If I were forced to choose, I would say that copywriters are the wildest of all of the creative people. I one had a kid named Andy Pillarsky working for me when I was at XYZ Advertising*. He was the greatest flake I every worked with. He was high on everything in the world, you name it—pills, marijuana, plastic model glue—only God knows what else. He arrived to the office nearly catatonic. It got to the point where if I looked into his dilated pupils another time I would literally lose my mind. I mean, he was the embodiment of the burned-out agency guy. Burned out on life, not the ad biz because he was always clutch when the client needed great copy. And, he was great, so I never wrote him up or sent him away.

The material issue with Andy was not the state that he arrived in, but when he arrived. Some days he would show up at five in the evening. He used to tell me that he had vampire tendencies in a former life and it spilled over into this life. He was terrified of mornings. He hated mornings, so he would hide in bed until the sun started to dip into the distance. It wasn’t that he was dodging work—he used to work until the wee hours of the morning—it was simply that he was working a different schedule which wreaked havoc with our traffic manager’s anal scale of scheduling grids and what-not.

His problems, our problems, extended far past rudimentary project management. Creative directors frequently couldn’t find him, because of course, he was still in bed. Account managers were constantly trying to pin him down for their copy only to see an empty desk. And there he was, sleepwalking to his desk at four or five in the evening, more likely than not in Zombie Mode. It’s a fairly well known fact that account guys have never understood how to handle creative that are high as a kite. And then other copywriters saw Andy and his schedule and wanting part of the flexible work hours action so they too could sleep in the morning.

I was always staying late to counsel him, “Andy, you’ve have get here earlier earlier. Everyone is looking for you during the day, you know that, don’t you?” Andy would always say something along these lines, “I can’t help it. I’ll do anything else you want, but I can’t help it. These vampire lives overwhelm me. I have to come in at this time.” I said, “Andy, listen, I can’t protect you forever. The bosses are going to get wind of it eventually and they are going to can you.” Yet, he wouldn’t listen.

They finally decided to fire him because he was causing too much anxiety for the rest of the team. The day I was told to let him go, he comes into my office at 8:30 A.M. and says, “Chief, “I figured out how to get in early. I want a raise.”

This caught me off guard to say the least, so I asked him what he meant and the conversation went something like this:

Andy: “I’ve found a new girlfriend and I need that raise so that she can leave her apartment and move into a better one with her. Not only is she a vampire hunter who can cure me, but after we move in together, she’ll wake me up early because she isn’t scared of the morning like I am and then I’ll be able to get into work on time. I won’t oversleep.”

Me: “Andy, you need more money from the agency so you and your girlfriend can move in and she can get you up in the morning, right?”

Andy: “Exactly!”

Me: “Andy, did you ever hear of an alarm clock?”

Andy: “Did you ever try to fuck an alarm clock?”

Andy went from XYZ Advertising to several other agencies where he did respectable work, but he always managed to get fired. Now he’s retired in Colorado where it’s legal to get high. He’s been fired from some of the best agencies in town. One director fired him Vito Corleone style. He went to the fish market and bought a huge tuna, wrapped it in newspaper and put it on Andy’s desk. That told Andy that he was done there. 

Most copywriters are suspicious. Andy felt that people and things were always snubbing him. Take the copier. Everybody was coming up to the copier at XYZ Advertising and making copies. But when Andy put his piece of paper into the copier, there were some strange noises and the original came out of the machine all smudged and torn. He took it out of the machine, looked up, and screamed in his monotone voice, “Even the Xerox hates me.”

There’s another copywriter named Sarah*—extremely nice lady, quiet, well-mannered, education, except that she had a thing about suing people. Typically, she was suing two or three people at a time (I swear). It was a known fact in the business that if you hire Sarah, you know she is going to spend most of her time in court. She simply loved to be the victim, sue people, and spend time with the lawyers. For example, what she used to do is walk down the street and wait at the bus stop for a bus. Imagine the bus stopping two feet from the curb and she has to walk through a puddle to board. The first thing she says to the driver is, “What is this, you stopping so far from the curb?” Bus drivers, who deal with crazies all day long will tell her to move her ass to the rear of the bus, and naturally, the next day she knocks out a letter to the government agency running the busses letting them them they’re being sued for whatever crazy reason Sarah dreams up.

