THE seven-year itch is not confined to matrimony. It also afflicts the relationship between advertising agents and their clients. The average client changes agencies once every seven years. He gets bored with his agency, much as a gourmet gets bored with the repertoire of his chef.
Winning a new account is a heady experience, but losing one is pure hell. What do you do to convince your other clients that they too should not dismiss you? I have seen two large agencies collapse after one defecting client started a run on the bank; it is a sickening spectacle.
What does the agency president do about his conscience when he knows that it was his own fault that his agency lost the ac-V count? How can he, in common decency, fire the people who worked on the account and did their best to offset his own stupidity? Some of them may be men of rare ability, and he will need them to work on the next new account he brings in. But can he afford to keep them on ice? Generally not. I have seen agencies fire a hundred people when they have lost a single account; and some of those poor devils were too old to get another job. This is one reason why agencies have to pay such high salaries; next to the theater, advertising is probably the least secure of all careers.
If you aspire to manage an agency, you must accept the fact that you are always going to be traveling on the edge of a precipice. If you are naturally an insecure, frightened person, woe betide you. You are in for a rough passage.
I envy my friends who are doctors. They have so many patients that the defection of one cannot ruin them. Nor is the defection re-ported in the newspapers for all their other patients to read.
I also envy lawyers. They can go on their vacations, safe in the knowledge that other lawyers are not making love to their clients. Now that I have acquired a portfolio of nineteen splendid clients, I wish that a law could be passed making it illegal for agencies to so-licit. In Sweden the big agencies have got such a law onto the statute books, in delightful restraint of trade.
There are certain steps you can take to reduce the turnover. First and foremost, you can devote your best brains to the service of your clients, instead of diverting them to the pursuit of new ones. I have always forbidden my account executives to hunt new clients, be-cause it corrupts them, like playing the horses. They start neglecting their present clients, and the revolving door starts spinning.
Second, you can avoid hiring unstable, quarrelsome executives. Madison Avenue is full of masochists who unconsciously provoke rejection by their clients. I know brilliant men who have lost every account they have ever handled. And I know pedestrian nonentities who have a genius for creating relationships of calm stability be-tween the agency and its clients.
Third, you can avoid taking on clients who have a record of fir-ing their agencies at frequent intervals. You may think that you can cure them of their infidelity, but the odds are against you, as they are when you marry a much-divorced woman.
Fourth, you can keep in contact with your clients at all their lev-els. But this is becoming increasingly difficult as the big advertisers pile level upon level—assistant brand managers reporting to brand managers, reporting to division heads, reporting to marketing vice presidents, reporting to executive vice presidents, reporting to presi-dents, reporting to chairmen—with a battery of consultants, commit-tees, and staff officers heckling the agency from the wings.
It has become the fashion for most corporate chairmen and presidents to insulate themselves from all contact with their agen-cies. Mind you, they still make the important decisions with respect to their advertising, but they never see the agency people face to face, and their henchmen are often incompetent to serve as go-betweens. Frequently I hear advertising managers quote their presi-dents as uttering stupidities which I know they could never have said. And I have no doubt that these same presidents hear me quoted as saying some pretty silly things. Before you know it, you are fired.
It reminds me of a story told during the First World War. A bri-gade major sent a verbal message back from the front-line trench to his divisional headquarters. The message started out as “Send up re-inforcements, we are going to advance.” By the time it had been re-peated from mouth to mouth through all the levels, it reached head-quarters as “Send up three-and-four-pence, we are going to a dance.”
One of the reasons why the top people in big corporations show this tendency to deal with agencies at arm’s length is that they dis-like the whole business of advertising. It is so intangible. When they build new factories, or issue new stock, or buy raw materials, they know exactly what they are getting. These propositions are presented to them cut-and-dried, with all the facts and figures they need to jus-tify their decision to their stockholders. But advertising is still an in-exact speculation. As the first Lord Leverhulme (and John Wana-maker after him) complained, “Half the money I spend on advertis-ing is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Manufacturers who have come up through production or ac-counting or research are apt to be suspicious of advertising people, because they are too articulate. That is why some inarticulate dull-ards have done so well as the heads of agencies: they make their cli-ents feel comfortable.
