Forks In The Road

My roller-coaster life in advertising confronted me one rainy afternoon, walking up lower Fifth Avenue, when I run into a guy I haven't seen since I left D'Arcy to become president of McCann Amster Yard six years ago. First of all, this guy doesn't look right. He's smiling. No, beaming. And he's looking right at me, out from under his umbrella. I don't recognize him at first. How could I? The guy I knew was the dourest human being in the history of the advertising business. I never saw him smile once. Smirk, maybe. But not smile. And yet here he comes, right at me, with a gigantic shit-eating grin on his face.Larry (yeah, I've changed his name) was the essence of everything I used to think was wrong with the business. An account guy on Procter & Gamble, a client of Benton & Bowles—whose agency culture seemed to cast a wet blanket on the Budweiser/Pontiac spirit of D'Arcy MacManus Masius when they merged. Larry surrounded himself with mediocrity, championed safe advertising and kept his client happy for 20-some years by agreeing with them, and generally accomplished little else at an agency he now admits to me he "hated" for the last 10 years he was there. Yet this guy stayed out of trouble and ultimately "succeeded" in the ad business after all those years. Now he's retired. He's 50-something and walks his sorry ass out of D'Arcy a couple of years ago with what I conservatively estimate at $20 million in his pocket. And if I'm wrong by half, it doesn't matter. I left D'Arcy a professional heartbeat before the Leo Burnett/Bcom3/Publicis merger with nothing to show for it but my pride. And the rest of my life ahead of me. I grew up at D'Arcy St. Louis on Budweiser in the late '70s and early '80s, where we dedicated night and day to doing some damned fine, even groundbreaking work during the classic beer wars. My partners were brilliant creative directors, and we fought each other, our bosses and our clients all the way to triple industry growth, sparking Anheuser-Busch momentum they continue to enjoy to this day. We were loud and brash, and we didn't stop until we'd alienated all of them, I guess. Then I take all this chutzpah to New York, where a bunch of people a whole lot smarter than me, along with a couple of ill-advised career turns, pound most of my arrogance into what I hope passes today as ability. Or maturity. Whatever. By the time I come back to D'Arcy—the agency that advertised beer and cars, airlines and fast food—it has merged with the agency that advertises … diapers. And mouthwash and toothpaste. The first of the Madison Avenue mega-mergers, it fit like a glove on paper. But Benton & Bowles and D'Arcy were about as suited for each other as the Hells Angels and the Catholic Church. By this time, the agency is run the Benton & Bowles way—well-meaning but formulaic, go-along/get-along, earn your client's favor through steadfast servitude and earnest call reports—a culture that thrived with P&G and, for a long while, Mars, for accounts like Uncle Ben's Rice and Whiskas cat food. A few years later, when I help write "The DMB&B Way," I have to fight to include this principle for account management: "We believe in client relationships built on high standards and mutual respect." My contention was that an agency could earn mutual respect by occasional use of the word no. Management had difficulty with this bilateral concept. These values and some poor management appointments and decisions would lead to D'Arcy's ultimate disappearance into the ad-agency merger graveyard. In fact, the reason I came back to D'Arcy was that I happened to visit a creative director there one day who was the singer in a blues band I played bass guitar in, and we had a gig that night to talk about. And I'll be damned: That very day, one of the agency's biggest clients, Burger King (an account I ran at J. Walter Thompson), loses its marketing director—the brother-in-law of D'Arcy's BK account director. This, following the exit of a senior BK account guy a couple weeks earlier, has put a strain on the agency. To make things really interesting, the interim BK marketing director happens to be an ex-client of mine from Hertz. They ask me to come in and help. Three weeks later, I first meet Roy Bostock (his real name) in a presentation to BK's CEO—which I'm now leading as a freelance make-shit-happen guy. Amazing. What am I doing here? A few months later, following a home-run Burger King convention in Miami where we present all new creative, and after seeing our band's singer get burned in the process (he was still our singer but no longer our creative director), Roy asks me to come work for the agency full-time. I do, and after spending 165 days outside the U.S. the next year and leading the expansion of our BK business from three to 28 countries, I end up as D'Arcy's third choice for new-business director. The first two turned them down cold, apparently seeing "D'Arcy new business" as an oxymoron. Not me. I've always had a death wish.