Aweek after winning Subaru early this month, DDB’s Lee Garfinkel sat in his Madison Avenue office—bare white walls, an acoustic guitar sitting nearby—and contemplated the significance of the victory. The big picture was obvious: It meant a return to the automobile category for the agency that changed the ad business with its Volkswagen work in the 1960s. But Garfinkel, who began his career on Subaru as a young copywriter in the ’80s, briefly allowed himself to consider what it meant on a personal level, too. When Subaru vp of marketing Rick Crosson called, “he said the nicest thing,” Garfinkel recalls. “He said, ‘Welcome back to Subaru.’ That really touched me. I got choked up at that point.”
Garfinkel, 49, joined DDB as New York chairman and chief creative officer in March 2003. He has helped the shop win the $20 million Cotton account and more business from existing clients, including Unilever’s Lipton iced teas ($10 million) and Anheuser-Busch’s Michelob Amber Bock ($30 million). But the $165 million Subaru account, snared after a five-month review, is his first big catch—and a sweet one at that. He worked on Subaru for more than a decade at Levine, Huntley, Schmidt & Beaver, where he began as a junior copywriter and left as executive creative director, and he still drives a Subaru today.
But Garfinkel, a low-key leader—”I’m in between a pessimist and a realist” is how he describes it—isn’t getting carried away. “It is just the beginning,” he says of the revamp at the estimated $800 million shop. “We’ve definitely made progress, but we’re far from where I want us to be.”
Garfinkel was recruited to the Omnicom Group agency by DDB worldwide CEO Ken Kaess and Chicago chairman and U.S. chief creative officer Bob Scarpelli. (He arrived after three months off due to a contractual obligation to his former employer, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, and its parent, Publicis Groupe.) At DDB, his mission was to ignite a spark at an agency that had largely grown cold creatively. The lackluster New York office had suffered chronic management changes on the business and creative sides and continued to live in the shadow of DDB Chicago, long celebrated for its creative achievements on A-B. TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Bob Kuperman had arrived as New York president and CEO in 2001. “Kupe had done a good job of stabilizing things from the standpoint of improving morale, the creative product and from a financial standpoint,” says Kaess. “Lee added rocket fuel to the recovery.”
The man Kaess calls a “creative superstar” had built a reputation for squeezing standout creative out of shops—Lowe in New York and D’Arcy—built on process and packaged-goods clients. (Earlier he had worked at BBDO, where he did the famous Cindy Crawford Super Bowl Pepsi spot.) “Wherever he’s been, he’s made the work and the agency better,” says Scarpelli. “We were thinking about going in a different direction in New York, and he became available.”
For Keith Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide, that direction means nothing less than having New York reclaim its leadership position in the network and the city. “This is the flagship office,” Reinhard says. “It needs to be seen by the New York community as [it was] in the heyday—as one after which there is no other. It’s something to shoot for in an entirely different world, competitive set and media context.”
When D’Arcy was absorbed by Publicis, Garfinkel, who had been at D’Arcy for a year and a half, cut his ties rather than take a worldwide role at the merged shop. Still, he says his time at D’Arcy was productive. He produced enviable work for Heineken, arguably helped improve the work for Cadillac and Crest and helped win Cadbury’s $30-50 million chocolate business, among other strides. Before D’Arcy, as chairman, CEO and chief creative officer of Lowe, Garfinkel produced award-winning work for Mercedes-Benz, Sprite and Diet Coke and Sony, among other clients.
Upon joining DDB, the onetime aspiring comedian took the agency’s legacy—and its attendant expectations—seriously. “My mission here is to make DDB New York as relevant as it was in the ’60s and ’70s,” he says. “Not only was the creative great, but what they were doing was revolutionary in terms of how they thought about businesses. And that’s what I’m asking people to do for me here.”
Last month, addressing the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ creative conference during Advertising Week in New York, Garfinkel discussed the differences between small and large agencies. “Size doesn’t matter,” he said. “People do.” At DDB, he leads the 280 employees and 50-person creative department by example. He has always remained close to the work. “I’ve found that some creative directors I’ve known who have stopped writing and are purely creative directors or management, they seem to lose something,” he says. “[Staying involved] keeps you sharper.”
The son of a Bronx shoe salesman, Garfinkel has a soft-spoken demeanor that belies his status as an industry heavyweight. And he maintains a strong work ethic that current and former colleagues say is also key to his team-building methods. “He’s a tireless worker,” says Steve Doppelt, a creative director at Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners who worked for Garfinkel at D’Arcy and Lowe. “He goes in before everyone else and leaves after everyone else. He creates this vibe that you don’t want to let him down.”
