From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [97]
It’s just as tough on the other side. The client has to pick an agency, and let’s say that the field has been narrowed down to four finalists. Here he’s about to commit $3 million or $4 million to a bunch of guys and he has to evaluate them in an hour or so. And you know what? All four of them start to look alike after a while, and nowadays they say the same thing.
Cliché number one is: We’re the most creative agency in New York City.
They’ll even give you a tour of their creative department. Then the prospective client sees guys in their offices who have hair jumping out of their heads as if they had stuck their tongue in an electric socket. ‘That guy over there, we have to keep him strapped in. You know, he goes berserk from time to time. But wow, what an art director!’ They’ll point to a copywriter: ‘Very good. You’ll never have to deal with him. We don’t deal with him ourselves except when it’s feeding time.’ Bates was always very big at showing clients the creative department. Let’s face it, my section was crazy, guys yelling, secretaries screaming. It looked strange as hell. Delehanty, which has some genuine crazy people, downplays the talk about them. They talk about their advertising. It’s like an arms race, this creative stuff. Our nuts are nuttier than anyone else’s. We have more madmen per square inch than any other agency. Therefore we are creative. I think any client who falls for that is really pretty naïve, but some still do.
Cliché number two is: We’ve got some of the great success stories in the business.
Everybody has a success story. If you go by presentations, there has never been a product that failed in American history. Everybody succeeds. We took such and such, which had a losing share of the market, and now they’re number one. We took this thing here which was a new product and now it leads the field.
After a while the agency guys all start to run together. They all are very sharp, very charming. The guys are going to be charming, they’re going to be witty, they’re going to be bright, they’re going to stare at the client, at the tip of the guy’s nose, and appear to be staring deeply into his eyes. They’re going to do all the things that they learned about over the years. They’re going to be so good at it that they all look alike.
The only thing that the guy can really depend on is the work. If I were a client, I would not even want to see any agency people until I was just about to make my decision. Then, if they didn’t turn out to be gorillas, I would give them the business. I’ve worked at five different agencies and I’ve never seen anything said at a presentation that is any different from what we say now. We’re all in the same bag. We all say the same things.
Oh, sure, some guys pose. They say, ‘I don’t know if I can take your account.’ Very funny. Deep down they’re saying, ‘If you give it to me, I’ll be sure to figure out a way to take it.’ But basically we’re all the same. We’re all bright, we’re all witty, we’re all smart, we all know the client’s problems, we all know how to solve them. It’s a very tough sell, but it’s a very tough buy, too. It’s very tough for a client to buy an agency. He’s always going to wonder if he made the wrong decision. He’s always going to wonder if maybe those other guys he let go out the door had a little more magic. He’s got to go on past record – that’s the only thing. And that’s where we live or die as an agency. That’s all we have. I don’t play golf. Ron plays golf but he gets very hostile on the golf course, so we can’t go looking for new business on the course. I’ve never had a client to