From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [49]
I wonder what happened to most of the guys I started out in business with. I began in the mailroom of Ruthrauff & Ryan, and the only guy that I know of still in advertising from those days is Evan Stark, who is now at Doyle, Dane. Forget about where the guys are. Where are the agencies? Ruthrauff & Ryan is gone. I once went looking for a job at the Biow Agency. Gone. Donahue & Coe. Gone. Cecil & Presby. You ever hear of that one? Lennen & Newell used to be Lennen & Mitchell. You’d better amend that thought about the island with the elephants and the ex-copywriters: they also got on that island one hell of a lot of dead agencies.
Fashions change. So does advertising. The physical look of advertising changes from year to year. Last year’s ads don’t look as good as this year’s. I get tired of looking at my old ads. They bore me. The kids are changing everything – language, clothes, style, and the visual arts.
The schools are breeding kids like nobody’s business. Don’t you think that when Patch got rid of that thirty-two-year-old guy that a lot of guys felt a cold draft down their necks? Of course they did. I know a $40,000-a-year art director working for Patch who’s thinking about that eight-grand-a-year copywriter and he’s saying to himself, ‘What if Patch goes out and finds an eight-grand-a-year art director – where do I go with my forty grand a year?’ Phones are ringing all over town. Everybody’s changing jobs. It’s like musical chairs – you can’t keep up. The kids are death on forty-grand-a-year art directors and copywriters. Pure death.
Maybe we’re in the middle of a recession and we don’t know it. Advertising people can usually predict a recession a lot sooner than the rest of the country. I know when the economy is going to get a little rotten and I can smell it because the advertisers slowly start to pull back. Agency presidents start to get a little more nervous than usual, and the whole pullback works its way down to the copywriters who won’t get hired.
At that annual copywriter’s party I went to last year, there was a lot of fear and the whole room was kind of nervous. What is happening is simply that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. There have been periods in this business when the phones were always ringing and you couldn’t keep up with all of the openings. Not today – and I wonder if it is going to get even worse. It’s interesting that in that room of five hundred people – mostly copywriters – there were only four or five people I would hire. Forget about the party; in the entire city there are maybe twenty-five copywriters worth mentioning. The whole city. You’re talking about an agency like J. Walter Thompson which had only one writer whose work I admire – Ron Rosenfeld – and he just quit there after one year. Forget it after that. An agency like Compton must have fifty or sixty copywriters. The only guy whose stuff I can look at is my ex-partner’s – Ned Tolmach. Four years ago I went to that party and this year it was an entirely different group of people. I found about ten or fifteen standbys who always show up, and the rest, you know, it’s tall, gangly kids with pimples and girls who have decided it’s the most glamorous business in the world and they’re really out to make it.
The same sort of fear that copywriters show in public – like at the party – bugs them in private. For example, if a writer’s campaign is killed, forget it, the guy is lost for a couple of months. And these campaigns are like babies. These guys sit there and they love their campaigns and they look at their ads and they take them out and mount them. You’re talking about a piece of paper, and the copywriter puts it on a piece of mounting board and wraps it in Cellophane and he carries it around to show