From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor Part 7

'I haven't heard anything.'

'Well, let me see if I can refresh your memory. I hear you're pitching National Airlines?'

'National? They're at Papert, Koenig, Lois. There's always talk about National Airlines. But I'm not doing anything.'

'Well, we hear they're really talking to somebody.'

I say, 'Is your source a good source?'

'My source is a pretty good source.'

I say, 'Fine. Why don't you call up PKL? They're going to deny it. Why don't you call up National? They'll admit it because National always admits these things. They always say, "We talk to agencies all the time."'

During that call I really knew nothing about National and PKL so I really couldn't help the guy from the trade paper. If I was pitching National I would have told him. But I don't think anyone with cla.s.s ever picks up the phone to say, 'Hey, did you hear that ...?' I think that's tipping, and it's wrong.

People use rumors to zap out other people. An example of this terrible practice is the case of Mary Wells. According to The Gallagher Report, Mary Wells used to have only a thirty-day contract with her own agency. But people began to use this report against her and it was affecting her new business. How did the word that she had only a short contract ever get out? Who knows? But I'll bet she didn't run around town screaming it. Somebody leaked it from Wells, Rich & Greene to somebody else where it got to The Gallagher Report where Gallagher did a whole series of columns on it. Wells, Rich might be pitching an account and another agency also pitching the account might say to the prospective client, 'What do you want to go to Wells, Rich for? Mary Wells has only a thirty-day contract. She can walk out any time she wants to.' To combat this kind of thing she just signed a ten-year contract with her own company. Now, n.o.body can zap Wells, Rich with the line about Mary Wells leaving any more. A client can say to himself, 'For the next ten years I have Mary.' So she's set and she's going to do very well. But figure how nasty the business is when she had to sign such a longterm contract to combat the rumors. And of course, when she did sign, it made big news with all the trade papers.

Guys in an agency try to knock off other guys in the same agency by using rumors. I once worked for a place where the executive vice-president a guy I'll call Hunter was trying to zap the president of the agency, whom I'll call Duffy. Week in, week out, Hunter spread rumors that he was going to become president. Duffy was slowly getting zapped all over the place. The rumors were of the kind with the intimate, quiet business details that only the two guys knew about. Whenever anyone questioned Hunter about these terrible rumors he would shrug his shoulders and say, 'Who, me? I don't even know how that started.'

Hunter hasn't got the job yet. But he's going to get it eventually. Day in, day out, another rumor. You'd open up The Gallagher Report and you'd read, 'Hunter is going to get Duffy's job.' Or, 'Hunter is a good replacement for Duffy.' Or, 'Duffy is getting along in years and must be concerned about the National Clambake business, which isn't as solid as it used to be.' The average person reading this must wonder, 'Why doesn't Duffy walk into Hunter's office one day and punch him in the mouth?' That's not the way they play the game. Duffy will see Hunter and say, 'Hunter, how are you?' Hunter says, 'Fine, but I'm very upset by all these rumors about you. I can't imagine how they're starting.' Duffy simply cannot fire Hunter. Hunter has a contract and is well set up at the agency. He can't be fired without a meeting of the entire board of directors.

One day Hunter and I had to take a cab together on an appointment. He started, 'Jesus, I don't know how these rumors about Duffy and me are starting. Did you see the one today in The Gallagher Report?' I said, 'Hunter, cut the c.r.a.p. I know where the rumors come from. You're sending them in.' He sighed and said, 'Ah, let's change the subject.' That was it, just change the subject.

The outsider who reads about this kind of infighting might be horrified, but strangely enough I enjoy it. I think it's a lot of fun. I like it when somebody zaps me. The guy who said we weren't taking small accounts did a beautiful job he really got me. He put me in a position where I couldn't fight back and I can admire the job he did. The thing to remember about the entire rumor game is that you can't touch a solid account and you can't bother a solid advertising man. A rumor will start, the trade paper will call the advertising manager of the account, and the advertising manager will say, 'Shove it.' Take Talon Zippers at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller. Talon is very happy; they're getting good advertising and they're content. They could start a million rumors but those people are not going to move. Rumors only occur when there is something wrong with the advertising being done for the account.

Rumors are especially heavy nowadays with the revolution going on in the business. The older agencies are slipping and they're getting desperate. Therefore, plenty of rumors. The younger agencies are aggressive and really pretty tough. Therefore, plenty of rumors. The guy in the older agency who is trying to hold on is vulnerable to rumors. He fights back by sending out a lot of rumors. All of this is followed by the young guy trying to build an agency who is going to make it if he has to stomp over the first ten people he sees. He's putting out rumors too, and some nasty ones at that.

A lot of people watch all of this carrying on and wonder what would happen if guys would quit s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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. n.o.body 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 b.u.t.toned 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 and I know exactly what's wrong up there.

