If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to any other. The general standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half-century would have been impossible without spreading the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt “Madison Avenue, here I come!” Well, actually not Madison, Lexington Avenue, but I was going to the largest advertising agency in the world at the time.
In 1958 I had come across Martin Mayer’s Madison Avenue, USA. It was a reporter’s book about advertising and the people who work from their “rising in the morning to their falling down at night.” Of the nineteen chapters in the book, two were solely on the J. Walter Thompson Co.
The book pointed out that its elaborate offices occupied almost three floors of the enormous Graybar Building beside Grand Central Station on Lexington Avenue, with each floor representing more than an acre of space. It had no organization table, no flowcharts, no fixed system of work, yet only four agencies had billing figures of more than $200 million. With billing of $300 million, J. Walter Thompson (also known as JWT), led the pack: with three-fourths of it in North America, and the rest in thirty-four offices in nineteen countries on the other four inhabited continents. Ownership of the agency stock was held by people who worked at the company and was spread throughout every executive level.
Suffice it to say that I fell in love with the agency through the book, and there was no other place that I could imagine going to work.
In 1963 J. Walter Thompson’s New York Graybar Building headquarters, alone, housed 3,000 people. In addition to Ford, Pan Am, RCA and Lever Brothers, JWT accounts ran the gamut from Kodak to Kraft, Mennen to Oscar Meyer, Reader’s Digest to Rolex, and Scott to Squibb. Products advertised went through the alphabet from Beechnut to Brillo, Fleischmann’s to French’s, Planters to Ponds, Quaker Oats to Viva.
To be hired by JWT required passing a series of stringent tests. After I applied, I was mailed three case histories of products for which the agency wanted me to create marketing and advertising campaigns, and in one case it was a mythical new product that had not been named.
While writing was my training and my trade, my avocation was art, so I put my best foot forward. The marketing plan for each product was a snap, and my creative side came up with some clever approaches for ads. But the capper was my ability to illustrate what a final print ad might look like. I may have done myself a disservice because I was hired not in management or marketing but for $5,000 as a writer in the creative department.
An MBA was a relatively new degree when I graduated, and although big corporations such as P&G caught on to the value of this degree in their management and marketing departments, the advertising industry had not. I was told a couple of weeks after I was hired that as far as they knew in the personnel department, I was the first MBA hired by a major ad agency in New York. With its worldwide clout, Thompson had no problems recruiting successful advertising people they wanted away from their jobs. They were staffed with professionals from other ad agencies, and since my experience was limited to The University of Learning, they really didn’t know what to do with me.
What they did know was that I had a creative flair, so they placed me in that department. Ironically, my first assignment was creating billboard copy for the Ford Motor Dealers Association, among others. I learned at the outset the magic rule for outdoor advertising copy: say whatever it is you have to say in seven words or less, or you haven’t got a message worth conveying, let alone a message people have time to read. The general philosophy at J. Walter Thompson was that if you couldn’t come up with your key selling point, the message you wanted to drive home in a headline or a TV or radio commercial in seven words or less, you didn’t have a handle on what you were trying to sell.
I had found an apartment in the virtually vacant sixteenth floor of a brand-new complex under construction in Queens, and we were one of the first tenants in the first completed high-rise in the development. It was well outside Manhattan, but the only thing I was able to afford. The rent took half of the roughly $400 after deductions and taxes I made each month. I had been impressed by the fact that you could see the New York skyline from the roof, and our apartment was only a fire escape away from that view.
My wife was unimpressed. We had one other tenant on the entire floor, so it turned out to be a scary experience for her living in a new, barely rented high rise while I was two subway rides away in New York.
J. Walter Thompson was everything I had hoped it would be. It was hard work, but exciting and fun. Fun for me, but not so much fun for my family. There is not much time left for family life when you leave for work at 7 AM and don’t get home until 7 pM. Mayer’s book had warned that ad people don’t want to have a phone at home, since just as you were dropping off to bed, the phone would ring at 1 AM from someone at the agency “wanting to check something with you.”
About two months after arriving at JWT, I got a call from the personnel office. They had already adjusted my meager salary up to $7,500 since I seemed to fit in, and they had an unusual assignment for me. It seemed that Unilever, which was handled by our Canadian branch, had developed a new sunflower oil product.
They were having trouble getting our people in Canada to develop a marketing-advertising approach to launch the product. Our Canadian branch was basically creative, and the marketing people at headquarters in New York, who had responsibility for Lever Bros. in the United States but not the more international Unilever, had little time and no intent in doing the job for them.
I was told JWT could lose the account unless we came up with a complete campaign from scratch in one week. They wanted to know if I was willing to apply my MBA training to the project.
The deal was if I could pull off something that would save the account, the reward would be substantial. The catch was that if I failed, I would be the scapegoat, and they made it clear that in all probability I would lose my job. They put all their eggs in my basket instead of trying to pull together a team in New York to work on the project. It was a gamble, and I was given a chance to decline. I said “yes” and explained the situation to my wife. She also felt we had nothing to lose, living as we were at a subsistence level on the fringes of New York City under less than desirable conditions.
I took on the assignment with a vengeance, reading all the background sent down from Canada. I immersed myself in the project, staying up all hours of the night to get it done. This was my one chance to prove myself, as well as demonstrate how useful someone with an MBA could be in an ad agency. My wife would wander into the living room, which served as my study, at 4 AM to find me still going at it. My sleep was confined to the commute on the subways where annoyed passengers would push me away when I nodded off on their shoulders. I had to come up with a name for the product, a logo, product packaging and design, and that is where my creative ability came in. I had to develop a marketing campaign defining the target audience, and a media plan and budget and, finally, the TV commercial storyboards, billboard copy, magazine and newspaper ads. The project included direct mail and brochures describing the benefits of the product.
By the end of the week, I had completed the entire assignment and turned it in to my agency for review. With a few minor adjustments, which were done in the office on Monday, the campaign was hand-carried across the Canadian border by courier and delivered to our Canadian office for presentation to Unilever the next day. Two days later I got word the client was pleased with the entire presentation, and that the company had saved the account.
I breathed a sigh of relief, at least knowing I had held on to my job. The reward came along shortly, and it was hard to believe.
It was an opportunity to be interviewed by JWT’s office in Coral Gables, FL, with the possible assignment of the writer and account executive position for Pan America’s Latin-American division.
Pan Am, which flew to 114 cities in eighty-six countries, had been a JWT account since 1942, and this job was a plum many people in our New York headquarters—who had been with the company much longer than me—were vying for. A number of them had already been interviewed for the position. It was coming open because it was held by John Minahan, author of The Sudden Silence, who had asked for a leave of absence to write a second book. He went on to write another eighteen or so after that.
When my wife and I were flown into Coral Gables, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven. The manager of the office, Joe Kelleher, picked us up at the airport and drove us to a beautiful hotel, with reflecting ponds full of flamingos in the front. I always loved tropical plants and climates, and this was beyond belief. The next day I was interviewed by everyone in the office and a day later we were flown back to New York to await the decision.