From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [52]
Several years ago two guys got together to form a new agency. They planned the agency along the lines of William Esty. Now William Esty is a very successful agency. It must bill somewhere in the neighborhood of $140 million a year, which is good billing. And William Esty has a very shrewd concept: Don’t take on a lot of accounts, just a few high-ticket, very large accounts. I think Esty has Sun Oil, Colgate, National Biscuit, American Home Products, Hunt-Wesson and only a few others. They can’t have more than ten or fifteen accounts, but all of them bill very high. Esty supposedly has the fewest number of employees for the number of accounts of any agency in town. You’re supposed to have something like eight employees for every $1 million in billing. Esty handles their accounts with maybe six employees for every $1 million. It is a very efficiently run agency, beautifully handled, and they can’t lose. They make nothing but money at Esty. They don’t care for too much publicity at Esty; all they want to do is their job – and count the dollars.
They hold onto their accounts because with that small a number you really pay a lot of attention to them. Figure it out: the president has maybe ten or eleven guys to worry about each day – the chairman of the boards of the various accounts. He can make ten or eleven calls a day to see how his accounts are, he can have lunch with each chairman of the board in the space of two weeks. Esty pays a lot of attention to their accounts and they make sure their accounts are happy. And, believe me, they are.
Anyhow, let’s get back to the two guys who formed that other agency a few years ago, and let’s call them Manny and Moe. The first year Manny and Moe began they had zero billing and then they got hot. At the end of the first year they had $6 million in billing, and they added a little bit to that the second year. During the third year they really got hot – they got so hot their billing went up to like $20 million. The fourth year they must have hit $40 million. Well, they hit their high of $40 million, and then they died, absolutely died. They managed to lose more business than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. It got so you couldn’t pick up Phil Dougherty’s column in The Times without reading of another client leaving Manny and Moe.
When Manny and Moe set up their agency along the lines of Esty, they said to themselves, ‘We’ll load ourselves up with some high-ticket accounts and we’ll coin money.’ They forgot one thing. These people come – and go, too. It is very hard to keep a long-lasting relationship with an account when you are bored with it. And they blew it all because they got bored. Manny decided he was going to save the world, which is O. K. if your business is good. Moe decided he was going to beat the horses, which is even tougher than saving the world.
Manny got very interested in gun control and political campaigns. That was good. But you’ve got to be careful. There are guys running around Madison Avenue who also have guns and they are always trying to knock you off. You might be an account sitting out in the waiting room with a hell of a problem, and you’re looking for Manny. When you gave them the account, they promised you Manny would be working on it. Where’s Manny? Well, right now Manny is out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, working on a political campaign for a guy who’s running for sewer commissioner of Jackson Hole. Manny thinks this guy has a future in politics, and he’s trying to make him into something much bigger than the sewer commissioner. Terrific, except if you’re a client and you want to see Manny you’ve got to figure out how to get to Wyoming.
Where’s Moe? Well, Moe is studying the racing form, and when Moe starts handicapping the fifth at Belmont it can get a little confusing. Moe may have been the only agency president in America who would show up at meetings with binoculars around his neck. He became so track-oriented