The Art of Egg Zen

My father was a jet-setting sophisticate with gourmet tastes and a zest for experimentation. Except at breakfast. Then, he was strictly an egg man.In Paris, in Rome, dating a stewardess in Dubrovnik, tanning on a Jamaican beach or skiing in Gstaad, my dad ate chicken embryos boiled, scrambled, over easy, runny, in an omelette or on toast, "Nobody can screw up an egg," said Feuer père. "No matter where in the world you are or who's doing the cooking, an egg is an egg." This was not just a culinary obsession; this was a philosophy of life: Egg Zen. And it can be applied to anything.Consider the communications business. Media agencies plan, buy, or plan and buy. They work directly with clients, another media shop, or creative partners. They promise to deliver mind share, optimum media direction or initiative. But in the end, to borrow the creatives' hackneyed mantra, it's all about the work.A media agency is a media agency is a media agency.A clear example of Egg Zen is Zenith Media's victory in the $600 million-plus Verizon telecom review. For many people building and launching media agencies in the past decade, Zenith was the anti-model, the network no one wanted to emulate. It was relegated by parentage to a mere buying service role for fellow Cordiant Communications Group agencies Bates and Saatchi & Saatchi. True, it had a major role to play in the well-publicized emergence of media specialists—Zenith was the first European media agency to open in the U.S. But media networks that followed talked about the need to combine planning with buying, to be careful about confining entanglements with sister creative shops. They thought they could do it better. Yet in 1998, Zenith won Bell Atlantic's $150 million business, a win that "put us on the map," says agency head Rich Hamilton. Two years later, Zenith successfully defended what is now a huge media account on par with some of the tastiest fruits on the review vine, such as Kraft, Pfizer or Unilever. More to the point—Verizon is a direct client that includes both planning and buying, and Zenith is less dependent on its creative shop ties every day.Even more telling is that a lot of networks that followed Zenith, including huge ones like OMD, are also strongly linked to their sister agencies and don't always have, shall we say, a particularly strong voice in strategic media planning.Clients, however, are served by their media agencies in different ways; structure is less important than relationships or quality of work. Simplistic? No, because every media agency is trying to brand itself—to win business—based on its particular model. We're stronger, we're bigger, we're better, and we have this unbelievable new proprietary research tool developed by our best people in Kuala Lumpur.An egg is an egg. It's not how you cook it; it's how it tastes. Creatives learned this long ago. It's time for media shops to focus on their work, not on their business model. Because the worst egg is the egg on your face.

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The Art of Egg Zen

Jack Feuer

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Jack Feuer