A guy from the company comes out and he"s very friendly and personable: "Hi, I"m Eddie Jones, come on in." Immediately four guys try to go through the door at the same time. It always happens, and the door is only built to hold maybe half of a guy. There is always a b.u.mping of bodies on the way in to a presentation. I am very nervous, picking up and putting down the portfolio. It is like playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium when you know that it"s going to be O. K. if you ever get a ball hit in your direction. If somebody would ask you, "What are you guys billing?" things would be all right. n.o.body"s doing that. All they"re trying to be is friendly. They get you into a real Texas-sized conference room and you pray that there will be at least one guy there you will be able to understand. You start listening to the introductions and the h.e.l.los, and on a h.e.l.lo from one guy Ron leaned into my ear and said, "New York!" Fantastic. One cat we could understand. He was from New York and it was a great feeling that we weren"t alone in this foreign country.
We still have to pick the man who has got the clout in the room. There is always one guy in a room who is going to say yes or no. Finding this guy is a job all by itself. There can be real problems in searching out this guy. A guy I know once came into a meeting late. He sat down, looked at his papers, and when it was his time to go on he"s looking right down the line at each guy to find the one he"s going to zero in on. He spots one guy who looks like he"s important and very inquisitive and says to himself, "This is it." He stared him straight in the eye all the way through the pitch, never taking his eye off him. He threw out the rest of the people, so help me, and sold and sold and sold. He forgot the whole room. When it was over he was convinced that he had done a terrific job. Then they told him he had been pitching to a new guy who had just come to work at his agency an a.s.sistant media director. Obviously the new guy was too terrified to say, "Hey, I"m on your team."
There may be six people in the room and there"s going to be discussion, but when it"s all over one guy"s going to say, "I think we should go this way." He might not even say that. He might say, "The president, I think, will agree that we should go this way." This is the guy you want to find.
You start off ad libbing and you have no idea whom you"re talking to. They want to know where we ate the night before and when we tell them they say, "Great place, great steak." I keep thinking of the enchiladas. They"re uncomfortable because they know you"re nervous as h.e.l.l. You start off by saying, "I want to thank you all for allowing us to come out here and make this presentation."
The top gunner, the big guy, is at this meeting. Which is not good. My feeling about top gunners is when they"re at a meeting their troops feel they"ve got to perform for the top gunner. I like to go with plateaus.
The group we"re pitching to, they"re all big gunners. You could see it when the introductions started: "Vice-President in charge of international operations"; "Vice-President in charge of marketing"; "Director of marketing and advertising."
I start up again by thanking everyone. I give a little of my background and then we go around the table, and each of us gives background on himself. One of our account executives, Jim Travis, tells who he is. Ron tells them who he is he"s still nervous but he gets through it fine. Now we"re back to what to do next. I still don"t think it"s time to show the work; neither does Ron, because the way we work Ron hands me the ads as I show them and he"s not moving for the pile. I"m not even looking at him because I don"t want to show, either. We started looking at each other around 8:30 a.m. and now it"s about ten after nine. It"s still not the right time and then one of the gunners asks me about a column I wrote in Marketing/ Communications. I talk about the column and everybody laughs I was attacking the Federal Government and guys in the food business live in fear of the Food and Drug Administration.
All of a sudden, now it"s O. K. to show the work. We"re very close to them and now the pitch becomes almost automatic. I start to look over at Ron but I don"t have to because he"s reaching to pick up the first sample of work. First I go into a disclaimer, telling them that some of the work they"re going to see was done at three different agencies.
The first ad we show is the Peanuts ad for Talon Zippers. We do it because it gives the group a chance to laugh right off the bat. I tell them that I don"t know whether the ad ever sold a zipper or not, but it was a good ad psychologically for all the clothing manufacturers who were looking at the ad to know about Talon. So you"ve opened the meeting and the feeling is warm and friendly; now you"ve got to hit them with something hard, so we show the Pretty Feet ad the one that says, "What"s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?" A very good reaction on this one. They look impressed so I detour into drug advertising. Then, all of a sudden, there"s a long discussion about Pretty Feet.
Plesser is there watching and waiting. The very second this guy asks me a question and I answer it, I know I haven"t answered it right down the line. One second later the next voice I hear is Plesser"s saying, "And another side of it is ..." Plesser adds a little more weight; he makes my answer palatable.
