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By this time Ron is drawing with one hand and lettering in headlines with the other. There are four stages in making an ad: a thumbnail, which is just a tiny sketch; a rough, which is like a thumbnail, but big; a comp, which means the headline is lettered in and the drawing is much more detailed; and the finish.

‘How do you like this?’ he said. ‘We’ve got a nice shot of the hamburger, with a couple of potato chips on the side, and we’ve got a little piece of type.’ I’m sitting there writing copy now, mentally, and also talking it out. The excitement in the room is fantastic. Now we can’t sit down. We’re jumping up and down because we’ve a deadline to make and now we’ve got it and we know we’re going to make it. There is an electric feeling in the room and this is what this business is all about as far as the creative person is concerned. Ron finishes his comps at 9:15. The man from Hirsch showed up at 9:20. We had five ads ready to show him – five complete layouts with the headline comped in, the body copy roughed in, with a slogan line that they can live with and go along with forever. It was ready.

The feeling in that room between 8:30 and 9:00 is like insanity. Ron is drawing as fast as he can, throwing papers around, and I’m chattering like a maniac. That’s when an ad comes together, this is how it happens. No one has ever written about it. No one’s ever come close to describing what it is. They talk about it as though it’s magic. There’s really no magic, nor is it very creative. You know what it’s like? It’s like two salesmen sitting down trying to find a handle on how they’re going to sell the car this morning. It’s nine o’clock and the door’s going to open, people are going to come in, and what are we going to say to get them to buy this car? That’s really the whole thing. People shouldn’t try to make it into a writer and an art director. It’s two salesmen sitting there trying to figure something out and coming up with an idea.

When the Hirsch guy came in he said, ‘What have you got?’ We said, ‘Well, what we have is, these guys all want to be heroes, right?’ He said, ‘Right.’ ‘And some of these guys,’ we said, ‘they really feel sorry for themselves when they work like dogs, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘Well, let’s do a campaign glorifying them for breaking their ass, making them know that we know that they work hard. It’s institutional, it’s long-run. It’s not going to mean a guy is going to call up Hirsch and Company and say, ‘I want you because you ran that ad.’ It means that maybe he’s got his choice between Hirsch and Company and some other schnook he’s never heard of before, he’ll vaguely remember that Hirsch and Company did something he was really happy with.’ The Hirsch man took one look at the ads and said, ‘I buy it.’

The campaign ran, and it has been one of the good, successful campaigns in this area because the guys it was directed at – they can feel for it, it’s them, it’s their life. Some of these investment guys have even called Hirsch up asking for reprints of the ad. They want to hang it up in their offices. ‘That’s me, you know?’ they say. They show it to their wives and say, ‘You know why I come home late at night? Here’s why.’ They want to frame it. People are like that. They really do react to advertising.

It’s pretty easy to see how that morning would only work with Ron and me in the room. You couldn’t let anyone else in there, like an account executive. They would get in the way, interfere with the process. And you can also see the ease with which the guys who actually put together the ad can take it to the client and explain the ad and the campaign. What happens in the larger, older establishment agencies is that you’ve got copy chiefs, associate creative supervisors, creative supervisors on top of the actual creators of the ad. That’s where the trouble begins. These copy experts, unless they’re actually doing some work, are nothing but judges and superjudges. They sit there and they tell you whether they think something will work or not. They