(Within 18 months we are down to a half-dozen country assignments from BK, then one, then the media and field business, then, sadly, zero. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage our media business, Bostock has a prop suitcase labeled "Creative Baggage" and, during the final pitch, dramatically throws it out the door into the hall. And it works.) I keep taking "smart risks," putting my ass on the line daily for the sake of new business, taking the hits—all of them much too personally. And we end up as finalists for no less than $850 million in billings in the U.S. alone each year for five straight years. This after rarely making a prospect's list of candidates for years. Seriously. We're in major new territory. One of our accomplishments is our triumph on the global Gateway business and its $100 million account. After leading successful pitches in Los Angeles, New York, London, Sydney and Tokyo, I was able to negotiate a multimillion-dollar annual revenue contract with Gateway. The business is assigned to our L.A. office, and I'm back to the hunt. Roy thanks me for my contribution. I think it was the last positive contact we had. The agency loses Gateway less than 18 months later. These are the kinds of things I'm thinking as I'm standing here on the street, talking to Larry's millions. Bostock and his closest colleagues would spend the next several months continuing to consider various merger/acquisition/IPO possibilities with IPG, Leo Burnett, Dentsu and God knows who else, all the while denying any such thing not only to the press but to our own worldwide board of directors (which I was a member of), senior management, the executive committee and the worldwide employees.A few years later, I was told that IPG's board at one point agreed to accept a merger with DMB&B, only to be surprised when Bostock withdrew at the last minute, allegedly on the counsel of his "financial advisers" that such a move should produce more lucrative payoffs for him and his key shareholders. I remember, in the midst of all this, Roy announcing at a worldwide management committee meeting that, "As long as I'm with this agency, we will never sell!" Sure.All this while Larry keeps punching the clock on the agency business most highly valued by our CEO. And now I'm chatting him up down on Fifth Avenue, amicably enough, and for a minute I'm seeing life a little differently on this end of the advertising business. I tell him I don't begrudge him a thing, even after he tells me his financial adviser has criticized him for "not spending enough money." So, boys and girls, let's review ...On the one hand, you can gather up your good intentions as a go-along/get-along player in the ad game, keep your nose to the grindstone and your ass out of the crosshairs, reap the short-term rewards and, if you get yourself in the right place for the right amount of time, cash in on a big merger/go-public payoff—if there are any left to be had. On the other hand, you can land yourself in the advertising business for all the right reasons—because it remains a way to make a difference, to impact the culture and the economy with your ethics intact, to be true to yourself, to make real contributions, to realize your most passionate dreams, to fight for scary ideas with integrity and conviction and to raise hell and have fun doing it. Along the way, you might even piss off a few people. You may or may not end up in a position to cash in. You could, though—as long as you realize that there's no single absolute answer to any advertising problem, that it's the client's money, not yours, and that you have the ability to swallow your pride and stuff your ego once in a while and understand which battles to engage in and which to leave behind. And above all, to have the confidence and the grace to abide those around you, knowing that most great ideas will prevail in the end, despite the imperfections of their creators. I wish I'd been this smart when I was 20. Or 30. Or even 40 ...When we meet there on the street, Larry does describe one amazing accomplishment: Before he left D'Arcy, and after he had his millions securely in hand, he says, he goes to a senior agency officer whom I'll describe as the Martha Stewart of the ad business, who's in a discussion with another senior officer, whom she's close to and whom I'll describe as Austin Powers, and tells them both, "You are the dumbest white people I have ever met." For this alone, he deserves at least one of his $20 million.

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Forks In The Road

Tim Arnold

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Tim Arnold