From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [72]
Talk about the craziness of advertising. Where else do you hire a star art director or copywriter for $50,000 or $60,000 a year and then attempt to tell him what to do: ‘Okay, we’re paying you all this bread and now here’s what we want you to do. We want you to do this; you can’t do that.’ Figure it out; here’s a guy who’s making all this money, and he certainly should know how to do it and what to do. He’s being hired because he’s an expert. Yet agencies hire top people every day and then attempt to show them what advertising is. It’s strange – and stupid.
What’s even stranger is when an agency doesn’t use two-man creative teams but instead they call these giant conferences where they have so-called creative meetings. These are a real study in insanity because it’s almost like a real group-therapy session, but everybody’s got a big stake in this group session. You’ve got maybe four, five, or even six guys at this meeting. You’ve got the big $90,000-a-year creative director who is not going to allow an idea to go through that room unless it’s his. The first guy who tries to sneak his own idea through will be killed by the creative director. He’ll kill because he cares. How could he accept an idea from a guy who’s making $60,000 a year?
The $60,000-a-year guy may be a creative supervisor and his job is to come up with an ad that will make the $90,000-a-year guy look silly in front of all those people. Wonderful situation! You’ve got maybe four other people who will have to say something in the course of that meeting so that the creative director will know they are alive. They’ve got to hang on. They don’t care if they say the wrong thing – in fact they’re expected to say the wrong thing. But they have to be heard. They throw lines like, ‘Why don’t we try …?’
Maybe you’ve got an account executive sitting in. His contribution is, ‘You’ve got to come up with something or we’ll lose the account.’ He sets the tone of the meeting. ‘We’re going to blow it,’ he says, and they all sit around throwing headlines at each other.
Maybe if the problem is big enough or crucial enough, the agency president will sit in. He’s always felt he had a flair for the creative ever since he wrote that fantastic term paper back at Dartmouth where he got a B-plus and would have gotten an A if the teacher didn’t dislike him. There they are, smoking and drinking coffee and playing creative. The first guy to try is always the $90,000-a-year guy. If he can score a big hit and rout the troops early, he’s got it made. So he casually turns to the president and says, ‘Look, “Fights Headaches Three Ways” has been working very well for us, it’s given us a very good share of the market. Now if we can say, “Fights Headaches Five Ways” …’ And the president will look at the creative director and always shake his head yes. Big-time agency presidents never say no. They’re like the Japanese. Always shaking their heads yes. They mean no a lot but they always say yes. The $90,000-a-year creative director doesn’t know how to interpret the president’s headshake so he plunges ahead with ‘Fights Headaches Five Ways.’
The $60,000-a-year creative supervisor has been sitting there all this time trying to figure out how to bomb ‘Fights Headaches Five Ways.’ He can’t bomb it directly, like saying, ‘You’re crazy,’ or he’ll lose his job. So the way he gets the supervisor is not calling the headline bad; he simply says it’s not good enough. He’ll also have