The philosophy behind much advertising is based on the old observation that every man is really two men—the man he is and the man he wants to be.
—William Feather
Charles A. Kincaid, who had been operating successfully with a small staff and minimal billings, founded Kincaid Advertising Agency, Inc. in 1954. After it became Kincaid’s largest account, First Union National Bank, Inc. bought the agency in 1965. The agency had won a number of top awards in local, regional, and national competition and its ads scored big in advertising club contests in Charlotte. Overall, it had picked up more than forty awards during the ’60s, including an “Adie” from the American Advertising Federation.
After positive response to my application, I was flown to Charlotte for an interview that went well. I joined the agency in 1970, being impressed with its atmosphere and creativity. At that time Kincaid billed a little over a million dollars. As a subsidiary of First Union Bancorp, a $2.2 billion holding company, First Union National Bank, the third largest in North Carolina, as I said was its largest account. Another Bancorp subsidiary and Kincaid account, Cameron-Brown Company, was the eleventh largest mortgage bank in the nation.
Other accounts included Belk Stores Service in New York; Buena Vista, a Walt Disney Productions distributor; and Hunter Jersey Farms, a dairy products marketer.
The agency also handled Public Service Company of North Carolina, a natural gas utility covering twenty-six counties; Jefferson Standard Broadcasting Company; Harris Teeter Supermarkets; projects for the Research Triangle Institute; and Holly-Farms Poultry Industries, the largest processor of poultry in the world.
Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, it is ironic that I had honed in on an advertising agency situation that was almost identical to the one that had brought my father to Ithaca and led to his first big break. It was an in-house agency and as long as it did a first-class advertising job for its owner and subsidiaries, it was given carte blanche to pursue other clients and sources of revenue.
I was brought in as vice president of marketing and account management, and the job included media management, so I had six people reporting to me. I was also put in charge of new business. As such, I worked under Charlie with my creative director partner, Jim Pringle, to come up with a mission statement that would separate us from the crowded agency field in this rapidly growing state. When it was finished, it said, in part: We believe a creative idea that does not lock securely into a client marketing problem is mere invention, novelty or difference, because our basic test of success is the degree to which we can help our accounts grow and profit.
We challenge ourselves to create a total personality that is uniquely right for a given product or service. We believe a good ad is one person talking to another and saying the most meaningful thing in the most positive way at the most appropriate time.
If we speak singularly, our customer listens. Otherwise, he doesn’t. That’s why we understand the person we are talking directly to before trying to impress him with our own or the company’s views about a product.
We believe that it’s important to remember that everyday people go out to buy products because they like the style of the advertiser.
And believe what he has to say. To make them feel we offer something they have wanted all their lives. But just never heard of before.
Our small agency was loaded with professionals, and we even recruited talented people away from other prestigious agencies including Cargill, Wilson & Acree in Richmond and Charlotte; Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York; McCann-Erickson in Atlanta; and Foote, Cone & Belding in Chicago. Within a year, we brought in six new accounts and increased our billing by 20 percent.
One of the new accounts was First Mortgage Insurance Co, in Greensboro, NC, licensed in twenty-one states and the fourth-largest underwriter of mortgage guarantee insurance in the country. Others were Triton Investment Corp, a McDonald’s franchisee, and Gaston County Dyeing Machine Co. in Mt. Holly, NC, a manufacturer of textile dyeing, bleaching, extracting and drying machinery in eighty countries around the world.
Our television commercials for Hunter Dairy and Holly Farms and our “Let’s Make Tomorrow Together” campaign for First Union, including a song recorded by The Young Carolinians and a version sung by Harry Belafonte, won top national awards. We combined broadcasting with a massive billboard buy (my second outdoor advertising encounter after creating billboards for the Ford Motor Dealers Association at JWT) with our “Tomorrow Together” message covering every highway leading into North Carolina. The song also became the theme song of many North Carolina high school proms, and I was told the campaign gave our competitor, North Carolina National Bank, fits. This was confirmed when I met the former VP and director of public policy for NationsBank in Charlotte, who worked for North Carolina National Bank at the time before it became NationsBank. He remembered the campaign and told me he hated it. When my daughter graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she joined NationsBank before it became Bank of America, so she ended up “working for the enemy.” This is ironic because First Union, where I was employed, ended up merging with Wachovia, my father’s primary bank throughout his media business career.
While in Charlotte, I also served on the public relations committee of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, and working at Kincaid was great, continuing the satisfaction I felt during my seven years at JWT. During my time at the agency, I was fortunate to meet and work with prominent North Carolina businessmen such as Dan Cameron, Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles, and Ed Crutchfield. When I had come to Charlotte, we bought our first house with my profit sharing from JWT in a place called Robinson Woods. It had a small stream in the woods behind the house, and my young son was as attracted to the water as he was growing up. It may have been overkill, but to keep him from toddling near the stream alone, particularly after a heavy rain, I told him there were packs of wild animals in the woods. At night, when we would tuck him into bed, he would look at us wide-eyed, mumbling, “Dere woofs in duh woods,” but at least he slept well and it didn’t translate into nightmares.