When she was working at XYZ advertising she once took on one of the big airline carriers after a lousy flight. One of her side jobs is weekend stock racing and the lousy (and late) flight caused her to miss the race. So she wrote the airlines that she was planning to sue. She got a couple of mid-level pencil pushers to call as a result of that letter. They called her up and said, “How can we settle this issue?” Sarah said, “I think the only way you can settle it is in my office. Why don’t you try to be here at eleven-thirty in the morning?”

It happened that I needed the conference room that day and when I arrived, I saw Sarah sitting and talking with two very well-dressed men who looked as disturbed as possible. She was dictating something and our marketing coordinator was also there taking notes. I had no idea what was going on, so I spotted our traffic manager outside the conference room and told her I needed the room for a client meeting. She told me that Sarah had been in there for a long time and there’s no sign of it breaking up. I wound up meeting my client in my not-media-ready office.

Later on, I asked Sarah which client he was meeting with in the conference room. She said, “No, that wasn’t a client. Those were some guys from airlines and I was dictating my terms to them. I think they’re going to accept so I probably won’t sue.” I said, “You mean you took agency time as well as the conference room?” Sarah said, “Well, Michael, it’s very important to me that this thing gets straightened out.”

We fired her the next day. She never sued us, or me.

All the wackiness doesn’t stay on the creative side. On the account side, which is the direct link between the agency and the client, has its share of insanity. The big disparity is that the creative side takes advantage of its so-called creative reputation, and creative can where t-shirts under cardigans, and wear see-through shirts and ripped pants and dilate their pupils. The account side has to stay straight and narrow and wear Stella McCartney or Hugo Boss and stay sober.

The pressure sometimes gets to the account guys, however, and when they wig out it’s something to behold. I know a horde of account people who once had to make a trip to Cincinnati, to visit the folks who run a division of Wilson & Wilson*. That division happens to be prominent in the menstrual business: they make a little item called Snoogles*. So here is this group of New York agency account people winging it in Midwest, spending the morning talking about the advertising plans of Snoogles before going out to lunch.

Turns out the account folks load up a bit too much on the Midwestern martinis. Back from lunch, the big cheese from the division says he wants everyone around the table to brainstorm about other uses for Snoogles. You know, develop new business, investigate new markets, conquer new horizons, that sort of thing. The guys from New York are sitting there in a haze and one of the account women pipes up, “Hey, how about using Snoogles as torches for dwarfs?” When you’re living in Midwest and you get fired by this particular corporate giant, there’s not many companies where you can land safely. So the tendency is to downplay the smart-ass cracks about Snoogles. The New York guys all break up at the idea of dwarfs using Snoogles as torches, but the Wilson & Wilson big cheese is not impressed and everybody shuts up.

They get through the brainstorming session, and the next item on the agenda is a tour of the manufacturing plant. You can’t get out of Wilson & Wilson without this tour. It’s your get out of jail free card. So, with the Big Cheese leading the way, they meander through the factory and the group stops at this extremely bizarre, very strange-looking object. The Big Cheese proudly explains that this is an artificial vagina, in fact its name is the testgina, and naturally it verifies how good Snoogles are. The New York folks are looking at these testginas and they’re biting through their tongues to keep from laughing. The Big Cheese keeps going on about how good these testginas are and finally one New Yorker says, “And if you’re real nice, they let you take the testgina to dinner.” That triggered the account people collapsing on the factory floor in roaring laughter, the president turning angry red, and the advertising manager paralyzed with fear.

Needless to say, we didn’t win the business.

I once worked for a vice president of an agency whom we called “Schelp-Rock.” Schelp-Rock always managed to sit through a presentation and mess it all up at the end. He had this dreadful tendency to insult the client and he was truly dangerous to have around. We used to take bets on when he would open his mouth and blow the pitch. We kept telling him, ”Please stay away from presentations if you can’t stop insulting people.” Schelp-Rock would respond, “I’m going to behave, I’m really going to let you all do what you do best.”

