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By Root 376 0

easier to have two bright people sit there thinking about the same problem than to have one bright person using himself as a judge. When Ron and I are working, when we’re really on and really good, that door is locked. Like nobody exists. That room is a different place. A crazy chemistry takes over and suddenly the two of you think alike. With every art director I ever worked with I reached a point where I would start to say something and the art director would finish the sentence. I would say, ‘What if we said, “What’s the ugliest …”’ and the guy would say, ‘I got it, I got it!’ Without going any further.

The client knows nothing of this chemistry, this process. Why should he? He should care only what comes out of that room. Most clients, I’m sure, think that there’s a magic something going on. That if a guy is called creative the guy has somehow been touched by a special ray of light from the hand of God. People think the creative guy can do things other people can’t do. Nonsense.

The big agencies today are buying the mystique of the creative man – the big phony mystique. They buy the mystique and they pay top dollar for it and they don’t know what to do with it. Why is it that an agency can hire a guy who is so good at one agency and turn him into a stumblebum in their own agency? Because they think creative advertising is a mystique; they think it’s some kind of magic.

No one knows what it’s like. No one knows what it is, no one knows the feeling. No one except other art directors and copywriters have ever been in on the excitement. That’s why when clients sometimes try to do ads by saying, ‘Well, what if you had a headline that said …?’ they have no idea what the feeling is about turning out an ad and what it is to achieve that feeling. There are things that I might say to Ron and he’ll say, ‘Are you crazy? You can’t say that.’ He’ll then say, ‘But what if we did this?’ And he’ll come up with something that’s completely outlandish, but out of that outlandish thing there might be like one tiny dot there that says, ‘No, you’re wrong by doing it this way but if you tried it this way … ’

The way the whole process starts is that the art director and the copywriter do a lot of listening. When you’ve landed the account you’ve got to go through a lot of bullshit. There’s research and marketing, the account executive, the agency president, the advertising manager of the account – everybody gets into the act. Everybody has something to say about the problem. The account executive, if he’s good, can help. He’s there because you might forget something and he’s liable to say, ‘Look, did you ever notice …?’ He might come up with a concept for you. He’s another body.

The research guy does it with numbers. He says, ‘Look, the way I see it, nine out of ten people aren’t drinking this product because of the tests. It tastes like hell.’ He doesn’t give you a solution, he simply gives you another aspect of the problem. You’ve got the account guy talking to you, you’ve got the research guy talking to you, and you’ve got the account itself saying, ‘Well, I think our problem is that people don’t buy our product because they’re prejudiced against us because our plant is in Hackensack.’ Everybody’s got their own stake in what they think the problem is.

Now that you have listened to everyone, you have to get to know the account. This involves a trip to their plant to watch their widgets being made or a trip to listen to their sales manager or a trip to listen to their salesmen or going out on the road with their route salesmen or going into a store and asking a guy what he thinks of the product. It is the most concentrated educational process in the world. I can be a little bit of an expert on almost every business that I’ve ever touched. In other words, I can tell you how to make a polyester in your home if you’re crazy enough to want to know. I can tell you how the gases are pushed through all kinds of things and are turned into spaghetti coils, which then turn into fabric. I can tell you what it takes to sell time for a radio station.