From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [5]
The top, the very top management very wisely stakes out a claim on an account not already in the house. Let’s take a hypothetical example – let’s say your agency loses Texaco Gas. Suddenly an executive vice-president says, ‘I went to school with a guy from Sinclair, and they must be tired of those folks over at Cunningham and Walsh. I’m going to give old Jack a call. Maybe we can have a few drinks. I think I can line up something with Sinclair.’
Not to be outdone, another vice-president says, ‘I have a cat over at Esso. Forget about your guy at Sinclair. My guy at Esso, like we not only went to school together, we fought in the Army together. Esso is unhappy with their agency. My friend has told me so many times. I think we really could work out something with Esso.’
Each biggie in the agency picks a major company that he’s going to shoot for. This is the way they express their fear. They all talk about a big piece of business that they could bring into the house. Nothing ever happens, but that doesn’t matter. They try. They honestly believe that they can do it. What beautiful calls they make. The executive vice-president calls his pal Jack, who may or may not remember who this guy is, and he says, ‘Hi, Jack, you see we’ve just been screwed by Texaco. What do you say we get together and have a drink?’ He has his drink with pal Jack, and then he goes back to his agency and at a management meeting he says, ‘When I said to Jack that we lost the account, he smiled at me. I know that smile. I know the way he smiled at me – he was trying to tell me, “I can’t give it to you now, baby, but in six months it’s yours.” I have heard those exact words. There’s a slight variation on it. ‘When he said no, he said no in such a way that he was opening a door for us – he really was saying that in six months it’s ours. We’ve got it.’ That’s how top management lies to itself and how these guys lie to each other. After a while they forget about it. They’re out pitching new business, holding meetings, fooling around with the creative departments, and they forget all about pal Jack and how old school buddy Jack was going to give them Esso, or Sinclair, or Shell, or whatever the hell it was they were pitching. The biggies keep occupied. They must keep busy. As for the little people, they’ve already been screwed by the biggies. They haven’t got a chance. They’ve been fired.
The image of advertising still hangs in. The movie Blow-Up is a good example. Here’s this scrawny English photographer – a fashion photographer – and in one scene these two chicks literally attack him on his purple no-seam backdrop. Thousands of people watch this photographer jumping from one chick to the next and they think, Wow! Imagine what goes on in advertising if this is what happens to a photographer. So another whole batch of people decides to quit delivering milk or whatever the hell they were doing and they’ve made up their minds to get into advertising.
Those who don’t go into the business talk about it. You meet them at cocktail parties and they say to you, ‘Do you put the captions under the pictures or do you take the pictures?’ That’s the difference to them between an art director and a copywriter. A copywriter puts the captions under the pictures. As far as these people are concerned, you’re only playing around. They think you walk around during the day freaked out on acid or hash, and in between trips you’re carrying on with the women.
A friend I grew up with