One day we were pitching for a tourism department of some Middle Eastern country and the bagman for the dictator shows up to hear our pitch. The idea was if you got your pitch past the bagman, then you got to pitch to the top guy himself. The pitch went on for an eternity, something like four hours, and Schelp-Rock was a wunderkind. He sat there, not saying a word, and I was beginning to feel sorry about the way we yelled at him. “He’s great,” I said to myself, “he’s behaving like a real giant of industry. I’m sorry we hazed him before the meeting about his performance.”

For three hours and 57 minutes hours he was perfect. The meeting ends and I say to myself, “Thank goodness, we made it, the pitch is over and he hasn’t blown it, he hasn’t insulted the guys, he hasn’t done anything wrong.” So Schelp-Rock puts his arm around the bagman and as they were walking out the door—out the door mind you—Schelp-Rock says, “Mahmoud, you’re a nice guy. We’re going to be working together, I’m sure, and you’ll see we’re nice people, too. If you keep up the niceness, maybe we’ll give you back Israel.” I knew right then and there we were cooked.

….To Be Continued…


*-Names are changed to protect the guilty.

The post The Biz: Advertising Agency Origins, Part 2 appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

I love this little lady…

Okay, so where am I?

On the heels of the Clio win, I’m in front of my television after having watched a hockey game for the third time gleaning inspiration for a “homework assignment” I am working on as a tryout to contribute to a popular website. Who knows where it will lead? Who cares though? It’s great as an old dog to try new tricks.

All of this triggered my anxieties from my old days as a copywriter. Those endless nights in front of Selectric Typewriters with the hum urging my fingers into action, and, later, word processors with their fancy white cursors doing the same on the green background.

Being a copywriter is an amazing, yet disturbing occupation. I mean, you get paid to put words to paper. It’s one part brilliance and one part perseverance. It’s the art of sculpting fog as I’ve covered before.

The brilliance is that a copywriter has the ability to generate sales and positive branding for your clients while the perseverance comes from grinding through the feedback that rocks you to your core. The wrong set of “constructive criticism can trigger a full-scale identity crisis and make you wonder if you’re in the wrong profession.

The biggest influence I ever had in the copywriter world (and the Ad Man/Media Guy world) is that I never want the emotional wave that swallows you whole when you think you’re a fraud or incompetent. Yes kids, this how you feel when your client asks, “ Who the hell wrote this copy?” Every day, I think back to those instances and it energizes me to not only knock out my daily tasks, but think of those big ideas as well.

For me being a copywriter spurred an entire career. For me, that’s 32 years and counting. If this is the trade you desire, I celebrate your courage, innovation, and idiocy. Each day is a fresh scuffle against stalling, that blinking cursor, and those voices in your mind that scream you don’t really know what you’re doing. Best career ever.

So without further procrastination, here’s a quick tick list of the things you need to do in order be a successful ad agency copywriter.

Consume caffeine.

Not a coffee person? I wasn’t either. But, hey, this is what we do. Before you lift open your Mac Book, head to the coffeemaker and brew yourself a K-cup. If you want people to think you’re cool, drink it black—like your heart. If you want to truly appreciate the taste, splash some cream in it. It’s the perfect remedy for a late night or the more than occasional doldrums that plague the work day.

Keep a daily to do list.

Talk to your boss. Make a list. Shape your day. If you do, you’ll be put on projects and business you crave and desire.

Battle writer’s block.

Blink….blink…blink…

There she is again: that blinking cursor. You swear up and down you killed it yesterday, but she’s back, like that cat from Pet Sematary. Don’t be scared. Kill the bear, or rather, the blank doc. Down that morning coffee and bring your special set of skills and wage battle. The blinking cursor is going down once again.

Base camps.

No one every climbed Everest in a day and you can’t do it with your mountain of work. Build some momentum If I have an email that just needs a subject line, I’m moving that bad boy to the top of my list.

Be a firefighter.

Quench all fires as soon as possible. The urgent projects and needy clients you’re your attention first. Keep them happy and you will have the mental real estate to be as creative you want later in the day.

Inspirational views for a potential third Clio.

Focus on billable work.

