From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [41]
One of the ‘soft gin’ guys who came to see me had been out of work for only a few days, but really he had been out for six months. He knew his agency was going to lose the account six months before. So he’s had six months of looking for a job. Age fifty-two. Chances, zip. Who’s going to hire him? He hints around that. ‘I may have some business.’ He doesn’t have any business. If he had business, he would have kept it. He would have used the business to keep his job.
With the creative guys becoming more important, the account guys are having a tougher time of it. The entire structure of advertising is being disturbed. I get an account, and somebody loses a job someplace. In the large, older agencies many account executives work on only one account. In the smaller agencies one account man services several accounts. We have a handful of account executives servicing a couple of dozen accounts. That means there are a lot of account executives who are out of work because of us. For some people this could be a terrifying business, with good reason.
I’ve never been frightened because I always had something to show. I had something I knew how to do – copywriting. And I know what it’s like to be poor. I really know what it’s like to be broke. It’s not that terrifying. It’s not that bad, it’s not the end of the world. Christ, I was born in Brooklyn and I was living there up until a few years ago. I know how to get on the train and go back there. The Transit Authority has got pretty good signs showing you how to get to Brooklyn.
Part of the problem, especially with the account guys, is that they are living way over their heads. Advertising is a business that goes first class all the way. When you get hooked on the expense-account way of life, there’s a tendency to try to live out of the office the way you do in the office. This is part of it. They own boats, they belong to yacht clubs, they live in expensive houses. A lot of these guys are living very close to the edge. I would bet that most of them haven’t got any money in the bank. No bucks salted away. They just about make it. And they live very high indeed.
They’re living on loans. They’ve got big liquor bills. Big partying bills. Big school bills for the kids. Big clothes bills. Big everything. The nut is very high for these cats. That house in Rye – they’ve got to live in Rye – has got to cost them seventy-five big ones. And when you’ve got a seventy-fivegrand house with a mortgage this big, you don’t answer the client back that fast. You know, you’re not too quick to screw around. You’re not too ready to do anything except pop a lot of pills and maybe run up a big bill with the shrink.
The account man is in the only business in the world where he gets hired, is paid a lot of money for four or five years, and then at one point he’s told he’s not worth anything any more because they’ve lost the account. You know, if you go into any other business in the world and you last five years or so you’re going to live there forever. You go to work in this business and if you last for five years the chances are you’re going to be fired the next day. Seniority means nothing. This is not the railroads. There’s too much money at stake. These guys know what happens when they lose a job. They’ve got no place to go for a year or so. I mean, they can’t send their wife out to work, they’re past all that.
It hits everybody in the business, not just the account executives. I know a very good art director who’s been out of work for eleven months. And he’s good, in fact he just won an award at a show. The guy is fantastic. He was making $40,000 a year but now he says he’ll ‘negotiate.’ That means $25,000 a year. He’s making too much money. I could get some crazy kid to come in and start at $7,000 a year and keep raising him up and up and after five or six years, if I could hang on to him that long, you couldn’t hire an equivalent art director for $50,000. I’ve got one art director who’s twenty-two, and I just hired an eighteen-year-old. The twenty-two-year-old is like