Agency presidents should keep their people happy. People have big mouths and they go out and blab, and an angry person has an even bigger mouth. The girl I was talking to also mentioned something about the president of her agency the fact that he might be retiring. She told me enough about what's going on in that shop that I know right now that there are two or three accounts that are worth shooting for there, and I know what their problems are. This girl talked about one of their electronics accounts. And she pinpointed the specific problems on the account.

Now this is one girl. One job. Multiply her three or four times a day and you get to know exactly what accounts are loose or in trouble around town. I believe all of the newer and smaller agencies work this way when they're talking to people about jobs. But it doesn't work like that at the larger agencies. If somebody goes to ask for a job at J. Walter Thompson, forget it. The lines of communication must be so screwed up there because of Thompson's size that any valuable word from an interview will never get its way back up to the guys who pitch. Thompson is so big that if there was a fire there, a guy couldn't get the word to enough people to prevent a major tragedy. At a small agency, the relationship is one to one. Agency president talking to media girl, media girl spills her guts out, agency president makes the call tomorrow and possibly gets the account.

A Doyle, Dane is past the stage that they have to go digging for information. They're at the point where people call them on possible new business and they're not fighting hard. I get calls too, a lot of them. But I'm also fighting hard. Also, there's a Machiavellian thing to this whole business that I love, and no matter how we grow I don't think I'll ever sit back and say to myself, 'Well, that's it. I don't want to hustle any more.' I enjoy this part of it; I enjoy it almost as much as I enjoy doing ads and commercials. I get a charge out of finding information and then putting it to use.

Corum Watches is one of our oldest accounts and truly one of the best. Good success story for us. One of their watches is an old American gold piece split in half, with a watch movement inserted in it. We sell that thing very big in Texas. We heard about Corum originally from a guy at Look magazine who said they were looking for an agency and we ought to pitch it. After I got the call I got out the phone book and couldn't even find Corum Watches. I got back to the guy on Look magazine who knew the account. 'Sure, Corum, know them well. Guy by the name of Jerry Greenberg is in charge of the whole business. He really is a great guy.' I asked him about Greenberg. 'Well, Jerry is a Cuban refugee, and he speaks with a heavy Spanish accent. He's a very gentle guy, very nice guy, but he likes b.a.l.l.sy things.'

I picked up the phone, got Corum, and said, 'h.e.l.lo, Jerry Greenberg, I hear your account is loose. I'd like to come in and talk to you about it.' At that point there's no sense saying we should get together and have a little talk. He's already talking to other agencies and I might have been too late. He had never heard of me. We had been in business for three months and things were bad. We were running out of bread, two of our partners had decided to pull out and things were very tight. I went to see him, showed him the stuff and got the account, just like that. I practically got it while I was there. When we took over the account Corum was advertising in the Times Magazine and spending something like $65,000. The account now bills close to a half million dollars with us. It's a major account with us and pretty soon he's going to be all over the lot. His sales are fantastic on that watch made out of a gold piece he's backed up with orders, two or three months' worth. The guy has a watch company now. When you're able to spend close to $500,000 in promotion and advertising, you've got to be making a lot of bread.

Let's say you track down a rumor and you're asked to make a pitch. You can do it two ways. You can have a standard regular pitch which you make to every prospective new client. Or you can do a lot of work on spec, showing the guy what kind of campaign he should have. Mostly the new and younger agencies feature a standard pitch. They don't believe in freebies for anybody. The older agencies the establishment, which is running scared will do anything for new business and they'll go to any lengths, like preparing a whole campaign on spec. Like the TWA thing, which is the great example. One thing good that did come out of the TWA pitch was a growing reluctance on the part of all agencies to do free work.

There is still a third way to get an account, but it is really going out of style fast. What happens is that the chairman of the board of an old-fashioned big agency learns that an account is loose and remembers that he went to school with Bunny or Snoopie or whatever, who now is chairman of the board of the account. The advertising chairman of the board calls his friend at Chase Manhattan and the banker quietly sets up a discreet lunch for the two chairmen of the board. They have a terrific lunch, which is featured by the lack of talk about advertising. Maybe they'll talk about their mutual friend Stinky who was a big man because he stole the town bell one night after the senior hop. You've got to understand that the two chairmen of the board really can't discuss advertising, because they don't know a thing about it. After the lunch, if the account chairman is feeling good, he'll give the account to the agency chairman on the spot because he trusts him and 'he's our kind of person.' However, with so much more money at stake these days, this kind of pitch is going out of style. Only once did I ever run into a guy I knew when I was a kid in Brooklyn. We were pitching a radio station and this kid who used to hang around the same street corner as I did turned out to be the account executive of the radio station. It was the first time I ever had a common background with a potential account. We sat around talking about old times, you know, things like 'Hey, whatever happened to Baldy?' 'I don't know.' 'What happened to Louie Nuts?' 'Well Louie Nuts is doing three to five in Dannemora.' 'And how about Whacky?' 'Whacky?' 'Yeah, you remember, Whacky was the guy with the funny pointy head.' 'Oh, yeah, Whacky.' It turns out that out of the first twenty years of his life, Whacky spent ten in various prisons. I'm not very good on pitches that depend on schoolboy chums.

