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By Root 411 0

a good reason for not doing it, such as, Albert Lasker used it in 1932 for a similar project. For all he knows, Lasker wrote a headline that said, ‘Leeches Fight Headaches Five Ways.’ Nobody else knows what Lasker said. To finish zapping the $90,000-a-year guy, the $60,000-a-year guy says, ‘We gotta do a Doyle, Dane type of thing. We’re going to lose this account if we don’t go Doyle, Dane. We have to come up with their kind of headline. What would Doyle, Dane say in a situation like this? I just happen to have …’ And with that he reaches into his pocket for the sixty headlines that he chomped away at the beginning of the meeting. He goes on and reads ‘some stuff that I think is really Doyle, Dane.’ And of course it really is terrible stuff.

The $90,000-a-year guy, who has been zapped once but who is very tricky, sees that the $60,000-a-year guy is very vulnerable after reading this garbage out loud to the meeting. He says, ‘Look, this agency wasn’t founded on Doyle, Dane’s style because we don’t do that kind of crap. Leave that to those boutiquey guys to do. We’re going to hit them with solid advertising. That’s what they hired us for.’ Score one for the creative director.

The president is nodding all the time. The account man, by the way, is turning white because he really can see the account pulling out after all of this nonsense. The flunkies in the room are acting as if they’re at a tennis game: they nod their heads to the left, they nod their heads to the right. They don’t know where to nod first.

The meeting keeps going on. This year, it’s fashionable for one guy to say we got to have a Wells, Rich, Greene commercial, and then the other guy knocks that notion off as soon as he rings in tradition, the history of the agency. Maybe the president has an early lunch date and he’s had enough of the meeting. So he might suggest a compromise. He keeps the radicals happy who want a little Doyle, Dane ethnic humor and keeps the traditional guys happy by suggesting, ‘Oy, Fights Headaches Four Ways.’ Or something just as silly.

Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not. I’m dead serious. This kind of thing goes on all the time. They held this type of meeting at Fuller & Smith & Ross many years ago when the agency was trying to get the Air France account. The $60,000-a-year creative supervisor was trying to impress the $90,000-a-year creative director, and they all were throwing lines like, ‘What if we say …?’

Sitting out of the main line of fire was a poor guy making $20,000 a year and he knew eventually he had to put his two cents’ worth in, even though all the other people would dismiss it. He was a copy supervisor of some sort, but pretty far down the rung.

He spots a break in the conversation and says, ‘You know, I thought of something. Air France, like it’s French. Why don’t we say something like “Come Home with Us to Paris”?’ The meeting stopped dead in its tracks; the line struck them as great. Before the meeting was over the $90,000-a-year creative director was spouting the line as if it was his. He started by saying, ‘Let me tell you, that is a good concept because we could …’ It was armed robbery the way he grabbed the line. The $20,000-a-year guy wasn’t heard from for the rest of the meeting. He kept raising his hand – you know, he had scored something and he might be making $25,000 by the end of the year. The guy had a heart condition – he later died of a heart attack. But he really was dead at that meeting. They ran over him. Nobody wanted to know he was there any more. Everybody went for that bandwagon as fast as they could. The creative director, being the heaviest at $90,000, got there first. The $60,000-a-year guy saw what was happening and he tried to take a shot at the line, he was trying to score too, and he’s saying, ‘Well, it’s good, but what if we took part of the line …’ The creative director beat off that attack quickly. ‘Look, nothing is going to beat “Come Home with Us to Paris.”

The creative director moved so quickly that before the meeting was out, people were convinced that the line was his. Each