Corum Watches comes on next and before you know it the lights are out and the commercial reel is on. We open with the commercial for Ozone, a men"s hairspray, which we did at Bates using Yogi Berra. Whenever that commercial is shown at a presentation, somebody"s voice comes out of the dark saying, "Look at the face on this guy." The next commercial is one our own agency did for The New York Knickerbocker, a newspaper that began after the World-Journal Tribune folded. It folded pretty quickly itself. As it starts to play I always say, "That commercial cost six thousand dollars to produce. These days you can"t even get a baby picture of your kid for six thousand." They all pick up. Now they"re looking to see what we got for our six grand which is something they toss away every hour. A Royal Globe Insurance commercial is next. In the final scene of this one a driver out of control is coming straight out of the screen at the viewer in a very dramatic night shot. Ron quietly gets up during this commercial and walks over to the projector. He looks as though he"s fiddling with the focus, but what he really is doing is turning the sound of the commercial up full blast. The sound of the commercial fills the room just as the car is about to crash. As the commercial finishes, Ron turns down the sound and sits down again. This works very well and the guy next to me says, "Wow!"
We close the reel with a commercial we did for the National Hemophilia Foundation, which features a bleeder bleeding on camera. On come the lights and then I go into the agency philosophy. Because this is a company with problems with the Government, I tell them about Miss Cheng and Feminique. They"re nodding their heads, saying, "Yeah. Thank G.o.d somebody else is being persecuted." One old conservative guy at the meeting is saying, "You mean you can talk about a woman"s private parts and they won"t let us say what we want to say about food?" He"s very angry and as far as he"s concerned he"s got to go out and lynch a couple of Mexicans to feel better.
Then I talk about our billing all of us had finally agreed on a figure which was reasonably accurate. Then I mention that we have had a.s.signments from R.J.Reynolds and Quaker Oats. I repeat it three times because somebody might have thought it was the Quakertown Oats Company, which makes horse food. "Yes, Quaker Oats called us and said, "We"ve decided to give you an a.s.signment." Just to make sure, I throw in, "Lovely people over at Quaker Oats." If I could have, I would have asked them if they had their Quaker Oats for breakfast this morning. What I"m doing with Quaker Oats is establishing that although that company is bigger than our prospective client, they think we"re respectable.
I talk about the American Broadcasting Company next. They all love the word "American" in Dallas and they seem to have heard of ABC. Great second name to mention. From ABC I move to Cinzano Vermouth. I look over at the older guy. He looks as if he"s thinking that we"re in bed with all the Italians. "That client also has Moet Champagne," I add. He doesn"t like the French either, right? So we go into Blue Nun wine I almost get a smile out of him with Blue Nun wine. We"ve also done some special projects for a large account that they"ve heard of. All of a sudden little looks around the table. "Look," I say, "they"re very happy with their agency but it"s practically the same situation where you called me and said you"re not unhappy with your agency, either." I talk about Corum Watches. Who knows from Corum Watches? "Part of the Piaget Company." n.o.body stirs. "Part of the North American Watch Company." The old guy hears American and starts to nod.
Suddenly one guy asks, "What do you think of Ted Bates?" I don"t think much of Ted Bates in or out of a presentation so I start blasting Bates. They keep talking. The big question they bring up is, "What happens if Della Femina gets run over by a truck?" They"re worried about the fact that we appear to be a one-man operation. We have to convince them that they"re wrong. We end up by leaving them with the impression that I was already dead at this meeting and stuffed just to make the presentation look nice.
We tell them that we"ve just moved into a new set of offices. We finish our pitch and that"s that. We made plans for them to visit us in New York, which they want to do. Dates are set up, which is good. The only thing different we"ll do is to take our art director, Bob Giraldi, and go get him a haircut and maybe dress him like an American. Otherwise nothing will change.
A few weeks later they did come up to see us. We went through the pitch again and walked them through the offices. We even had gotten Bob to wear some normal clothes for the occasion. We have a good shot at the business, too. Lots of handshaking and congratulations. The last thing one of their guys said as he left our offices was, "Boy, you creative agencies sure have some strange types around. Like that art director of yours."
CHAPTER.
THIRTEEN.
THE MOST.
FUN YOU.
CAN HAVE.
WITH YOUR.
CLOTHES.
ON.
"New agencies always start at lunchtime. Everybody goes to lunch and everybody b.i.t.c.hes at lunch. "Those sons of b.i.t.c.hes, they don"t appreciate what I"ve done for them. Why, in the last year I"ve picked up two millions" worth of billing myself." All of a sudden, "Imagine that. Two million dollars. That means three hundred thousand dollars to the agency and all I"m making from them is a lousy forty thousand a year. They"re making three hundred thousand and paying me forty thousand. I"d really like to start a place." The other guy says, "You know, we"ve worked together for a lot of years. I haven"t got any money but I"ve got a friend who"s got all the money and he"s got a connection. Let"s go into business ...""