Don’t daydream all day and try to knock out work in a tiny window leaving only a handful of billable hours for your agency to bill. For you newbies, billable work is merely the labor your clients authorize payments for. More work means more revenue for the agency. Fill up that time sheet and you will mostly likely see your own paycheck rise at annual review time.

Take your constitutionals.

I’ve spent my days chained to my desk throughout my agency days. Don’t do that yourself. Take a break—not a long one, but enough of one to stretch your legs. Go for a quick walk and grab a Starbuck. You’ll get back to your desk revitalized and prepared for the blinking cursor.

Know when to call it a day.

If you say to yourself, “nobody told me there would be days like this…” remember that I just did! Some days are tougher than others. They won’t all be like this. Some days you won’t have it.

Go home, find your happy spot. For goodness sakes, get some good sleep in. The blinking cursor will be ready for you tomorrow morning.

—

So there you have it…now it’s time to channel my inner wordsmith and deliver a winner on this old dog, new trick homework assignment.

Click to enlarge.

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This is the famous passage from the Statue of Liberty poem. New Colossus and its famous last lines have become part of American history. It’s also part of the foundation of the unique inclusion of the advertising business.

Once upon a time in the ad world…

Advertising is the only business in the world that takes in the anti-social, the closet drunks, the outed potheads, your basic weirdos, and embraces the egomaniac braggarts. You won’t make it as an account executive with a pothead rep, but most likely you can last as a copywriter or an art director if your pupils are a bit dilated. Eccentrics are drawn to the business and welcomed into it. Your finest selection of eccentric is typically found on the creative side, among the copywriters and art directors.

We get a lot of crazies. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in our industry who, if they were currently working for Lloyd’s of London, would have found themselves in the looney bin (or rehab). At review time their bosses lean back and say, “This guy is really going nuts,” and then have HR call home and say, “ I think it’s time we get him some help him because, you know, he’s doing off things.”

Take a good friend of mine, Mark Lewin*, for example. He’s a real a legend. A flake of epic proportions. Mark once worked for XYZ Advertising* for five hours. He had been hired as a graphic designer and asked to start at eight in the morning because XYZ is a by-the-book shop. Sure enough, Mark shows up on day one right on time He meets some key staff, fills out all the forms you have to fill out on the first day on a job, and then around 1:05 he goes out to lunch. He had a regular Wednesday lunch partner with someone at Tate & McMann*. Well, they had a nice lunch like they always do and the guy says, “Why don’t you come to work with me at Tate & McMann as a copywriter?”

They get down to specifics and Mark is offered a job (better than the one he’s got at XYZ). So he goes down to Tate & McMann meets Danny McMann*, the co-owner of that agency, and accepts the offer at about three in the afternoon.

But he couldn’t resist picking up the phone. He’s still up at Tate & McMann and he dials XYZ and asks for personnel. He says, “My name is Mark Lewin. I was working for you this morning. I worked for you for approximately five and a half hours.” And the woman on the other side says, “Yes, what can I do for you?”

Mark says, “I just wanted to know, have I accumulated any vacation time? I know I’ve only been working at XYZ for five and a half hours, but if there’s any vacation money due me I wish you’d send it to me in care of Tate & McMann.”

Once upon a time, I worked at Tate & McMann. The agency was like a school, except all the kids seemed to be crazy. It was my first real job in advertising. I mean my first legitimate job. I was toiling away taking orders from the big bosses and spending my days on the phone trying to get magazine editors and writers to place my client’s news releases. I spent a lot of time on hold getting cauliflower ears waiting for my pitch to start.

I found that the whole place was filled with young guys who suddenly discovered that somebody was going to pay them a lot of money for doing these things called advertising and public relations, and all of us got caught up in the insanity of it and went crazy. A whole group of people slowly went out of their skulls.

I did too.

I mean I put a hockey puck through a plate glass window once…and got promoted for my efforts!

This was my initiation into the world of promotion.