Not everyone at DDB followed his lead. John Staffen, an art director known for his New York Lottery work who had been at DDB off and on for 18 years and who was most recently co-ecd with John Russo, left a year ago to join Arnold in New York. Garfinkel declines to discuss the parting, but Staffen says the two “agreed to disagree and that it wasn’t going to work out.”
While every agency has its share of politics, former Lowe creative C.J. Waldman, now directing through Harvest, says Garfinkel’s choices in staffing are based on what’s best for the product. “Creative directors pick their favorites based on whether they feel they can come through,” he says. “If any guy should have started an agency, it’s Lee. Good people naturally flock to him.”
Along with Russo, formerly of D’Arcy, several other former colleagues have joined Garfinkel at DDB. Kaess hired Bob Nelson, former head of production at Lowe, in January 2003. Karen Sullivan, former director of creative services at D’Arcy, joined DDB in the same role shortly after Garfinkel started, as did art director Carmine Coppola and the creative team of Yimbo Ma and Mike Sullivan.
Peter Hempel, former global marketing chief for Gap, who worked with Garfinkel at Lowe as general manager, joined as managing director in April. “It’s DDB, and it’s Lee,” says Hempel, who started his career at DDB in 1983. “It’s one of the best agencies in the world and one of the best creative people in the world. Having gone through the DDB training program, I learned early on that it’s your partners that make things memorable.”
Garfinkel’s mandate for creative improvement is wide-ranging, covering all accounts. To give every member of the department a chance to do memorable work, Garfinkel created a “Wall of Opportunity.” Seven months ago, he began hanging up every agency brief to open up the process beyond brand assignments. “Every account we have gets the additional creative firepower working against it,” he says. “It’s an experiment.”
The creative-without-borders philosophy extends beyond New York, with Garfinkel and his office pitching in on A-B assignments—first with a campaign for Michelob Amber Bock, and most recently on Bud Light. (One spot that broke last month features overeager beer seekers bumping into a recently washed store window, trying to get to the Bud Light on display.) “What I’m trying to do in the U.S. is get the right people on the right assignments,” says Scarpelli. “I have one giant creative department. We help him with some things, he helps Chicago with some things.”
Garfinkel says the work is steadily improving. “The reel is much better than it was a year ago, and not half as good as where it’ll be a year from now,” he says. The $100 million global Philips campaign, supporting a new theme, “Sense and simplicity,” features serious, fact-driven ads, such as one showing how the company helped cut the Eiffel Tower’s electric bill by 30 percent. The New York Lottery retains its offbeat humor, showing winners enjoying their prizes. Humorous Amber Boch ads play off the “Rich and smooth” tagline. The agency’s first push for Cotton this spring used stylized, music-heavy spots that played off the joys and comfort of wearing cotton. And ads for NYC 2012 used the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld to stress New York’s readiness to host the Olympic Games.
Garfinkel, who counts Lee Clow and Jeff Goodby as role models, operates by the mantra, “There are no small assignments, only small ideas.” While he earned a reputation for TV work (which may or may not be why he doesn’t own a DVR), he wants DDB to be known for much more. “If, a year from now, people say DDB New York is doing really, really good work, I’d be happy, but it’s only one step,” he says. “I would love for people to say, Wow, I can’t believe DDB came up with that idea, or did this kind of a storefront, or they came up with this wild event or something.”
The return to car advertising with Subaru (DDB lost Volkswagen in the ’90s, and it eventually landed at Arnold) may offer a good barometer of the progress. The hope, says Russo, is that the work—the first ads are due next year—will do for DDB now what VW did for Doyle Dane Bernbach in its glory days. “A number of people came into the business because of the work the agency did on Volkswagen,” Russo says. “It would be great to do that with Subaru.”
Subaru wants to be reborn as a premium brand. Crosson, its marketing chief, wants to sell 250,000 cars in 2006, up from 180,000-190,000 now, as the automaker rolls out a new seven-passenger SUV next year. Garfinkel’s comprehensive presentation gave Crosson faith that it’s a reasonable goal. “It was an idea that galvanized and put the right feel for the brand as an umbrella and captured the essence for Subaru,” says Crosson, who has been with Subaru for two decades. “It translated the brand attributes and emphasis on styling performance.”
While progress may have seemed slow before the Subaru win, Garfinkel says it’s right on schedule. “[At Lowe] it took a year for me to get one commercial that I liked and about a year and a half before we won the Diet Coke business,” he says. “And then we did that ‘Lucky’ commercial. I’ve been at DDB about a year and a half. We’ve been working really hard getting the agency to come together.”
With the momentum, morale is up. “It feels like it’s on the cusp of being real DDB again. A lot of that has to do with Lee,” says director of brand planning Paul Parton. But Garfinkel, in his usual understated way, cautions against popping the champagne just yet. “I want to make sure nobody thinks about jumping up and down [and getting] cocky,” he says. “While it’s nice, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Hope And Glory