CHAPTER.

TWELVE.

PROFILES.

IN WARM.

AND HUMANE COURAGE.

'Presentations are like an opening night on Broadway. It's very big, it's the make-or-break moment for an agency, and there is a lot of very tough pressure on everyone. You've got thirty-six minutes and your audience is sitting there, and like who knows what's going to happen? Sometimes you barely get the presentation off the ground before disaster strikes ...'

Good agencies refuse to work up a free presentation. The agency which is forced to work up a presentation is an agency that is in trouble. It's an agency that is desperate, insecure about showing the work they've already done. There was a soap commercial on the air and it featured a little girl running up to her mother with a slip which had just been washed in the soap, and the little girl says, 'Mommy, smell my slip.' Now if you're the agency that turned out that little job you really don't want to go showing it to prospective clients, do you? All right, so a possible client comes to you and says, 'We don't like what our present agency is doing for us creatively, what can you do?' Well, you're faced with the prospect of either showing the little girl smelling her slip or turning out something on spec. What is happening today in all of advertising is accounts are coming in to talk creative. The main source of dissatisfaction that accounts have is in the creative area.

When an agency has no smarts in an area like the creative area, they have to go to a pitch. So they come up with a campaign. They work as though they had the account. They go out and take pictures, they work up marketing plans, spend fortunes on shooting rough commercials. They spend thousands of dollars. They get photographers to work for them for reduced rates. They say, O. K., do this for half price now and you can sock one of my clients later when we come to you.' The current clients of the agency end up paying for presentations. If there is a scandal in the business, it's the money that clients are paying for work that they never see. A typical example: A large agency has a presentation to do. They write off a lot of it. They take the bills they get for the presentation and spread them throughout the other accounts in the agency. Let's say they get a $400 stat bill for the presentation. They'll dump that $400 on the twenty accounts that they have in the agency. So it's $20 an account, and what does the account know?

When they tell their art director to do something as cheaply as possible, the only thing the art director can say to the photographer is to do it for half price now with the promise that he can sock it on the next bill. Type bills: same thing happens. Sure, they get somebody to cut the type bill, but that type bill shows up later on in some other poor guy's bill. Instead of paying $25 for something, he winds up paying $29. He doesn't question it what does the client know about the cost of setting type? it's only a $4,00 difference. The type people aren't going to absorb the loss. Somebody has to pay for it, so the existing clients foot the bill. When an agency does a full-scale presentation, somebody has to pay for it that's obvious. What isn't so obvious is that the current clients have to do the paying. How do you think a prospective client would feel if, during a pitch, he was told that this pitch came to him through the courtesy of the other clients at the agency? He'd think the way I would swell, but what happens if I give you my business? Do I have to pay for pitches you're going to make in the future? Think of the time spent on pitches. The account executive, the art director, copywriters, media people, research people, all of these guys working on a new pitch. If they're spending their time thinking about new business, they're not thinking about their regular accounts. This is very unfair. It's unfair of an advertiser to ask for a campaign and it's very unfair of an agency to accept the offer to make a pitch with a full campaign.

I would say that most of the smaller and newer agencies won't touch a pitch if a campaign is asked for. The reason for this is partly pride and partly common sense. Smaller agencies work like h.e.l.l they've got fewer people per account than larger agencies do and they really don't have the time to start pulling people off regular accounts to prepare a campaign. We do what a lot of agencies do: a regular, standard, straight-up pitch. It runs exactly thirty-six minutes no more, no less. We show what we've done in the past, we give a one-minute philosophy of our approach, we answer any questions the account might have, and that's that. If we don't get the account, we didn't deserve to get it. They know as much about us in those thirty-six minutes as they ever will know. We've got our pitch broken down to seven minutes of commercials. Then you show your print ads, explain a bit about the background of each ad, and that's that.

Presentations are like an opening night on Broadway. It's very big, it's the make-or-break moment for an agency, and there is a lot of very tough pressure on everyone. You've got thirty-six minutes and your audience is sitting there, and like who knows what's going to happen? Sometimes you barely get the presentation off the ground before disaster strikes. Ron Travisano and I made a pitch not long ago to a very nice guy named Jerry O'Reilly, who handled the Evening in Paris perfume business. We walked into the offices and they were the slickest offices I've seen in a long time. We gave our names to a receptionist and this guy comes down this great long hall. This guy is Mr. O'Reilly's a.s.sistant. He leads us to this great big room where we are to meet Mr. O'Reilly. I was carrying the regular ad case and Ron was carrying the projector, which is a big thing and must weigh sixty or seventy pounds. Mr. O'Reilly walks in and I extend my hand and say, 'Mr. O'Reilly, I'm Jerry Della Femina.' He shakes my hand and then Ron turns to him and says, 'Hi, I'm Ron Travisano.' What Ron didn't remember as he turned to O'Reilly was that he was carrying that projector. When he turned, so did the projector, and the thing caught O'Reilly right on the kneecap. The sound of the projector hitting his kneecap was a sound I used to hear when I was a kid going to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. You would listen to the crack of the bat and you could tell from the sound when it was going to be a home run. Same sound from O'Reilly's knee. I had my eyes shut when I heard that sound, and I could have sworn that his knee was going to end up in the left-field stands. O'Reilly went down to the floor immediately.