But a nightmare was pending for me and fate set me up for perhaps the most momentous decision of my life. It led to my leaving KincaidAdvertising in 1971, and shortly after Jim Pringle, who I knew had been planning it, also left to start his own agency in Atlanta. A year later, Kincaid was bought by Cargill Wilson & Acree, then the South’s largest ad agency and a subsidiary of Doyle Dane Bernbach.
In 1973, Ed Crutchfield, First Union’s marketing director and primary contact with our agency, became, at the age of thirty-two, its president. At that time he was the youngest president of a major bank in the United States. Crutchfield took the assets of the bank from $5 billion to over $250 billion, retiring the year before First Union and Wachovia merged in 2001.
A REQUEST TO RETURN The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
—David Hare As much as I was enjoying my first year at Kincaid, the offer from my father to come to work for him couldn’t have come at a worse time.
His first call took me by surprise, and it conveyed a mixed message. It seemed he was trying to lure me to Ithaca and at the same time talk me out of making the move. He offered me the role of his administrative assistant, and while he was describing the job, he was also deprecating it. There was no question that a position was open, and that he had been looking for someone to fill it. But because of his aversion to nepotism, he made it clear he had a concern about the reactions from his business associates, particularly Johnnie Babcock, whom I liked and respected.
He told me that he couldn’t put me in a line position without some working experience in his business, and he laid down the rules if I took the job. He said I would have to keep my reserve up, my mouth shut, and my emotions down. He warned me that I’d have to work long hours and earn my own respect. I was already doing the former, and had already earned the latter, and as we talked, I could tell both of us felt this job relationship, and its ramifications, would be a difficult path to set out upon.
How much respect can you earn as the son of, and an errand boy for, the boss, doing his every bidding, without the freedom to do anything on your own? I suspected my mother might have been behind the offer. But here I was with two hard-earned university degrees and successful management experience with two fine advertising agencies. I told him I would think about it. I had been discussing the possibility of moving to Atlanta with my creative counterpart at Kincaid to start our own agency. We had earned the reputation in the South by that time to be able to do it. I had no intention of taking the job my father had described.
Before I entertained any further thought about it, he called back a week later with a second offer—the job as general manager of his outdoor division, a spot where I would be running a business, not just a member of his staff.
For a brief period I struggled with the idea of returning to Ithaca. I decided to sit down and list the pros and cons of joining my father. Of course, back then I did not know as much about the difficulty of being the Son of a Boss in general so I was not fully aware of what things might be like in a long-term business relationship with a father, mine in particular.
I started with salary, which was to be only a couple of hundred dollars a year more than I was already making. No huge incentive there, but I considered the trade adequate since I really wasn’t motivated by money. Looking at overall compensation, I was told there would be an incentive of 1 percent of the gross operating profit increase, but no profit-sharing, and was told that there would be no salary review for one year from the end of the year in which I joined, when it would start on an annual basis. I had a company car with Kincaid and was to be provided with one with Park Outdoor, so that was a wash.
On insurance, Kincaid provided me with a $100,000 life insurance policy; Park Outdoor would provide only $5,000, which would cost me 65¢ a month per $1,000. The medical insurance was provided by both jobs but totally paid for at Kincaid. At Park, it would cost $18.50 a month. A negative there.
The fact that I would be returning to the town I grew up in was not that appealing, and I was told I would be doing so without being able to buy a house for a trial period of at least a year. I had a house in Charlotte and the tax deduction that went along with owning it. A move to Ithaca would also put me into a higher cost of living, renting a house with two kids, two cats, and one dog. I was also faced with the time pressure of selling the house I had. He said he would pay for the move.
My father, encouragingly, said the job would put me into a management position, but I was already in one. I had worked for years to earn it and I already had people reporting to me. He said it would heavily involve sales. I was never a high-pressure salesman, although I could put together blow-out sales pitches when I had something to sell, and I had been selling advertising campaigns for years.
In my advertising field I was working with people who were as bright, or brighter than me, and I loved the give-and-take. My father said I would have to remain aloof, as the officer in charge, from people who reported to me. No socializing with the troops. That was not my style. There was very little in his job description that fit my lifestyle and the way I enjoyed working with people.
My father argued that it was a chance to learn the realistic side of business, but I don’t know what he thought I’d been doing for the past seven years. In outdoor, I would be competing with experts in their own field. I would be out of mine, and I didn’t need a failure on my record. It was a big risk with no guarantee.