Another thing you can do to reduce the risk of losing accounts is to adopt my ice-box policy. As soon as a client has approved a new campaign, begin work to develop another one, and put it in test markets. You will then be ready with a shot in your locker if your first campaign flops, or incurs the displeasure of your client’s top management for some more subjective reason. This restless prepara-tion of reserve positions will cut into your profits and exasperate your copywriters, but it will prolong your tenure of accounts.
I have always tried to sit on the same side of the table as my cli-ents, to see problems through their eyes. I buy shares in their com-pany, so that I can think like a member of their family. When I take a total view of their business, I am better able to give them sound ad-vice. If they would elect me to their board of directors, it would be even easier to identify myself with their best interests.
Young eager beavers often have the bright idea of combining two of their clients in a joint operation. They may suggest that one client should mount a contest and offer another client’s product as the prize; or that two clients should share an advertisement in maga-zines. This doubling-up can be dangerous to the agency; almost in-variably one of the clients will feel that he has got the short end of the stick. When you try to umpire disputes between clients, you end up with a bloody nose. I was brought up to keep my clients apart. The only time the head of Hathaway met the head of Schweppes was when they went to buy a Rolls-Royce on the same morning.
I never tell one client that I cannot attend his sales convention because I have a previous engagement with another client; success-ful polygamy depends upon pretending to each spouse that she is the only pebble on your beach. If one client asks me what results I have been getting with a campaign for another client, I change the subject. This may irritate him, but if I were to give him the information he asks, he would probably conclude that I would be equally indiscreet with his secrets. Once a client loses confidence in your discretion, you’ve had it.
Sometimes a client hires an advertising manager who is so in-1 competent that you have to denounce him. But I have only done this twice in fifteen years. In one case the man was a psychotic whom I had fired six months before. In the other case he was a pathological liar.
Most reasonable clients seem to regard it as your duty to alert them when you detect a weak link in the chain of communication be-tween their top management and yours. I was once taken to task by a client for not warning him that our account executive was ghosting his brand manager’s marketing plans.
Clients do not hesitate to blackball our account executives. Sometimes they are right; sometimes they are wrong. In either case it is better for all concerned to transfer the victim to another job, and to do it before the smoke bursts into flame and ruptures the whole agency-client relationship.
One of the most brilliant colleagues I ever had was blackballed by three clients in one year; the experience hurt him so badly that he left the agency business forever. If you are too thin-skinned to sur-vive this hazard, you should not become an account executive in an advertising agency.
I always use my clients’ products. This is not toadyism, but elementary good manners. Almost everything I consume is manufac-tured by one of my clients. My shirts are by Hathaway, my candle-sticks by Steuben. My car is a Rolls-Royce, and its tank is always full of Super Shell. I have my suits made by Sears, Roebuck. At breakfast I drink Maxwell House coffee or Tetley Tea, and eat two slices of Pepperidge Farm toast. I wash with Dove, deodorize with Ban, and light my pipe with a Zippo lighter. After sundown I drink nothing but Puerto Rico rum and Schweppes. I read magazines and newspapers which are printed on paper from the mills of Interna-tional Paper. When I go on vacation (in Britain or Puerto Rico) I get my reservations through American Express and travel by KLM or P&O-Orient Lines.
And why not, pray tell? Are these not the finest goods and ser-vices on earth? I think they are, and that is why I advertise them.
When a client hires our agency, it is because he has decided that it is the best available to him. His advisers have reached this decision after making a thorough study of what we have to offer. But as time goes by, he acquires new advisers. Every time this happens, it is ex-pedient for the agency to convince the new adviser that his predeces-sor was right in selecting our agency. The new adviser should be treated as if he were a new business prospect.
With big corporations, this process of reselling the agency never ends. It is time-consuming and wearisome, but it is vitally important. New brooms are a constant threat to the stability of agency-client relationships.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to an agency is to depend on a single personal tie with a client company. If the presi-dent of a large manufacturing organization hires your agency be-cause he likes your president, you must take urgent steps to forge ties at lower levels. Only when the agency is wired in at every level can you hope for tenure.
