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Sometimes the creative people get sucked into becoming shills. Let’s say a guy is doing a terrific job on a cosmetic account for a small agency. Let’s say further that an old-line agency has a cosmetic account that is in trouble. So, there’s big fear going around. The big agency will decide to sandbag. They go out and pull in stars and offer them fantastic salaries. Who can resist? Maybe the star copywriter would like to move the hell out of the East Village and breathe some of that good Westport air. So they can’t resist. They show up and they work on the pitch to save the account. The agency was doomed to lose the account anyway. The account goes, the guy goes. He was led into a trap and slaughtered. There have been many cases of this sort of thing and it’s very, very bad business.

Creative people don’t have a business sense about themselves. When I went to work at Bates I had one of the first contracts in the history of the Bates creative department. No one had ever asked for one. And they’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people go in and out of that creative department. Creative people don’t consider what can happen. Most creative people don’t know their own pattern of work and they aren’t smart enough – quite honestly – to go in and say, ‘I want a contract.’ I asked for and got a specific type of contract. I wanted it for eighteen months – not two years, or a year, but eighteen months. I told them that after four months they were going to hate me, and I meant despise me. ‘You won’t be able to stand me,’ I told them. ‘And after another eight months, you’re going to start grudgingly to like me but you would have fired me months ago if I didn’t have that contract. And after that I’m going to score. If I can make it for eighteen months, I’ll stay for life. If I don’t make it. I’ll pull out.’ Which is what I did. When I was at Delehanty for only four months Shep Kurnit was out looking for a new creative director. I stayed there for two and a half years.

I find it easy to hire an art director or a copywriter, but when an account executive comes in to see me I don’t even know what to ask him. I go through a session with this guy and spend most of the time reading my shoelaces. I have nothing to tell the guy, nothing to ask him. Should I ask him how he smiles? Should I ask him how do you handle yourself with clients? ‘Oh, I handle myself very well.’ ‘Waiter, how’s the liver tonight?’ ‘Oh, the liver’s terrific today.’ How the hell does the waiter know? How the hell do I know if the account guy is good with the account?

‘What accounts have you worked on?’ ‘Well, when I was on General Foods, I kept us from losing the account for nine months.’ General Foods has hundreds of guys on the account. And this guy kept the account for nine months! Maybe he did. I don’t know. Not long ago I had two guys in my office who were from the same agency and had worked on the same account. The first guy came in and said, ‘When I was on the account, I helped them introduce “soft gin.”’ Two hours later, so help me, another guy walks in and says, ‘I was the fellow who introduced “soft gin.”’ Now, if one of those cats wasn’t lying, then they were identical twins. And they both said they were account supervisors on the account.

When I talked to the two ‘soft gin’ guys, I was in the market for two account men. I had seen maybe thirty-five guys, and twenty of them were out of work. All right, there are twenty guys looking for a job, and I’ve got room for only two. They’ve all had jobs. Once they were important guys in some agency. Once they were the guys who really did the ‘soft gin’ marketing plan. They lost their jobs, and all of a sudden they have no value at all, except for a guy who might need an account man for a liquor account. Now I was looking for a wine guy, and the two ‘soft gin’ guys know only gin, they don’t know from wine. It is much easier for an agency to hire an account man who knows a piece of business. He can jump right in and start working; you don’t have to teach him. When you have a choice, you