From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [45]
As I was walking down the hall and approaching my office I could hear the telephone ringing. I broke into a run and grabbed the phone and it’s the $120,000-a-year Creative Director of the World. ‘Jerry,’ he says on the phone, ‘can you come down to my office and bring that tape recorder?’ And I said, ‘Bring in my tape recorder?’ ‘And bring the tape, too.’ I said, ‘But there’s nothing on the tape. It’s useless to me now. But I’ll run it over again if you want.’ ‘Just bring the tape, Jerry.’
On my way to the Creative Director of the World’s office I met four of the guys in the hall who were in that creative review board meeting. One of the $75,000-a-year biggies – I’ll call him Kent – is standing right there in the hallway, blocking my way, and he’s looking even more nervous than he usually looked, which was pretty nervous anyhow. ‘Jerry,’ Kent said, ‘why’d you bring that tape into the meeting?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I just like to hear my voice.’ Kent is really against the wall because he doesn’t quite know where he fits in the advertising business. ‘You probably can’t hear my voice on that recorder,’ he says. I said, ‘Come on, Kent, come on, I know it was you speaking.’ He couldn’t even take it as a joke. ‘Oh, no,’ Kent said, ‘I know my own voice. I know when I talk and I can tell if I have my voice on a tape recorder.’
I passed by another office, a guy named Marks, and he vaulted over a little marble coffee table he had in his office and flew into the hall. ‘Why’d you do it, Jerry?’ Marks asked. ‘To hear my voice,’ I said, and I was getting a bit tired of saying it, too. ‘It’s a very bad business,’ he said, and turned away. Finally I got to the Creative Director of the World and there were the rest of the creative review board.
‘It turned me off,’ said one guy. ‘Why did you do it?’ asked another. The Creative Director of the World said, ‘Will you hand it over, please?’ They really were quite disturbed. As I walked out of the office I couldn’t resist saying, ‘Gee, I think this should be a practice in all of your creative review sessions. You know, I think it would be fantastic if you installed a videotape set so that you could tape these things and have them running for the rest of the people in the agency. It would be very helpful.’ One guy, a good friend of mine, said, ‘It will be a long time before we tape any other review session and it will be an even longer time before you come back to the creative review board.’
Well, what’s the story here? Fear. Basically, these guys have never, never been on record before. The noncreative people who work in the creative department are so used to lying to themselves that they can write – these guys were afraid of the tape recorder. It represented truth. These guys had been kidding each other all their lives, and like this tape recorder meant something. The tape recorder could put them away. The tape recorder was truth; they couldn’t deny truth and they couldn’t live with it. They could carry on, but they couldn’t face that little thirty-dollar tape recorder. Some of these people are so adept at kidding themselves and everybody else that they’re professionals at it.
They never held another creative review board meeting at Bates – at least not while I was there. That session with me ended it. And the word got out in the agency, ‘Did you really do it?’ And I said, ‘Of course I did.’ The story picked up the entire creative department. Everybody in the creative department felt – Wow! – we’ve got something going here. It was like a victory for a lot of guys who had been getting killed by the noncreative creative experts.
Sometimes the pressure on the creative people isn’t as obvious as a review board. It can get subtle, very subtle. A one-on-one kind of thing. I worked at an agency where there was a guy whom I referred to as the Mount Everest of Fear. He worked for the vice-president, the man named David whom we called