From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [38]
An agency president once told me, ‘I start worrying about losing an account the minute I get it. The minute I sign the contract, I’m one step closer toward losing it.’ At that point he’s worried and his contribution to the advertising is fear. He pushes it to the people under him: ‘We’ve got to hold, we’ve got to hold.’ A good example of this is Yardley, which came into Bates while I was there, and at the first meeting the word was, ‘We want great work, we want creative work.’ Terrific! Everyone shook hands, and we opened up the booze for special occasions and had a party.
The next day – I swear, the next day – the word was out: ‘We’re in danger of losing the account. We’ve got to be very careful of the way we handle it.’ So work was done and never shown to the client. Why? ‘We can’t afford to show him stuff like this right now.’ Step one: fear. They’re afraid to even show him work. So they show him what they consider safe. And safe is not what he came to the agency for.
I felt like a shill in the Yardley pitch. They trotted me out and showed the Yardley people some of the work that I had done on Pretty Feet while I was at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. And Yardley was sold a bill of goods that I was going to be in charge of the account. All I ever did was work on one piece of the account and then the agency never wanted to show the work to the client. The people were afraid of the work and didn’t even want to let the client say no to it. So they did some off-the-wall garbage and they showed it to the client and the client threw it back in their laps. I mean, it was real garbage. And they were hung. The account moved from Bates to Delehanty. Delehanty resigned it when they picked up Coty, which conflicted with Yardley. Yardley then started its own house agency and recently gave that up for Benton & Bowles and Davis, Parker and Valenti.
Accounts move around so much these days because they’re not getting what they want. It’s the agency’s job to express what they need. That’s the agency’s job. The client simply knows where he wants his product to go in the marketplace. My agency just picked up a new account and the client said, ‘I’ve had two agencies, one which insisted that everything they did was gold and I got rid of them, and the other agency which came in every day and said, “What would you like to see on paper this week?” ‘ My partner Ron Travisano puts it another way: ‘Would you like to see something in an opentoe campaign?’ An account shouldn’t be treated that way. He should be guided, but he shouldn’t be forced into doing anything he really doesn’t want to do.
Most account guys live with fear in their hearts. I know a guy in town named Coolidge. He once was very big at an agency called Cunningham & Walsh. Big money. Maybe ninety big ones a year. He got fired from there and thanks to his good friend, Beautiful Jim, at Fuller & Smith & Ross, he zipped over to Fuller & Smith as a creative supervisor. Coolidge lives in Westport, knows the right people, he’s very soft-spoken, does none of the things that people assume an agency guy would do. But he doesn’t live like a human being. He’s got that fear crawling in him every day. Most of these guys start the day off deciding which account is going to call them and scare them. All an account has to do to terrorize an account man is call up and say, ‘Hey, can you send me some copies of the last five ads you’ve done for us?’ and the panic spreads.
Yet this doesn’t go on at Doyle, Dane. They never think they’re going to lose anything. They’ve got a marvelous track record and they’re confident. Mary Wells isn’t sitting there worrying about whether she’s going to lose anything. And she usually