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By Root 423 0

is, as I’ve heard it, that he doesn’t talk – but nothing – he just sits and stares. So the copywriters at Doyle, Dane used to go in with Krone and talk and talk and talk, and finally they’re running out of things to say. During all this talk Krone might have shaken his head once for a few seconds. Two days go by and the copywriter comes out of there wringing wet, twitching like a son of a bitch, wondering whether he should have taken up something else, like selling Bibles.

In the meantime, Krone is just methodically sitting there listening. He doesn’t go in much for the chemistry. He’s like a father, or a doctor. He’s really got you lined up. He’s just sitting there staring at you. Finally, after three or four days, he might come up with something and when he does it might be brilliant. He is a great art director; his only problem is that he’s tough on the nerves of the copywriters.

There have been copywriters who don’t talk and there have been cases where both the art director and the copywriter don’t say a word to each other for hours. They just sit there for three hours and not one word is said. At the end of three hours one of the guys sighs and says, ‘What if we said, “Fights Headaches Three Ways”?’ The other guy might say, ‘Nah, doesn’t sound right.’ And they’ll sit there for another three hours.

There have been cases where the male art director takes a look at the pretty young girl copywriter and he turns the whole session into a pitch. The guy is sitting there thinking of headlines. A lot of affairs in the advertising business have started over ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ First of all, this whole thing is very close, very much like sex. Here’s the girl’s chance to see the guy as a hero. You know, he’s going to solve the problem. They’re now two people struggling against this big problem. He says, ‘Wait, I’ll save you – I’ll save your job, your little one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Eighties, I’m going to come up with a headline.’ ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ And bingo. He’s a hero. And sometimes, like heroes, he’s rewarded.

Doyle, Dane has had some very strange copywriters. One of the strangest was a girl who developed working with an art director to a fine art. Her theory was, ‘What does it matter where we do the work as long as we produce?’ So she quit going to the office, especially in the summer. You’d see her and the art director lounging around Central Park. If it was really hot, the two of them would take off for Amagansett. They’d work on the beach and come back with a campaign.

When a team fails to come up with something, they might go to the creative director and ask for help. A good creative director can be a great source of inspiration: ‘Hey, look, why don’t you just concentrate on this one area? Maybe you can come up with something and you’ll be in better shape than you are right now. Go back and try again.’ Like a hung jury, they’re never dismissed immediately – they’re told to go back and give it another try.

Some of the larger agencies that have switched to the team method occasionally have four or five teams working on the same problem – an ugly business. This means that only one team is going to win. The other four are going to be rejected, which also means that they’re going to go out and look for jobs that day. The winning team, of course, is going to feel happy until the next time. That’s the team theory of Rosser Reeves – throw everybody into the dike when there’s a crisis. If a copywriter happened to be walking by Reeves, he would grab him and say, ‘Find yourself an art director and get to work.’

I can’t talk too much about the importance of the copywriter and the art director clicking together. It’s the reason why creative agencies are doing so much better today. Sure, an agency making a pitch for business can say, ‘Come with us, we’re a great media agency.’ What do you place if you haven’t got advertising? How can an agency say, ‘We’re research-oriented’? What do you research if it doesn’t lead to advertising? All the account needs is advertising – that’s what he pays for