Ron turned to me right at the crack of the bat and said, 'This is not going to be such a good presentation.' And like I flipped when he said that. We both went into hysterics. Tears were coming out of my eyes. The guy, he went down and he had a little trouble talking for a few minutes. Ron and I went into such hysterics that we couldn't move we were useless for the rest of the presentation. O'Reilly was very nice about it, considering that he might have been crippled for life by the shot. I'm sorry to say we didn't get the account which is not surprising and the guy was nice enough not to sue us for bodily damage with intent to kill.

Just after we went into business for ourselves we had a chance to pitch an account over in Jersey some outfit that made hair tonic. They wanted to see what we had done in the past and we decided to ship all of our previous ads out to Jersey ahead of time. Ron lives in Jersey and he said he would take the portfolio out there the day before, since it was on his way home. Ron sometimes dresses a little too much. This particular day he was wearing a bright-green sport jacket plus an electric-blue shirt, and to top that off he had on one of those flowered ties. He's got very swarthy skin and very weird hair and occasionally when you take a look at him he comes on a little strange. He gets out to Jersey with the portfolio and he tells the receptionist he's the executive vice-president of the agency and they show him to the office of Mr. Jones, the guy we're supposed to pitch. Jones comes to the door and Ron starts to say that he's from the agency but Jones takes one look at Ron and figures him for a Mercury Messenger or something. 'O. K., thanks, boy,' Jones says, and leaves poor Ron standing there. It was obvious that if Ron had a piece of paper in his hand Jones would have signed it and sent him on his way. Like Ron was destroyed for three days after that. It was the first time he had ever been mistaken for a messenger.

Sometimes presentations turn into disasters because you find out halfway through that you really shouldn't have been there in the first place. Years ago I worked for a short time at an agency called Ashe & Engelmore. One of the guys at the agency named Bob Hirshberg had met another guy at the bar of '21' and after two minutes of talk Bob figured that the guy was hinting that we should go out and make a very big presentation for the Loew's Hotel business in Puerto Rico. I don't know to this day how Bob got that impression, but he came back to the agency and said, 'This is it, we've got a real shot at this account.'

Well, we sat down and I get the bright idea that we've got to find out more about how travel agents react to the Americana Hotel. I got a little tape recorder with an attachment to the telephone and we started to call travel agents. I decided that I would tell them that I'm a guy going to Puerto Rico and could they recommend a hotel. If they don't recommend the Americana, then I would say, 'Hey, how about the Americana? Is that any good?' Then we'd take the tape and use it at the presentation.

I got a tapeload of reactions. Little did I know that things like this can blow a whole presentation. I figured the tape would immediately strike them that they needed an agency like us, one that thought ahead and really was interested enough to know the problems that they might be facing. At the first meeting I knew something was wrong when the guy whom Bob had met in the bar said, 'Bob, you didn't have to do anything like this.' Bob says, 'Well, we thought we would show you what our ideas on the ...' And the guy said, 'Look, I thought this would just be a meeting where we would talk a little bit.' When you hear that phrase, duck. Also sitting in at the meeting was one of the Tisch brothers I forgot which but one of the owners of Loew's Hotels.

They're waiting for the presentation to start and I said, 'Gentlemen, I'd like you to hear this tape.' The tape goes on, you hear the telephone ringing, and my voice saying, 'Is this the Magic Carpet Travel Service?' 'Yeah.' 'My name is Jerry Dell and I'm looking for a place to stay when I go to Puerto Rico. I was wondering if you could tell me something about the place.' And the travel agent's voice comes on, 'Well, there are a lot of nice places in Puerto Rico.' One of the Loew's guys says, 'That's Hymie Smith.' They start whispering around the table, 'Hey that's Hymie, that's Hymie.'

I said, 'What place would you recommend?' Hymie says, 'Well, I would recommend ...' and he recommended something other than the Americana. My voice comes on again. 'What about the Americana? I hear a lot about the Americana.' Hymie says, 'The Americana? It's too close to the airport. It hasn't got a swinging crowd. You're a young guy, right?'

The next voice I hear is one of the Loew's Hotel people who says, 'That p.r.i.c.k! Stop the tape!' I stop the tape and the hotel guy tells a secretary to call in a guy named Sid, who evidently is in charge of travel-agent relations. Sid is a very fat guy and when he walks in he's very cordial and gives everybody a big smile and makes a big thing of shaking all hands. 'Sid,' says the hotel guy, 'when's the last time you spoke to Hymie Smith over at Magic Carpet Travel?' 'Hymie? I took Hymie to lunch just the other day.' 'Would you say that Hymie is your friend?' 'Oh, Hymie is one of our good friends.' 'Play the tape.' I replay the tape and Sid is perspiring a lot.