I do not believe in restricting contact with the client to the ac-count executives. It works better to have people from your service departments—research, media, copy, art, television production, mer-chandising, and so on—get to know your client. This sometimes pre-sents comic problems, because our backroom boys are not always remarkable for their tact, and some of them are unimpressive in their persons. It takes a client of rare perception to recognize that a tongue-tied hobbledehoy may be capable of writing a commercial which will double his sales.
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It is difficult for a doctor to tell a patient that he is suffering from a serious disease, and it is equally difficult to tell a client that his product has a serious fault. I have known clients who resent such candor more than they would resent criticism of their wives. A manufacturer’s pride in his product almost always blinds him to its shortcomings. But the time comes in the life of every advertising agent when he must grasp this nettle. I confess that I am no good at it. When I told one client that I had doubts about the consistency of his spaghetti, his reaction was to question whether I could do a good job for any product which I disliked; we lost the account. On the whole, however, I have observed an increasing tendency on the part of clients to welcome candor, particularly when it is based on the re-sults of consumer research.
The head of an agency has so much on his plate that he is apt to see his clients only at times of crisis. This is a mistake. If you get into the habit of seeing clients when the weather is calm, you will establish an easy relationship which may save your life when a storm blows up.
It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buck-passers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame.
Come to think of it, we have resigned three times as many cli-ents as we have been fired by. I will not allow my staff to be bullied by tyrants, and I will not run a campaign dictated by a client unless I believe in its basic soundness. When you do that, you imperil the creative reputation of your agency, which ought to be your most treasured possession. In 1954 I made this very mistake. My friend Jerry Babb at Lever Brothers was insisting that we advertise the old Rinso soap powder and the new Rinso Blue detergent in the same advertisements. A study of the precedents had taught me that it doesn’t pay to advertise two products in one advertisement, particu-larly when one of them is new and the other is obsolescent. Even worse, Jerry instructed me to inject a note of whimsical gaiety into the campaign.
For several weeks I tried to sell him the kind of serious cam-paign which had proved successful for Tide and other detergents, but Jerry was adamant. Storm signals were hoisted. His right-hand man warned me that unless I did as I was told, I would lose the account. In the end, I capitulated. It took me two hours and a pint of Puerto Rican rum to write the silliest copy in the history of advertising. It was in verse, to be sung to the tune of “Boys and Girls Come Out to Play”:
Rinso White or Rinso Blue? Soap or detergent—it’s up to you! Both wash whiter and brighter than new, The choice, dear lady, is up to you!
This dreadful doggerel duly appeared. I lost more face than I could afford; my staff thought that I had gone mad, and the working levels at Lever Brothers concluded that I had no conception of what kind of advertising was required to persuade housewives to buy a de-tergent. Six months later we were fired, and deserved to be.
Nor did the mischief end there. For several years afterward I found it impossible to get any serious marketing man to join Ogilvy, Benson & Mather until I had told him that my opinion of my idiotic Rinso campaign was as low as his own.
This episode taught me that it does not pay to appease clients on matters of grand strategy. One Munich was enough.
I also resign accounts when they are unprofitable to my agency. This happened with Reed & Barton. Our commissions were not big enough to pay for the services which were required, and Roger Hal-lowell, who managed this fine old family business, was unwilling to make good the losses we were incurring. I liked Roger and all his colleagues at Reed & Barton, but I was not prepared to trade with them indefinitely at a loss. I believe that they made a mistake in al-lowing us to resign; we had made an important contribution to their profits by showing them how to pretest new patterns for sterling flatware. It costs $500,000 to launch a new pattern, and no male ex-ecutive can predict what patterns will appeal to nineteen-year-old brides.
I also resign accounts when I lose confidence in the product. It is flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy.
Frank Hummert, who succeeded Claude Hopkins as copy chief of Lord & Thomas and then made a fortune as the inventor of soap operas, once told me: “All clients are pigs. You may start by think-ing otherwise, but you will change your mind.”
