From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [51]
Case is invited out to the Coast to make a speech, and they pick him up at the airport. They’re driving away from the airport on their way to get a drink or something and Case is looking out of the window as they drive in. If you’ve ever driven in on Sepulveda Boulevard, you know it is not much to look at. Anyhow, Case makes the speech and immediately he says, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to fly out of this town, I hate it.’ The L. A. guys are looking at Case as if he’s crazy. They want to take him out to dinner. But he’s insisting that they take him back to the airport, he’s had his look at L. A., and he’s had enough. He says to them, ‘I know this place. I used to present to the Carnation Milk account out here when I worked for Jack Tinker, and they were always nasty to me. I can’t stand this town. You’ve got to take me to the airport.’ So they shake their heads, bundle Case back on a plane to New York and today. he’s a legend out there. ‘Gene Case, wasn’t he fantastic?’ they say. Case, of course, produced the ultimate putdown.
It’s nice – out of town. A different kind of advertising. It’s a slower and much easier life because, let’s face it, where could you be banished to if you’re working in Cleveland? I mean, where could they send you? Akron? In New York, you could always wind up in Cleveland, but like in Cleveland there’s nothing worse. So the people don’t have the same fears. They don’t have the same salaries, either. They don’t have the same relationships with clients. It’s not advertising the way I know it. In New York you have real stars – copy guys, art directors, creative people, television directors – who are good and they know it. Some of these creative people command higher salaries than the president of an agency in Cleveland might get. There is an emphasis on the creative guy in New York. Agencies put up with the craziness to get the creative. There’s no creativity in Cleveland, very little originality.
It’s a whole different game. It’s maybe advertising the way it used to be in 1942. The president of the agency still gets out on the golf course and plays with his client, the president of Acme Steel. The president of the agency lives very well and the rest of the people in the agency are just working people. They don’t make big salaries. There are no glamour people in, say, Cleveland. There’s nobody sitting in Cleveland saying, ‘I want to be like somebody else in Cleveland.’ They live vicariously and get their glamour from New York.
Cleveland will eventually change. The creative revolution will eventually get there. In New York, advertising is changing drastically and rapidly. Creative people are getting more clout. It is a provable fact that the so-called creative agencies are the ones that are growing the fastest. But I also have the feeling that life for the creative side of an agency will always be tough. Now you’ve got creative review boards made up of red noses and blue veins. Who knows? In twenty years perhaps pot will be legalized. It depresses me to think that in twenty years there still will be creative review boards, except that the board will not be made up of red noses. Instead, you’ll have a bunch of old guys with very funny pupils looking at your work. A bunch of dilated pupils checking you out. That kind of nonsense will never change.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
THE
JOLLY
GREEN
GIANT
AND
OTHER
STORIES
‘There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster … All the great advertising in the world can never straighten out the stewardess who wakes up cranky one morning. There is nothing in the world an agency can do about the gas station attendant in One Horse Stand, Nebraska, who has a hangover …’
I don’t want to give the impression that the new