They start to walk slower. Sometimes you really don’t know quite what’s wrong with them, but they’re not healthy any more. At Bates the guys took Anacin.

What a wonderful thing for the economists to play with. There’s a great case of an agency taking its product seriously.

Some of the biggest aspirin-takers that I’ve met in advertising are the hip-pocket account guys. Hip-pocket guys are a dying breed, but while they hang on they’re wonderful to watch. A hip-pocket guy has an account in his pocket. Account guys are able to get employment contracts at agencies if they come in with pocket business. A guy with pocket business can deliver the account – he’s in so tight with the account for whatever reason that he owns it, it’s his, nobody can touch it. Someplace along the line he impressed the account enough so that they’ll stick with this guy for life if he just plays along. There’s a guy in town who represents an entire industry – let’s call it the peacock-feather industry. All the breeders of peacocks got together and formed a Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association to do national advertising, lobbying, and whatever.

This fellow, Al, has been working with the Peacock Feather people for years. The Peacock Feather Breeders’ Association wouldn’t make any kind of advertising move whatever without Al’s being involved. When Al started working with the Peacock Feather account it was worth $1,000,000 in billing a year.