This has not been my experience. I have encountered a handful of pigs and I have resigned them. But with a very few exceptions, I have loved my clients. If I hadn’t become his advertising agent, I would never have made friends with Ted Moscoso, the great Puerto Rican who became American Ambassador to Venezuela and head of the Alliance for Progress.
If I hadn’t landed the Steuben Glass account, I would never have made friends with Arthur Houghton. It was a great day for me when I realized that I had acquired as a client the foremost patron of contemporary artists in the history of industry, an eminent authority on rare books, and the most imaginative of philanthropists.
My list of clients who became dear friends is a long one. Eller-ton Jette of Hathaway enriched my life by getting me elected to the Board of Trustees at Colby College. Sir Colin Anderson of P&O-Orient Lines is the only client I have ever had who is equally expert at Scottish dancing and embroidery. Commander Whitehead of Schweppes started out as a client and became one of my closest companions. We have been shipwrecked together, and our wives solace each other by comparing notes on their husbands’ vanities.
Helena Rubinstein has always fascinated me. This tiny Polish beauty started her career in Australia in the nineteenth century, and made a profit of £30,000 when she was eighteen years old. By the time she discovered me, she had become a matriarch, in control of companies all over the world. In the office she is a terror, but she also has an irresistible sense of humor. A hundred times I have seen her, in the middle of an otherwise grim meeting, so convulsed by laughter that the tears ran down her cheeks. As a friend, she is an en-chanting combination of gaiety and generosity.
Another thing I admire in Madame Rubinstein is her lack of pretense; she is as remarkable as she looks, and no pretense is needed. That is what Graham Sutherland captured in his portrait of her.
Some agencies pander to the craze for doing everything in committee. They boast about “teamwork” and decry the role of the individual. But no team can write an advertisement, and I doubt whether there is a single agency of any consequence which is not the lengthened shadow of one man.
Clients sometimes ask me what would become of our agency if I were run over by a taxicab. It would change. When Senator Benton and Governor Bowles left their agency, it changed—for the better. J. Walter Thompson survived the departure of Mr. Thompson. McCann-Erickson hit its stride after Harry McCann retired. Even the retirement of Raymond Rubicam, who was probably the best agency head in history, failed to arrest the progress of Young & Rubicam.
Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns. Once or twice a week I go into our Delivery Room and preside over what is known as a Presentation. These awesome ceremonies are attended by six or seven of my henchmen and notables from the client’s offi-cial family. The atmosphere is electric. The client knows that he is going to be asked to approve a campaign which will cost millions. The agency has invested much time and treasure in preparing its of-fering.
At my agency we always rehearse our presentations before our Plans Board, on which sit our senior senators. They are sterner crit-ics than any client I have so far encountered, and their criticisms are expressed in rougher language. By the time a campaign has passed their scrutiny, it is apt to be good.
But however well-doc*mented our presentation may be, how-ever thoroughly our planners have assessed the marketing realities, and however brilliantly our copywriters have done their work, horri-ble things can happen at The Presentation. If it begins early in the morning, the client may have a hangover. On one occasion I made the mistake of presenting a new campaign to Sam Bronfman of Sea-gram after luncheon. He fell sound asleep, and awoke in such a poi-sonous humor that he rejected the campaign on which we had been working for several months.
Bronfman disliked the convention which most agencies observe of using several spokesmen to make their presentations. So do I. It is less distracting to the audience if one man does all the talking. He should be the most persuasive advocate available, and he should be so thoroughly briefed that he can stand up under cross-examination.
I make more presentations than most agency heads, partly be-cause I fancy myself as an advocate, and partly because I believe that there is no better way of demonstrating to the client that the head of the agency is personally involved in his affairs. I wonder if any barrister has to spend as many nights as I do preparing for the Presentations which succeed each other with such remorseless regularity.
It pays to take immense pains in preparing the plans you present to clients. They should be written with the maximum lucidity and the least possible mannerism. They should be laced with irrefutable facts.