I am very poor on dates and it is a good thing I"m in the advertising business where they don"t worry too much about how accurate resumes are. I was born in 1936 and in July I will be thirty-four years old. I got married when I was twenty years old but I really have been married all my life. I graduated from Lafayette High School in Brooklyn in 1954 and I went to night school at Brooklyn College for one year. That"s it with regard to education. My first job was as a messenger boy for The New York Times and I really didn"t do anything much beyond that from 1945 to 1961. In 1961 I finally got a job with a real advertising agency, Daniel & Charles.
I started with Danny and Charlie as a copywriter at $100 a week, and when I left in 1963 to go to Fuller & Smith & Ross I was making $18,000 a year. I didn"t last too long at Fuller & Smith no more than nine months or so and the next place I worked, which was Ashe & Engelmore, was an even shorter time. In 1964 I went to work for Shep Kurnit at Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller and I lasted there a couple of years. From Delehanty I moved over to Ted Bates in 1966, making $50,000 a year plus all the grief they could give you. We started our own agency in September of 1967 after Ron went out and practically raised $80,000 all by himself. I knew very few people with $800, much less $80,000. This September we will celebrate our third anniversary in business and of course we will have a big party. I really don"t know what we"re billing, but it must be someplace around $20 million a year, which is not bad at all. We"ve got fifty-three people working for us and we"re paying some of these people $40,000 or so a year, which is not too bad, either. We have never been fired by one of our accounts. We resigned a couple of small ones because of some trouble with them, and one account, The Knickerbocker, just disappeared. We have a company car, a Lincoln, and one weekend last summer I drove out in it with my family to Montauk for the weekend. I locked the keys to the car in the trunk just as we were about to come back, so there are still strange things that happen now and then.
Last summer, one of our clients mailed us a check for $400,000, which was to cover a lot of television buying, and Ron and I took a look at that check and started to giggle like kids. It is a very weird feeling to hold a check in your hand for that amount of money and not think about skipping town to Brazil. When we go to the Coast to shoot a commercial they are very nice to us at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it"s great to sit at the pool and get paged. Our banker is nice to us, too, and we even have a line of credit. Guys call us up and try to hustle us to go public, which I hope we will never do. We have terrific offices at 625 Madison Avenue, a full floor, and the day we moved into the place we ran out of s.p.a.ce. I work crazy hours and not long ago I spent three days and nights trying to control an AC-DC actor who was starring in one of our commercials. This guy tried first to make it with every girl on the set and after he went through the chicks, he then started on the shooting crew.
We have come a long way in three years, baby, to steal one of Leo Burnett"s lines. The year we went into business, about 140 agencies also started up. There are now ten of those new agencies left. The problem with all of these new agencies is that most of them are started by creative guys who really aren"t business-oriented. And they start agencies for the wrong reasons. A guy gets fired and he decides to start an agency. Guys don"t plan their agencies. They don"t plan their growth and they wind up in trouble.
A friend of mine just opened an agency and he said, "Gee, I don"t know if I should work out of my house or if I should work out of a hotel." I said, "You"d better work out of a hotel. At least if you have a prospective client call you he won"t get your mother on the phone." He said, "Yeah, I guess you"re right." I read in the paper the other day that he just started in a hotel a hotel I"d never heard of. I thought I"d heard of every hotel in New York but I think this one is one of the Lyons hotels down in the Bowery. I don"t know where he found it but he"s in business. He"ll fold.
New agencies always start at lunchtime. Everybody goes to lunch and everybody b.i.t.c.hes at lunch. "Those sons of b.i.t.c.hes, they don"t appreciate what I"ve done for them. Why, in the last year I"ve picked up two millions" worth of billing myself." All of a sudden, "Imagine that. Two million dollars. That means three hundred thousand dollars to the agency and all I"m making from them is a lousy forty thousand a year. They"re making three hundred thousand and paying me forty thousand. I"d really like to start a place." The other guy says, "You know, we"ve worked together for a lot of years. I haven"t got any money but I"ve got a friend who"s got all the money and he"s got a connection. Let"s go into business."
So the three of them get together, find an Uncle Sam hotel and go into business. The friend with the connection doesn"t pan out; he can"t raise the bread. The account executive who"s got some kind of promise that he can have an account when he opens suddenly finds that he doesn"t have any business. The man who tells you he"s going to give you business doesn"t give it to you and all of a sudden you can"t get him on the phone.