Joy Miller* is an unusual lady. She’s extremely demure and a very good creative director. One day I was working with her on some of the first ads I had ever collaborated on. We’re grinding away and her phone rang. In addition to unusual, Joy is a picture of intensity person when she’s working and she keeps working, ignoring the phone. Minutes pass. The phone is still ringing. Five, six cycles of ringing. I looked nervously at the phone, perhaps my brow dropped a bit of sweat, but since I was new I deduce that maybe Joy likes a phone to ring for incessantly before she picks it up. It’s still ringing and she still doesn’t answer it but I can see she’s getting more irritated by the second. It’s building up to an explosion. Finally she picks up one of those heavy duty X-ACTO knives and she stabs the phone. Not simply cut the wire or something simple like that. I mean she cut right through it, right from the handpiece all the way through the the bottom of the phone. “That should hold it,” she said.

I looked at her and then I said, “I think I hear my phone ringing, be right back.” I didn’t come back for a few days (hey I was young!) until the commotion settled down and I knew my copy was solid (if not brilliant). Years later, I still see Joy and we have a chuckle about it, along with a good cigar. How many people stab their phones? She didn’t joke around with it, either, I mean she wanted to kill that phone. The funny thing is that even after she stabbed it, it still rang. Joy was much calmer after that little incident.

We had another art director at Tate & McMann, named Phil Silverstein*. In the middle of a brainstorming/strategy meeting, Phil decided to leave his wife. His conversation at home went something like this:

Phil: “I’m leaving you. I have a girlfriend.”  

His wife: “How can you do this to me?”  

Phil: “I told you, I have a girlfriend.” 

His wife: “Why me, why Phil why?” 

Phil: “I’ll stay but what’s wrong with having a girlfriend? All the other guys at the agency have girlfriends. Why can’t I have one too?”

His wife decided to go after all the men at the agency, regardless if they were married or not. She got into Phil’s smartphone backup and restored his contacts to an older phone. She crafted a plan to call all of the wives and girlfriends on his team to tell them that all of us were cheating. Then Phil informed us that she decided not to make the phone calls, but instead she was planning to go all Lorena Bobbitt on us. That when we all got nervous and searched for a good place to hide if she showed up. In dark recesses of the darkroom in the creative department there was a closet with a false wall that no one knew about except Joy and me. I struck a deal with Joy that if we ever heard his wife screaming on the floor she would shepherd me to the closet and stay there until the storm ended. Every man for himself in this situation. You probably think I am joking, but her voicemail was methodically crystal clear: “I’m going to go up and get all you cheating motherf**kers.”

There are a couple of classic stories involving destructive employees. There is a fantastically insane copywriter named Vic*. During a client lunch at the end of the three-martini era, Vic decided that six martinis was the right limit. He came back feeling depressed about everything (except the client he offended with his filthy mouth). After visiting all of us with offices, he decided to quit the ad world and started tearing up his office…throwing picture frames and printers, tossing a computer monitor into the hallway, breaking the chair. His plan to resign was not to craft a short and sweet letter to HR, but rather to destroy everything in his path.

The only thing he had left to handle was his desk. He ripped his blinds off, opened his window and tried to get his monolith of a desk up and out of the window. By now, all of the noise vibrating from his office attracted the admin staff who rushed his door trying to stop the madness as his desk was teetering in the window pane.

For years people would speak about the legendary Vic desk incident. Myth or reality. I ran into him a few years back at an American Marketing Association event and asked him about the validity of the story. He said, “one hundred per cent it’s true, but it was only on the alley side side of the building.” I mean, how can you help but low a guy that realizes that if his desk goes out on the street side it causes problems and potential death, but it’s alright on the alley side? That’s a nutty, yet rational man.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all of us creatives are out of our minds. Really, I only know of one stabbing that ever took place, besides the phone incident, of course.

A photographer named Maggie* once got into a heated argument with our account executive over an ad, so she calmly stabbed the AE with her high-end fountain pen. Yes, there was blood and agonizing moans, but the AE only needed eight stitches and he lived. The agency had to punish Maggie, so their solution was to send her to Hawaii to photograph a new resort client we had. I ran into the AE in Hollywood, reeking of pot and looking manic. He was carrying his cashmere coat over one arm and his Shinola briefcase in the other. He had a weeklong growth of beard and called me Dan throughout our brief catch-up.

On the whole, there’s not that much violence….to be continued…

*-Names are changed to protect the guilty.

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