At this point I'm ready to go into the presentation. They couldn't care less. At this point they're so aggravated at Hymie over at Magic Carpet Travel that they don't know I'm in the room. 'Well,' I say, 'now I'd like to show you what we're going to do to combat this indifference to your hotel.' n.o.body's listening. The Loew's guy is going on in this vein 'You spend money, you take these guys to places I don't go to, and then they show you this? Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have no loyalty.' Guys are walking around muttering, 'How could you spend money on those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?'

I try to b.u.t.t in with 'I'd like to tell you how we're going to solve this marketing problem of yours ...' One hotel guy looked at me as if to say, 'What, are you still here? You caused all the trouble, you b.u.m, now go away.' I said, 'Here's an ad we have featuring James Bond ...' One guy says, 'Look. We got advertising, we got good advertising. We're not interested in a new agency. We're worried about the off season.'

Meanwhile we're trying to back out the door without getting hit. Now it's a case where you have to grab your equipment, and suddenly it feels like you have a lot more equipment than when you went in. You're plugging things and unplugging things and the tape recorder is falling on the floor and 'Bob, hold this,' 'I got it,' and they're still yelling at Sid. The whole thing was such a disaster that it probably was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in advertising because I learned one thing out of it: that was, never be afraid of a presentation. I mean, what could go worse? Worse is that they could physically attack you. That is the end. I've seen people who were uptight about presentations. A lot of people. Agency presidents who get very shook about presenting. And I always think back to that day with Loew's as Bob and I were walking out. I was trying to hold my head in my hands and keep the tape recorder under one arm.

On the street it was murder. A hot, hot day in July, and it must have been like 98 degrees out. When we got downstairs the heat hit us. Now usually whenever an agency finishes a presentation, no matter how bad it is, they usually say, 'Did you notice that guy over there on the end? He looked pretty impressed. The other two were yawning but ...' They always try to find something to get them through the day. n.o.body doesn't get an account. You always say, 'Gee, we got a good chance.' When Bob and I came down the elevator we were still looking back to see if they were chasing us. They were shoving us out the door saying things like 'Here, take this. This is the top to that thing you're carrying. You can snap it on later.'

So there we are, 98 degrees out, carrying all this equipment. I start to say something in the usual vein about the presentation and Bob looked at me and said, 'Shhh. Don't even talk about it.' We're lugging all of this equipment and of course no cabs. We had to walk back from Forty-third and Broadway to Madison Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street. It was like the Bataan Death March. We were sweating, we were dying, the heat was killing us. I felt like people were hitting me with bayonets to get me going.

We got back to the agency and Irwin Engelmore, the president, a very sweet guy, takes a look at the two of us who are soaked through and says, 'How'd you do?' And for the first time in the history of advertising someone told the truth after a presentation. Bob said, 'We bombed.' Irwin said, 'Oh, were there things that they didn't like?'

Bob said, 'There was everything that they didn't like. We bombed.'

Now Irwin, who had spent quite a bit of money on this presentation, said, 'Well, do they want us to come back again?'

Bob said, 'I don't think they want us in that neighborhood any more. I don't think we can go around Broadway and Forty-second Street.'

Irwin said, 'Uh, is there somebody I can call?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'Call a priest, Irwin. Maybe he'll help.'

Once, also at Ashe & Engelmore, we were going to make a presentation to a fellow named Richard Meltzer, who was the president of Beauknit Mills, a very big textile company. We had come up with some kind of campaign to show them I don't even remember what it was, it's not really important. The thing was we all had instructed Irwin before the presentation, 'Irwin, when you go out there, when you sit down with this guy, don't forget he's going to ask you some questions about what kind of advertising they need. This is new to him. Remember, it's human advertising. I want you to tell him it's human advertising.' I would do this to Irwin all the time, set him up, get him straight. 'You got it now? It's human advertising you're showing. If he says, 'What is it?' tell him it's warm and human.'

Irwin said, 'Yeah, yeah. It's warm and human.'

I said, 'Right, Irwin. It's warm and human, warm and human, warm and human.' He said, 'Don't worry about it, Jerry. We're going to do well.'

Irwin gets to the presentation and he's sitting there with his right-hand man, a very bright guy named Lee Barnett. Irwin hands Meltzer the campaign and says, 'Mr. Meltzer, this is it. This is humane.' Barnett's muttering, 'No, no, no.' Irwin says, 'It's humane, Mr. Meltzer. This is humane advertising, warm and humane.' Barnett's whispering, 'It's human, it's human.' Irwin says, 'Yeah, human. It's humane, Mr. Meltzer.' Finally Barnett kicked Irwin under the table and said, 'Human! Humane is kind to dogs, you schmuck!'