It was very tough for us in the beginning. There were the four founding partners: Ron, myself, Frank Seibke, an art director, and Ned Tolmach, a copywriter, all of us from Bates. And two girls Barbara Kalish and a kid named Sandy Levy. We were at 635 Madison Avenue then and we had too much s.p.a.ce. Just the six of us rattling around in these big offices. We were sitting around making presentations, hoping against hope that the guys would invite us to see them at their offices instead of ours. We got a little business but after three months we were in deep trouble. It was December and one day Ned and Frank came in and said they were leaving. It was just too tough. That day, the day they left, was very bad. It was about four o"clock in the afternoon and we figured we had $11,000 left in the bank after three months. There was furniture and rent, salaries for us and nothing but money going out. The lawyer got $5,000 for setting us up and the accountant took a fee too. You"re talking about $2,000 going out every week with nothing coming in and we were sitting there and we realized that we had less than $11,000 left. We figured that if we quit paying ourselves and stretched it as far and as wide as we could, we might be able to last until March. Here we were on December 8th, I think it was, and it dawned on me that it was like the worst day of all time.
We had a lot of guys saying to us, "Well, you know, we were considering you but now that Frank and Ned have left, well ..." We had this date staring at us, March 1, the doors close and the sheriff comes in and takes the furniture out. We would have continued to try, but can you imagine trying to pitch an account without having an office without having at least a girl answering the phone? If Sandy was out sick and Barbara was out doing something, a potential client would call Jerry Della Femina & Partners and get a guy answering. It was so frustrating because you know that all you need is time and you realize by the end of February you"re out of business.
Then I remembered something. One of my heroes, really, is Mike Todd. The great Mike Todd story is that once he had a show running at the Winter Garden in 1944 and it was about to close. It was some wartime thing with Gypsy Rose Lee in it and it was in terrible shape. Todd didn"t have any money and he didn"t know what to do. He needed at least six months to get his money back and he can"t buy a customer for love or money. So he threw out the guy he had at the box office and hired a lady who had arthritis very bad. She could move her hands, but very slowly.
Somebody would come up to the box office to buy a ticket and it would take her maybe ten minutes to make change. The day he hired her he was in business. She took so long that she built a line. Every time three people tried to buy a ticket the line grew. Pretty soon they had lines all around the Winter Garden. People would see the lines and ask, "What show is going on here?" It was fantastic, and then Walter Winch.e.l.l wrote an item in his column to the effect that "They"re standing around the corner to get into the Winter Garden." Which was true, they were. The only trouble was the lady couldn"t make change fast enough. The show suddenly turned into a big hit, ran for eight more months, and Todd got his money out.
What I did that bad day in December was decide that we needed something like Todd did. Ron said, "What are we going to do?" I said, "We"re going to have a party." Ron said, "Are you crazy?" "No," I said. "We"re going to have the biggest Christmas party on Madison Avenue. We"re going to invite every potential client we know. We are going to load this place up so with people that we will have to get two bartenders. We"re going to have a photographer come down from ANNY and Ad Age to cover it. We are going to look so affluent that it"s going to hurt."
We must have sent out a thousand invitations. The place was so packed you couldn"t move. We had the press, we had friends, we had enemies, we had potential new business, we had everybody. The party cost us like $3,000 and we knew that if this didn"t work we were really sunk. But we pulled it off. People kept coming up to me that night saying, "You know, I heard that things weren"t going along so good but boy, you"ve got a place here, haven"t you?" And we said, "Things are going great, man." Barbara was watching the bartender very carefully and I kept thinking we might end up eating the leftover food ourselves. We had guys who had come in from New Jersey for the party. We had all of our ads hanging up. You could hear it beginning to start. One guy would say, "What are you here for?" And the other guy, "Oh, I"ve been interested in this agency for quite a while and we"re considering them." All of us were almost high at the party and we didn"t touch a drop of booze. My job was to walk around radiating confidence, you know, "Hi, how"s everything with you, how"s your account doing?"
And the next day we got a call from an insurance company, the guy decided he"s going to give us his business. The Moxie Company called the day after that and there we were: in business. The pictures started appearing in the trade papers and people around town were talking about Della Femina"s Christmas party. It was a big thing and it made us. People began calling us, saying, "You know, you people must be doing all right after all." The party was the turning point for us. If we hadn"t thrown the party and just tried to stretch the money out, we would have died. Guys would have been too suspicious. We had too many empty walls to convince anyone we were a going concern. Part of this business a big part of it is illusion. Illusion is very important; it makes the potential clients aware of who the h.e.l.l you are.
