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Doyle, Dane, Bernbach grew too fast to get into the boutique thing. Just as the establishment was starting to call Doyle, Dane a boutique it turned into a department store right before their eyes and just kept clobbering the hell out of them. They don’t call Mary Wells a boutique because she opened and all of a sudden she’s a department store. The boutique is the call given to maybe twenty to twenty-five agencies.

But think about the boutique for a moment. It means you’re going to be dealing with the man who owns the store and you’re going to get a lot more service and a lot more attention from him. Second of all, the item you buy from a boutique has to be perfect, otherwise you would go to another store. It’s as simple as that. If you’re running a Macy’s, you sell everything in sight – you sell high-priced, low-priced, anything you can get your hands on. The object of Macy’s is to sell, and the hell with service; the object of a boutique is also to sell, but with a maximum of personalized service into the bargain. So the boutique stays open until 10:00 p.m. Macy’s closes at 6.00 p.m. A big difference.

You might go to Macy’s because R. H. Macy was a great merchant and a great salesman and a brilliant man who got everyone to think Macy’s when he wanted to buy anything beyond five-and-ten stuff – but whom do you find? You find a $90-a-week sales clerk with aching feet. She is R. H. Macy. The same thing happens in an agency. People might go to Ted Bates because Mr. Ted Bates is brilliant, but they might wind up with the equivalent of a $75-a-week trainee writing the stuff for their account. Chances are if an account goes to a boutique agency, they wind up working with the guy who did it all – the guy who started the agency. The word boutique used in a derogatory sense is a misnomer, it’s a joke, and it’s wrong.

But the small agencies are going to win, no matter what they call us. We win unless the kids who are striking in the schools take over, in which case nobody wins. The establishment is talking to a dying generation. They’re not on the same wavelength as the younger kids today. That’s why they’re in trouble. The establishment can’t change, it can’t give the people anything different, it can’t make the turn. The establishment doesn’t know what makes people think; they don’t know what makes people go any more. That’s where they lose it, that’s where they blow it. They’ve lost their ability to tell how people go, how people move, how to sell them their bra, how to sell them their hair lotion.

You think an establishment agency could have produced a campaign for Love cosmetics the way Mary Wells did? Never. It is a brilliant campaign and the packaging of the cosmetics themselves is phenomenal. The kids like the bottles so much they keep them after they’ve run out of lotion. The campaign is talking to kids the way they like being talked to. The kids they’ve used in the ads and the commercials are hippie-looking. They’re also very good-looking, and all they talk about is love. In one of the commercials the guy had longer hair than the girl. In fact, his hair was so long and so nice I almost identified with him more than with the girl. They’re very love-conscious, love-oriented. The Love cosmetics are selling like hell and they’ve got a problem in that they can’t make the stuff fast enough. Now maybe it’s a one-year phenomenon. The cosmetics business is a terrific jungle. But the fact that Love is selling means that they’ve got good advertising. The fact that they might stop selling means that maybe the product isn’t there. But right now they’re selling, they’re doing a good job.

What’s happening in business throughout the country is that these younger kids are beginning to work their way up in management. They’re in marketing, in sales, in promotion, in finance, and in a lot of cases, they’re running things. The president of a sleepy corporation who is in his late sixties and is trying to get to retirement without blowing an artery is not going to take his account