Irwin was a good man on presentations. He would always start off his presentation by saying, 'Do you have the courage to run our kind of advertising?' And the prospective client usually was confused because he couldn't figure out what kind of advertising he had to have the courage to run. This was Irwin's standard pitch. Most agency presidents have a standard pitch where they say, 'It takes courage to run our kind of advertising' or 'It doesn't take courage to run our kind of advertising.' Or 'We're marketers' or 'We're salesmen' or whatever they are on any given Thursday. Irwin's pitch always was the courage pitch. Running his ads was a sign of virility. It was wonderful, just wonderful.

Pitching with Shep Kurnit was just as much fun as it was with Irwin. Kurnit is a brilliant guy. He could be very good. We compete pretty hard against each other but I like the guy. He's got tremendous staying power. It's hard to keep up with him. He stays. He claws, he scratches, he fights, but he's there. He's not a pushover by any means. One of his funny traits is that when he talks to you he's got to touch you. When he makes a point, he touches you. The touching used to drive us crazy. One day Ron came out of his office and said, 'I solved the problem. Whenever he comes near me and starts to touch me, I start lighting matches.' Shep always used to back you in a corner. Ron said, 'It's easy. You stand there lighting matches and he never comes near you any more.'

One of Shep's little idiosyncrasies was that during a pitch he usually would find fault with the product they were pitching. As I said, he's very bright, and quite often during presentations he would take a look at the thing and automatically redesign it before your eyes. The problem was that you never knew when Shep was going to redesign the client's product and this led to a lot of tension at new-business meetings at Delehanty. You never knew when Shep was going to drop the bomb. Maybe the client has been in business for fifty years and maybe his father had started making these widgets or whatever. This guy has lived with these widgets for years, he wakes up widgets, he sleeps and dreams widgets. Shep would come in, take one look at the widget and say, 'You know what? If you took this handle off here, put the handle there, changed this, switched that, then you'd have a h.e.l.l of a product.' It was great because it gave you a chance to become reacquainted with your shoes. You would look at them and after a while Shep would be finished with redesigning the product.

The great thing about Shep is that he would drop a bomb on you in the unlikeliest places. Once we had to attend a Group W (Westinghouse) affiliates' convention in Florida. Shep had given a little speech the day before, and on this day we were sitting around the pool having lunch: Shep, Marvin Davis (a vice-president of Delehanty), me, and the lady in charge of continuity for the Group W stations. She was a very prim and proper lady because if you're in charge of continuity you've got to be at least a virgin, if not better. We're sitting there eating and I'm waiting for the bomb to fall. We know it's going to happen, so Marvin and I are trying to pick easy subjects to talk about. Marvin was picking good subjects like the weather, I was picking good subjects like baseball, we both were picking very good. The directress of continuity must have thought we were crazy, but little did she know! The minute he zapped in that this woman is in charge of continuity, he had to do continuity stories. He started off by saying, 'I have a client who is a great guy, but I once had a problem selling him an ad for Talon Zippers that showed the Statue of Liberty with a zipper down her back.' He goes into the whole story about how he has to create ads all day long on zippers, and I kind of looked over at Marvin for a second and he had a sandwich up to his mouth and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. We both knew something bad was going to happen but we weren't quite sure what. I said to myself, 'He's not going to tell the old Statue of Liberty story he's not going to do that.'

Sure enough. He says, 'We had this ad with the Statue of Liberty and I knew how the client would react to the Statue having her zipper in the back open. He could say it's unpatriotic but I remembered something I once saw on Forty-second Street.'

I said to myself, 'Oh, oh, here's where he tells the story about how he picked up a Statue of Liberty with a thermometer in its backside in some souvenir store on Forty-second Street. Oh, Shep, please don't talk about the thermometer being in the backside.'

Shep came through, all right. He did not say the Statue of Liberty had the thermometer in its backside. He said, 'So when I took the client this Statue of Liberty with a thermometer shoved up its a.s.s I told him if they can shove a thermometer up the a.s.s of the Statue of Liberty, you can take a zipper down in the back.' Like it was the first time someone really said a prayer after a meal. Everybody had their heads down at their plates, reading their parsley.

You can't underestimate Shep. One day he was flying back to New York from I don't know where and he happened to be sitting next to the advertising manager in charge of Singer Sewing Machines of Peru. Shep talked to him during the plane ride and the guy got to like Shep and he gave Shep the account. It was one of the most beautiful accounts in the history of advertising. We were selling sewing machines to Indians who couldn't run them because they had no place to plug them in. Shep went out and researched things and we found that the best form of media in Peru was to put a sign on a boat that floats down the Amazon River or whatever river flows through Peru.

Singer of Peru was a great experience. I once wrote an ad that said, 'The machine you buy your mother on Mother's Day will last until Father's Day.' It went to the client off in Peru and it came back with the note, 'We have no Father's Day in Peru.' We had a girl in our office who was a student from Colombia and was some kind of an Indian and she knew the kind of Spanish that they spoke in Peru at least she said she did and she would translate everything we did and then we would send it down to Peru.

