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I meet these account people on the street and I meet more people out of work than those who are working. A lot of them just don’t stick to the business. A lot of them just can’t come back. They’re too specialized. The jobs are disappearing and the business is changing. Some of them go into the realestate business; other guys go into the graphic-arts business. Maybe they buy a boat and sail away. They just can’t make it. They can’t take the feast-or-famine aspect of the business. It’s not romantic or glamorous, it’s tragic.

The average age of the account executive is thirty-two, thirty-three, and then they start lying about their age. I had a guy in my office who was gray. My God, I practically had to help him out the door. He claimed he was thirty-eight. Well, if he was thirty-eight he’s lived a great life. I mean, he really looked like he was in his early fifties. I mean, the guy was an old man.

Guys are out of work a long time, and they start to lie about their age, and that, too, is part of the fear. Good people are out of work, not just losers. This is one of the few businesses where you can be out of work and tell the world. In most other lines of work, usually you hide and don’t tell your neighbors you’re on the beach. If a guy gets fired, he gets on the phone and calls the first twenty people he can think of. And it’s all over town that he’s been fired. The kids are killing a lot of account people, too. A lot of hard-working young kids are now willing to take a crack at account work. Agencies that used to start kids in the mailroom are taking more chances and giving kids accounts after a couple of years at the agency. In the old days it was a slow process out of the mailroom to account work.

When a guy is out, he tries anything. He becomes a consultant – that’s the first step. He tries to get all of his friends to give him consultation work. He might look to the magazines as a space salesman. He might turn up working for a printing outfit. The average account man starts making plans to start his own agency after he’s fired. He says, ‘Well, screw them all. I was going to start my own agency anyway.’ But that doesn’t work out. He can’t get the bread. The account he thought he had sewn up wasn’t sewn up. He’s not connected anywhere, and slowly he starts to find that he’s got nine or twelve months of debts ahead of him. The guy is going to be looking for a new job for at least a year. There’s no wonder that an account man is afraid, knowing that if he goes, he’s going to be out this long. It’s natural. You’ve got to be afraid. You spend every day knowing that if you blow it, you’re out for a year. That’s what the average guy spends on the beach today. The shrinking job market is making it tough as hell for people to find a new job quickly.

And nobody has that kind of money in the bank. The worst story I ever heard along these lines wasn’t about an account man but a copywriter. He had been a star, and he came to see me about a job. He was in his late fifties. His portfolio was complete with samples, but they were at least eight years old. I said, ‘How long have you been out of work?’ He said it had been something like six or seven years, he wasn’t quite sure at that point. I said, ‘How in God’s name did you survive?’ He said, ‘Well, I sold the house in Darien. I sold all my stocks – and I had quite a few of them. I sold some real estate for a while and my wife and I moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn.’ He was working his way backwards. Six or seven years went by without a permanent job, no office to go into in the morning. The guy had no real income for all that time. He was begging me for some freelance work. He wanted a day’s work. Here is a guy who was once earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year. When they fall, they fall very hard, and everyone – account guys and creative people – knows that the fall down is very tough. We’re in a business that is very fashion-conscious. I mean, what’s in style this year may not be salable next year. The guy with talent from one era has a tough time