From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [96]
The lights went out for the reel of commercials. I’m watching this old guy. The lights went out, he went out. He had his head resting on his chest and if you looked at him in the dark, you would imagine that he was thinking very hard. He must have had a clock in him or maybe his advertising manager was bumping him but all of a sudden toward the next to the last commercial on the reel he woke up. The last commercial went off and he woke up completely. And he’s one of these guys who when he just wakes up he’s not a nice guy. He woke up a tiger and started taking people apart. ‘And you? What do you do?’ he said to a girl. ‘What qualifies you to be on my account?’ The girl was very nervous. ‘Well, uh, you see …’ ‘Are you on my account,’ he says, ‘or are you one of these people that they brought in to impress me?’ ‘No, no,’ the girl said, ‘I’m a fashion coordinator.’ ‘What do I need with a fashion coordinator?’ he said. It went on like that. Finally, he got to Kurnit. ‘Mr. Kurnit, why is your agency, of all the agencies I’ve seen – why is your agency qualified to handle my account?’ This is a very tough question. ‘Well,’ said Shep, ‘one of the reasons that I’m qualified is because our agency has been looking for this type of account for many years …’ ‘I know you’re looking for my account. I want to know if you can handle it now.’ The problem was he was just not a nice guy when he woke up. He took them apart.
At Fuller & Smith & Ross, one of the problems we had when we made a pitch was that one of the account supervisors – a klutz named Harry – was so inept he would blow everything almost right from the start. He claimed to have worked on almost every great campaign that ever came out of J. Walter Thompson, which was where he was at before he conned his way into Fuller & Smith. ‘Pan Am, oh yeah. I remember when we were doing Pan Am.’ He may have been in the building when they were working on the Pan Am account. He was fantastically uncoordinated. He would sit there with his pipe and talk, and invariably the phone would ring. He would reach for the phone and knock the pipe out of his mouth. Every time. Once, right before a meeting, Mike Lawlor saw him in the men’s room brushing his pants off. Harry said, ‘Got to go to a new-business meeting. Spilled some powder on my pants.’ He finally got the pants perfectly clean and said, ‘O. K., now I can go into the meeting.’ He walked into the meeting with his fly open. He set the indoor record for showing up at meetings with his fly open.
They finally ran this guy out of New York but he survived. He went to Rome, billing himself as the great white hope of New York. They just booted him out of Rome but he’s got at least nine other countries to go. The guy has Germany; he hasn’t touched France yet. He’s got plenty of places in Europe. When they catch on to him in Europe he can come back here to some off-the-wall place like Topeka. ‘Here I am,’ he’ll say. ‘I ran an agency in Rome for a while but now I’m ready to come back to Topeka because I’ve got this little lung condition and I wanted some of that fresh air of Topeka and I think I’m going to really make your agency.’ Topeka, they fall for it.
Guys get nervous before presentations, very uptight. Some guys throw up before presentations. There are some agency presidents who are basically shy, and when they present, they are being called on to do things that they never really wanted to do. In what other business does the president of