A crazy account. We had an American who understood the language to shoot commercials for us, so we wrote this one commercial which showed a young man and a young woman walking into the local Singer Sewing Center. Well, our man in Peru gets the storyboard for the commercial and he didn't know where to go to hire the models for the shooting. So this guy did what he thought was a logical thing. He went to a local movie studio and hired a couple of young out-of-work actors. The next day as our guy got ready to go out to shoot the commercial, he happened to glance at the local newspaper. There, staring back at him, was the face of his male model on page 1, and across his chest was a string of numbers. It turned out that the actor had just been picked up by the local police when he had attempted to hold up the National Bank of Lima. Our cameraman called us up in New York and informed us that the commercial we were waiting for would have to be held up for three to five years.

I had written a nice little commercial which showed a bullfighter sitting in the middle of a ring, sewing himself a cape. They let the bull out and the bullfighter starts sewing like a son of a b.i.t.c.h. Then the commercial cuts to the bull, back to the bullfighter, back to the bull, until the last moment when he finished the cape just in time to give the bull a pa.s.s and save his neck. The way it was shot, the opening scene showed the bullfighter wearing a black suit and in the next shot he was wearing a white suit, and in the third shot he had on a suit with a lot of crazy decorations on it. They just found some stock film and put it in wherever they could.

You wonder why Peru is mad at us. We were selling them machines and the poor Indians were buying machines without power. On time, yet. We got a letter from a guy who was trying to make a collection from a couple of Indians who had bought a sewing machine. They were stuck away on a mountain someplace and the collection guy spent four hours going through swamps, jungles and who knows what else trying to reach them. He was able to see them but he could not get to them. He could never reach them and he couldn't understand how they ever got down off their perch to get the sewing machine and put it on the back of their donkey and go back up the mountain.

The Peru guy used to show up in New York every so often and Shep spent hours trying to teach the guy media. The Peru guy says, 'You have to go in this magazine, El Commandore.' Shep says, 'What about this other magazine, El Fig?' (You had a choice of two magazines in your Peru marketing plan.) The Peru guy says, 'El Fig is no good because it's never on the newsstands. You can't advertise in it.' Shep says, 'Why isn't it on the stands?' He's figuring maybe they're having union trouble with El Fig down in Peru. The local tells Shep, 'The minute El Fig comes out it disappears from the stands. But El Commandore, it's always around on the stands.' Shep says, 'Do you understand that people are buying El Fig and not buying El Commandore and that's why El Fig is never around and El Commandore is?' The Peru guy said, 'Oh.' We ran ads, we ran commercials, and we made a lot of bread. If you got the Indian to make the down payment, you were breaking even. The rest of the stuff was gravy.

The best presentation I ever took part in also was at Delehanty. We were getting ready for a presentation to Chemway, Inc., which makes Pretty Feet. Usually, the night before any presentation Shep would come in and suddenly decide that everything was wrong and we were not going to get the account. True to form, he came in the night before the Chemway pitch and said our stuff was garbage and we wouldn't get the account. Well, we had a terrible fight. Shep and I were always having terrible fights but this one was worse. Marvin Davis, who also would be in on the pitch, said something about one of the ads and I went berserk. I had been working very hard and I just flipped. I climbed over a table after Marvin. People had to pull us apart because it was turning into a real brawl.

I was so uptight about what had just happened that I went out drinking for the whole night. It was a very wild night and I woke up at seven o'clock in the morning in a strange place not knowing what to do for clothing because my clothes were a shambles. I knew that I had to make a presentation and my shirt looked as if somebody had thrown up on it maybe it was me. I had to find a shirt, if nothing else. The presentation was scheduled for nine o'clock. No store is open at 8:30. I had a car and I couldn't remember where I had parked it. So I left the car wherever it was and jumped into a cab and told the guy to take me down to the West Side waterfront. Down there the Army-Navy surplus stores are open all night. I bought a denim shirt and a solid blue tie and figured it wouldn't look too bad. I was still hung over, terribly so, and I took the cab back to the office to make the presentation.

During a presentation the top-ranking officer from the agency starts the pitch and then everybody around the table says his piece, including the creative department. And now it comes time for me to do my speech and somebody had given me a cup of coffee. The alcohol must have been condensed in my body, because the minute I got the coffee down I was drunk again. But I got up and made the best presentation I've ever made in my life. It wasn't that I thought I was good; people came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, 'I've seen you at a presentation before but I've never seen you so b.u.t.toned up.' Well, the b.u.t.toned-up part was that I was afraid to open my mouth and really talk because I figured if I did open up my mouth I would throw up. So I talked very quietly. Afterward everyone said, 'Usually you get very excited. This was so nice. You didn't move, you didn't jump around. This was just the way to present to these people.' Little did they know that if I had jumped around my head would have fallen on the table.