The big problem with the new agencies is that you need an accountant and a lawyer two of the most important people in the world. When people start agencies they forget about that and they think in terms of, Well, I can write and this other guy can draw. Not so. It"s a business of an accountant who has some clout at a bank and a lawyer who is willing to go along with you. If you make it with a lawyer and an accountant you"re in business.
You can make money right from the word go in advertising. I know of an agency that doesn"t have a single account and they"re making money. They do special projects. Ten thousand here on a project, twenty thousand a year there. Two guys and a girl no overhead, no production headaches. They do special projects because n.o.body will trust them with a full account. When Ron and I were at Bates we made a lot of money for ourselves farming out our talent on special projects. It was written in my contract that I could do freelance work. It was at Bates where I learned that I never wanted to do political advertising.
I had a special project to do a campaign for a Philadelphia politician named Arlen Spector. "When do I get to see Arlen Spector?" I asked. "You don"t." Spector was a district attorney in Philadelphia, running for mayor. He wanted New York advertising but he had placed through a Philadelphia agency. I complained about not being able to see Arlen Spector. "Are you crazy?" his people said. "n.o.body gets to meet Arlen Spector. We can"t even see him." "All right," I said, "what"s Arlen Spector for?" "Arlen Spector is for getting elected." "All right," I said, "what"s Arlen Spector against?" "Arlen Spector is against losing." I did the campaign, but Arlen Spector lost.
Everybody is doing freelance. My people are doing it. I walked into an art director"s office the other day and saw something for Schaefer Beer. I said to myself, son of a gun, I didn"t realize we got the account. I was all set to have a drink on it until I realized the guy was doing something for Schaefer on a freelance basis.
I"ve been very lucky in this business. My first job was my best job. Daniel & Charles was great and is great. It was crazy, sheer lunacy but it was fun. Working for Shep at Delehanty was fun, too, although sometimes people thought we were going to kill each other. I really began thinking about having my own place when I was working for Shep.
When I left Shep to go to Bates my mind was made up, and like Bates was the clincher. I knew after a while at Bates that if I wanted to stay in the advertising business and make a living and be able to hold my head up about my work, I knew that I had to have my own place. When Bates hired me they were trying to buy some of that alleged magic, some of that Doyle, Dane touch. What Bates and a lot of other agencies haven"t caught on to is that it doesn"t hurt to be born Italian or Jewish in the streets of the City of New York. You can"t buy the experience. The copywriter is in disgrace today if he was born in a suburb of Boston, of a fairly well-to-do family.
A guy I"ll call Churchill convinced me that if I wanted to keep my sanity I had to have my own place. This guy Churchill was famed throughout Bates for having written the headline for some stuff called Certs "Two mints in one." Certs is a minty breath thing and Churchill wrote this famous commercial: There are two girls arguing and one girl says Certs is a breath mint and the other girl says it"s a candy mint. The announcer comes on and says, "Girls, girls, don"t argue. It"s two mints, two mints, two mints in one." Oh, it"s a fantastic commercial, it is some claim to fame in the history of man. Two mints in one.
Churchill also did the head cutaway and put hammers inside it for Anacin. Churchill produced the famous nose test where you"re told to send your sinuses to Arizona and if you can"t get your simuses on a plane try Dristan. Great stuff. I once wrote a memo up at Bates about Certs: "Listening to the meeting today I"ve come up with the theme that "Certs Cures Cancer." I"d like to proceed with some storyboards on this theme." That memo almost caused a fistfight at Bates.
A terrific business, the advertising business. Young kids pounding on doors trying to get in. Agencies starting, folding. The new agencies are getting hot, the older ones are getting hardening of the arteries. I make a good living from advertising. I like to think the work I do is good I know d.a.m.n well it sells the product because my clients wouldn"t have anything to do with me if I didn"t move the product. I don"t have to resort to "two mints in one," or "fights headaches three ways," or "builds strong bodies twelve ways." I don"t get too much sleep but I don"t cry myself to sleep either, the way a lot of guys do. I don"t kid anybody, least of all myself. I really love the business. There are some bad scenes you read about in this book. The things that are wrong in advertising would be wrong in any business. But don"t get the impression that I don"t dig the business. I really do. I could only write about the advertising game this way because I really do love it. Most people say, "This is a terrible business." They throw up their hands and go home to Rye at night and forget about it. There are ugly people in advertising, real charlatans, but there are good people, too. And good advertising. And I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
Copyright.
First published in the United States of America in 1970 by
Simon and Schuster, New York
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2010 Copyright Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin, 1970
Introduction copyright Jerry Della Femina, 2010
The moral right of the author has been a.s.serted British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 968 0.
Typeset by So it begins ... Edinburgh www.meetatthegate.com