But there are still a few clients who do not like their agencies to present advertisements in the context of a well-doc*mented plan. They enjoy appraising layouts in a vacuum, as if they were selecting pictures for an exhibition. Sir Frederic Hooper of Schweppes be-longs to this school. The first time I presented a marketing plan to him, he quickly became bored. He had been looking forward to a di-verting half-hour of literary criticism, and found himself being sub-jected to a tedious recitation of marketing facts. On page 19 of my presentation I came to a statistic that contradicted one of his basic assumptions. “Ogilvy,” he thundered, “your statistical approach to advertising is positively babyish."
I wondered what effect this compliment would have on the stat-isticians who had prepared our plan. But I stuck to my guns, and five years later Sir Frederic made an amende honorable when he invited me to address an advertising convention over which he was to pre-side. He suggested that I take as my text a conclusion at which he had recently arrived: “In the end, clients are grateful to advertising agents who tell them the truth.” By that time Schweppes’ sales in the United States had increased 517 per cent. We lived happily ever after.
Another client who did not want to be confused with facts com-plained to me with the utmost gravity, “David, the trouble with your agency is that it contains too many people with objective minds.”
The best tool ever devised for explaining complicated plans to committees is the flip-over easel, which the presenter reads aloud. It has the effect of riveting the attention of everyone in the room on what you are saying. Here I have some advice to offer. It may sound trivial, but it can be crucial to the success of the presentation: as you read aloud, never depart from your printed text by a single word. The trick lies in assaulting your audience simultaneously through their eyes and their ears. If they see one set of words, and hear a dif-ferent set, they become confused and inattentive.
I still die a thousand deaths before every presentation. I am par-ticularly nervous about the impact of my English accent.
How can an American manufacturer possibly have any confi-dence in the ability of a foreigner to influence the behavior of American housewives? In my heart I know that my years with Dr. Gallup at Princeton gave me more insight into the habits and mental-ity of the American consumer than most native copywriters can bring to bear, and I always hope that this will become apparent as my presentation unfolds. I therefore open with axioms which nobody can question. By the time the audience grows accustomed to my ac-cent, I launch into more controversial judgments.
The first time I allowed a member of my staff to present one of my campaigns to a client, I knew that my presence at the meeting would increase his nervousness. So I concealed myself in the next room and observed his performance through a peephole. His name was Garret Lydecker, and he performed better than I have ever done, before or since.
Nowadays I have several partners who are first-class presenters, and I no longer hesitate to attend their presentations. They have learned to preserve their equanimity, even when I heckle them. In the discussion which follows, we hammer out a position which was neither the client’s nor the agency’s at the beginning of the meeting. The result is a feeling of comradeship, cutting across the lines which traditionally keep agency and client on opposite sides of the table.
In some agencies the account executives are allowed to boss the creative people. This makes a good impression on some clients; they believe that their advertising is safer in the hands of “business” men. But it creates an atmosphere which inhibits copywriters, and the client winds up with second-rate advertising. In other agencies the ac-count executives are little more than waiters who carry confections from the campaign-builders to the clients. They are forbidden to accept the slightest modification which the client may propose without referring back to headquarters. Denied the authority to exercise their own judgment, they end up as errand boys.
I deplore both systems. I have able copywriters, and they work in tandem with able account executives who are empowered to negotiate with clients. The account executives are sufficiently mature to manage every phase of their accounts without challenging the ult-mate suzerainty of the copywriter. It is a delicate balance, and I know of only one other agency which has ever achieved it.
The marketing plans coming out of our agency today are more professional, more objective, and better doc*mented than the plans I used to write in our early days. But some of them are written in a business lingo which makes me squirm percentagewise, importantly, mitigate against, maximize, and so on. As a boy I was obliged to learn twelve verses of the Bible by heart before breakfast every morning, and I read Latin from the age of nine. At Oxford I came under the influence of dons who rejected the German school of scholarship—dry-as-dust, humorless, and unreadable. I was taught to admire not Mommsen, but Gibbon, Macaulay, and Trevelyan, who wrote to be read. This kind of training did not equip me to read the turgid doc*ments which are my homework today. American businessmen are not taught that it is a sin to bore your fellow creatures.