They gave us the account on the spot. I ordered champagne for everybody but I wouldn't serve any to Shep or Marvin. We got drunk the same day. It was like one twenty-four-hour binge, the whole place just went crazy.

Once, at Delehanty, we made a terrific presentation and the president of the company we were pitching fell asleep when the lights went out during the showing of the commercials. Shep was very good that day, and Marvin Davis was very good, too. I was sitting next to the president and he just didn't like the whole group. He was getting very tight and very fidgety. When a presentation is packaged, as the Delehanty presentation was, it's very hard to stop. It's like when you stop a door-to-door salesman in the middle of his pitch, he'll get so confused that he'll start the whole pitch over again. Shep's presentation couldn't be cut at the right time or speeded up. The presentation went on, deadly.

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 b.u.mping 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 the company go out and solicit the business? Salesmen get business. If your salesmen aren't getting the business, then you call in the sales manager and straighten him out. If a guy wants to go and be handled by a law firm, the partners don't show up and tell him what their law firm is going to do for him and what clients they've kept out of jail in the past. But in advertising you don't get an account without the client getting to see the president of the agency.

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.

Cliche 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 h.e.l.l. 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 naive, but some still do.

Cliche 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 dinner at my home. Neither has Ron. You don't need us for any of the other things. Join a friendship club for that kind of stuff. We'll take a client to dinner to discuss business.

Not long ago we made a pitch and we were competing with Doyle, Dane and Wells, Rich, and Jack Tinker. Three very strong agencies. I didn't figure we would get the business but I thought it was nice to be in such company. Suddenly it's reported in the papers that none of the four agencies got the account it went to a very, very bad agency. One of those places where they strive for mediocrity and miss. Now this bad agency did not present they were nowhere. They certainly couldn't get the account on the basis of their past work. Somewhere along the line, somebody made a hit, somebody scored. I figure they got the account through their bank. This bad agency found out who the client's bank was and worked a deal. It's so sad, because this client really needed a good agency to bail them out of their problems. Doyle, Dane would have been terrific for them, or Wells, Rich, or even us, but the outfit they gave the account to will run them into the ground. The sales will continue to drop and they will wonder why they can't move their product out.

Sometimes agency presidents are pretty casual guys themselves forget about the writers and art directors. Charlie Goldschmidt is that kind of president not uptight at all. Charlie has a thing about fire engines, or maybe it's fires. He would chase fire engines down the block. We might be having a presentation and Charlie would be sitting there quietly when, whammo, he'd hear a siren outside. He would jump up, run out the door, and you wouldn't see him for an hour or so. Some days I would be sitting with him alone and if he heard an engine he'd open the window. If it looked like the fire was close enough, he'd go out and see it. He was a big man for fires. One day in the middle of a very important meeting, Danny Karsch and a few other people were discussing things with a prospective client when he heard fire engines. The door to the office slams open, Charlie comes busting through. He walked right through the offices not saying a word to anyone, opened the window to check how close the fire was, shut the window, walked out, and shut the door. Not one single word during all this. Everybody is looking at one another, and finally Danny said, 'I think that people who like fires really don't like people.'

Packaged presentations are put together like Broadway shows. There are word cues and the whole thing. In our presentation, I might be talking and I'll say, 'And on the subject of marketing ...' and Tully Plesser of the Cambridge Marketing group, who occasionally does a research study for us, will say, 'On the subject of marketing, I would say that we can offer you the following ...' At the end of the marketing piece Tully might say, 'And of course marketing is only as good as media.' Then we punch the media director who wakes up and says, 'Life magazine, four-color, full page.' Some agencies have this thing down to such a science that they don't even need word cues; they look at one another.

Not long ago we pitched to a very big food company in Dallas. There was a lot of money at stake and we were very nervous when you're talking about millions of dollars you can't help but be nervous. We left New York on a Thursday for a Friday-morning pitch. We rent a car at the Dallas airport and drive into town and check into the hotel. We know we're in a foreign country when a local takes a look at Ron, who happens to be dressed very quietly, and says, 'Hey, boy, why don't you get a haircut?' Ron is very tense and says, 'Up yours, Reb.' We have dinner that night at the local top restaurant, where the big dish is fried steak with enchiladas on the side.

The next morning, grits. Ron, who sweats a lot, is really doing a job. We pile into the rented car and start looking for the main office. The company we're pitching to is enormous but we couldn't find it. You stop the car at a corner and ask somebody where the main headquarters are and of course you can't understand what the guy says. He's talking a different language. We felt like tourists in a foreign country. We started the car again and Ron says, 'What did he say?' 'I don't know, I didn't understand him.' We keep driving through this maze in the hope that we'll find an American we can talk to. Finally we get to one guy who says something like the building we're looking for is two blocks down, turn to the right.

Sure enough, general headquarters. Last-minute nerves. 'Don't forget we're billing fifteen million.' 'Fifteen? I thought it was eighteen.' 'How many people we got working for us now?' 'I don't know, I haven't counted lately.' You're trying to get all your facts straight.