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A lot of people watch all of this carrying on and wonder what would happen if guys would quit screwing around with rumors and spend their time on advertising. The truth is, there’s plenty of time to do both. I get a kick out of the rumor business because I look at it as part of the total warfare of the advertising game. Remember, there are all kinds of warfare. Suppose someone said, ‘Why don’t they just go in there with their guns and wipe out that town? What’s this bit about psychological warfare? What’s this bit about spies and everything else? You take your tanks and you go in and you take the town.’ Well, maybe somewhere along the line someone discovered that there are fifty different ways to capture this town. You need the tanks and you need the guns, but then maybe you’ll also need a lot of other little things that people don’t even consider. It’s part of the game, it’s part of the mix. Publicity is also part of the mix.

I don’t want to get too far away from rumors, but if you look at Doyle, Dane for a minute, you have to agree that in their own quiet, reserved, wonderful way they’ve done a fantastic public-relations job. There is no doubt about it, they’re very public-relations conscious. Nobody ever gets the feeling that they get publicity. It just seems that they win things and they do things, and isn’t it nice? They have a very good girl in charge of their publicity and they are very well buttoned up about what they do and how they do it. Mary Wells hired a girl to handle public relations for them. There is no such thing as an agency which steadily turns out such good work that everybody automatically looks up and says, ‘Yeah, aren’t they good?’ It’s public relations and a lot of other things.

Part of the rumor business is the way you make yourself accessible to people who are looking for a job. Let’s call the getting and losing of an account a war. Let’s also say that in a war the first thing you need for the fight is ammunition, and ammunition in advertising is good ads. Second, all the ammunition in the world won’t help you if you haven’t got information. Intelligence. Intelligence is knowing what’s going on, knowing what the people are doing down the block. As far as I’m concerned, you just can’t operate out of a vacuum. You just can’t say, ‘Well, I know what I’m doing so I don’t have to worry about what they’re doing down the block.’ You’ll never get an account that way; you’ll never be able to pick an account.

I interview people – always – with an eye toward hiring them, but also I regard these people who come in for a job as the greatest source of information as to what’s going on in the business. Some of the people who walk in are unhappy with their job or their agency. Others are trying to impress you with their knowledge of what’s going on in their agency. They’re ready to tell you anything – some of them just spill out at the mouth. I saw a girl not long ago – a kid in a media job at a good agency in town. In the course of one little interview she told me that the people at a very good account with her agency were very unhappy because they felt they were not getting the kind of service that they would like. The word she used was ‘pampered.’ ‘What do you mean by “pampered”?’ I asked. She said, ‘Well, it’s not that they want to be pampered. But they’d like to see the agency president come in at least once every two weeks to show them the ads and talk to them. They want to deal president to president.’

All right, now here’s a piece of loose intelligence that has been handed to me. What do you do with it? Well, tomorrow maybe I can put in a call to the account saying it’s about time that we talked – that we sat down and had some lunch together since I feel that one of the things which is making our agency grow is the fact that we’re at the size where we can get together – president to president – and talk about advertising. Maybe I won’t ever get that account but I do have a lead on $1.5 million worth of business