I held the cards in the advertising field, and I would be going into a new field with a lot of cards stacked against me. As a novice in outdoor, I would be under tremendous pressure to perform, as my father made sure to point out.
I also knew, having worked with him before, that he was strongly bottom-line oriented, and from his experience rightfully so. He said he kept score by the money, whereas I was more creatively and socially motivated and people-oriented. I saw where that could be a problem. He said creative was to be secondary to management, and people were secondary to profit. My father had already told me he thought by his standards I was not as logical or realistic as I should be, and he felt I was too emotional. I was more human than automaton, and I couldn’t change that, at least not at that stage of my life. I remembered how tough he had been to me in the past, and I had the right to be gun-shy.
I had always lived my own life, and I had reached the point where I didn’t need anybody telling me what to do. I could honestly not feel I would be comfortable in the job, performing under my father’s standards, especially when I was at the peak of my current career. I had learned too much in the business world to not try to apply it in Ithaca, and I knew that could be a problem. In the job I had, I at least had a final say.
He wanted me to try it for a year, but I felt one year would not be long enough to make it work. I also knew that one year could disrupt my current career, remembering that he criticized the campaign Kincaid had done for First Union, which had increased loans by 30 percent to young Carolinians, and profits in the bank by 80 percent in six months. It also won one of the top eight Bank Marketing Association awards in the nation, and this, plus the success of other campaigns we had done, filled me with pride and satisfaction.
I also remembered that when I worked for my father, there was little rapport. It was a mechanical relationship that held a degree of criticism on almost everything I did. This continued in both my personal and business life for the seven years I was out on my own. I remembered that during the years I lived in Rye, he was in New York City constantly but never once came to visit. When I lived in Charlotte, in my first home, although he was frequently in Raleigh, he also opted not to take time for a visit.
He said I would be expected to be the first to arrive and the last to leave, to take short lunches, to spend two or three days and one or two nights a week on the road. In regard to this travel, he also said he expected me to be very “circumspect” on expense accounts. He also said he expected me to keep a Dictaphone with me at all times and to work around the clock.
I was already working long hours into the night, and sometimes I was tired the next day and I knew that wouldn’t go over well with him. Overall, the fit just wasn’t right. My father told me not to come if I had any doubts, and I had plenty of them.
They were justifiable at the time, and I could honestly say that I felt it would be an uncomfortable situation. I had doubts I could do things by his standards, and I told him so.
One of the things that disturbed me the most was that he said my relationship with him and my mother would have to be cold and impersonal—like ice. It was to be a clear separation of power; only later would I fully appreciate the consequences. But the fact that he pointed this out so clearly made me think, again, that perhaps he was feeling some pressure from my mother.
He went on to say there would be business problems to solve but that I would have to solve any personal problems on my own. Otherwise, he said I would be “involving him” outside of the job. I didn’t have any personal problems at the time, but where do you turn to for help, except to your parents, when you need it? I liked the relationship the way it was then. I certainly had not received any personal help, but at least I had a father and he had a son, and I felt it might not be that way if we worked together.
Having been the object most of my life of my father’s “talk sheets,” I prepared my own answer to him. I had learned very well how to work up a talk sheet and had used them effectively during my business career.
I called him on the phone and this is what I said: “I’ve not had much sleep. You’ve given me an extremely difficult choice.
“In weighing alternatives, what came to forefront was my need to leave J. Walter Thompson to further my career at a higher level, not as somebody whose career peaked out after seven years in the business.
“The opportunity you offer me is challenging, but I want to dedicate my efforts in a field I know and continue my all-out exploration of every opportunity the advertising agency business may offer. “It may not work, but I can never say I didn’t try. “In a year or two, Kincaid will be on the map or it won’t.
Whatever is accomplished will be significantly attributable to my efforts.
“The management experience you offer could be valuable and maturing. In working with you, I am as convinced as you are about the danger of nepotism. I know I would report to Johnnie Babcock, not you, and agree with Johnnie that working for my father could result in an arbitrary and necessarily low salary. I’m worth what Kincaid is paying me now and may not be worth that to you for several years.
“In outdoor, I think I could be a good salesman, but I might not be. I know I can sell corporate images, marketing plans, and creative ideas to advertising clients who hired us for our advice, but maybe not billboards to new customers through cold calls.
“In my field I am already a competent and proven manager. I would rather learn and develop my capabilities in a situation that puts no pressure on the two of us. If I don’t make it here, neither of us will be embarrassed. We would be if I failed working for you in the job you offer.
“I know what it took you to offer me this spot. I’m deeply moved that you think enough of me to do it. My major concern is that my refusal will lead you to shut the door on the possibility of working together in the future. I hope this won’t happen. I’m sure you can understand.”
And so I turned down a second, but this time upgraded, offer from my father.