The Sisyphus Account

Those familiar with Greek mythology know Sisyphus, the king of Corinth. The gods sentenced him to an eternity in hell, pushing a large rock up a hill. He'd get it to the top, only to watch it roll to the bottom, where his job awaited him again.

Well, hate to tell you this, but there are a lot of clients like this. I'll call this one Sisyphus Corp.

Corporations like SisyCorp don't want to actually run advertising. They want to look at it. They want to talk about it. They want to have meetings about it. But they won't run a campaign. Not this year anyway.

“If we were to run advertising—we're not, but if we were to run an ad—could you show us what it might look like?”

You've just been handed a shovel and told to feed the Idea Furnace. You will work as hard as somebody whose ads are actually being published. You'll spend the same late nights and long weekends and order in the same pizza. But when the year is over, you'll have nothing to show for it but some dead ideas and a pizza gut.

This kind of account, although it can drive you crazy, isn't the worst. (More on them in a minute.) They're like blind giants, a Cyclops with something under his contact lens. They're big. They have money. And if they lumber about and head in the wrong direction, it hardly matters. As long as they make their numbers, they don't care. They've lost the entrepreneurial spirit. Winning isn't important; not losing is.

There isn't much you can do about this kind of account. There's an old saying: “The only way out is through.” Sometimes it's best simply to feed the beast its daily minimum requirement of concepts and then sneak out to a movie when the Idea-vores aren't hungry and on the prowl. Call it paying your dues. After you've put in a few months papering the walls of your client's meeting rooms, appeal to your creative director. Show him your battle scars. If he's any good, he'll occasionally put a fresh team in front of Sisyphus's rock.

Sisyphus isn't the worst kind of account. Not by a long shot. There's another enemy of good advertising. Fear.

The Meat Puppet

A very talented woman named Lois Korey, an ad star from the 1960s, described this kind of account:

Clients seem to get the advertising they deserve. The good ones, they're risk takers. They're willing to risk failures for extraordinary success.…The bad clients? Fear dribbles down from the top. No one says so, in so many words, but you know no risks will be tolerated, no rules will be broken, that mediocrity is the measure by which your work will be weighed.¹

Fear dribbles down from the top, says Ms. Korey. The Chinese have a more colorful phrase: “A fish stinks from the head.”

You can actually smell it on the vice presidents, the fear. No amount of roll-on is gonna cover up their terror of the boss. It may be their boss, or their boss's boss—it doesn't matter.

But the boss has done a terrible thing to these vice presidents. He has put them in charge of something they're not in charge of. The nameplates outside their cubicles may sport words such as “Assistant Director of Marketing,” but they are not directing marketing or anything else, for that matter. They are, in effect, meat puppets.

Invisible strings, thin but powerful, dangle down from management and are attached to every part of their bodies. Everything these guys do, everything they think, every memo they write, every decision they don't put off, will be second-guessed.

When you're a meat puppet, what you do is say “No.” An ad lands on your desk, and that invisible string connected to your hand makes you reach for the big NO stamp, pulls it back over the ad, and wham!

“NO!”

I have seen fear completely unravel a meat puppet.

She was the director of marketing for a large corporation whose name you'd recognize. She needed a TV spot, just one 30-second spot, for a new product being introduced the following spring. It was a great product. It deserved a big, wonderful introductory spot. We worked hard and presented an idea we believed was very good.

We flew in. Shook hands. Found a room with an easel, did our setup, and unveiled. She looked at the storyboard, looked at her notebook, then wrote something down. (When clients do this, I always assume it's: “Begin new agency search immediately.”) She looked up and said, “I just don't like it.”

The strategy wasn't the problem. How we were saying it wasn't the problem.

“I just don't like it.”

Good clients are allowed this. If they're buying good work most of the time, well, they deserve to have those simple human reservations we all feel now and then. We decide to let her play the “just don't like it” card. Fine. We go back. Time is running out, so we bring three storyboards to the next meeting. Luckily, we're on a streak and all three are good. We'd have been happy to go with any one.

“I just don't like it.”

“All three?”

“I just don't like it.”

“What is it you don't like?”

“I can't say.” And then she said the one thing all the really bad clients say sooner or later. “I'll know it when I see it.”

Copywriter and author Dick Wasserman said this phrase is tantamount to a general telling his armies, “March off in all directions, and when I see where one of you is headed, I'll have a better fix on where I'd like the rest of you to go.”

And so we marched off in all directions. Meeting after meeting was adjourned with, “I just don't like it.” The storyboards piled up. After a while, we didn't bother to fly in for meetings and started e-mailing scripts, always getting the same answer.

Some 25 boards passed before her. And 25 died. I assure you, we didn't give up. It was a good product. A fallow field lay before us. We presented good work right up to the end.

“I just don't like it.”

Time began to run out. Directors' January schedules were filling up. The media was bought, and the client was panicking. Client panic sometimes works in the agency's favor. Not this time. She asked for more. In the final phone meeting, the agency simply refused to provide any more boards.

And the client unraveled. I mean, she completely fell apart.

I remember listening to her voice on the speakerphone, hearing it begin to waver. She began to cry and then, God help me, beg like a junkie for more work.

She had become addicted to indecision.

“Come on! It doesn't even have to be a 30. Gimme a stinkin' 15. I'll take a 15! You got to have some 15s! Oh baby, baby, come to momma with another board.” (Okay, she didn't say exactly that, but…she said exactly that.) I'd never seen anything like it. It got worse, too.

Somehow, around board number 29, she bought something. The agency wasn't proud of the piece. We were just holding our noses, hoping to simply produce the thing and pray we would prevail on the next assignment. A second-tier director was chosen. A location in Miami was scouted and approved. There was a listless prepro meeting. Sets were built. The team assembled in Florida the night before the cameras rolled. And the phone rang.

In the 11th hour, in the 59th minute, and at the tail end of the 59th second, the client's antiperspirant failed again. “I just don't like it.”

The agency was forced to come up with a new concept and do it under the constraints of an existing set and a locked-off budget. Which is a lot like being told to build a plane, and here's a coffee can, a crayon, and an old copy of Sports Illustrated. It was insane. It was like that famous line from journalist Bill Mellor: “We are sorry. But the editor's indecision is final.”

These incredible dervish-like turnarounds are known as doing a 360°. It's like doing a 180°, but twice. It could be argued this client did a 540° or even a 720°. (Apparently, a 900° once happened in New York but nobody could tell, really; after a while it got hard to count.)

The agency had to go back to the drawing board yet again. This time, getting the idea took just 10 minutes. The tired writer and the dispirited art director walked to the end of a nearby pier and just sat there looking out at the ocean.

Idea number 30 limped into the writer's mind like a sick dog with its ribs showing, and the writer said, “Okay, what if we did this?”

The art director looked at the dog. The dog looked up at the art director.

“Fine.”

They took their sick little animal of an idea and walked it back down the dock, went inside, and called the client.

The client loved it.

It should come as no surprise the final spot was bad. It was so bad we were trying to change channels on it there in the editing suite. “See what else is on,” someone would say. What is surprising is how the client later decided they didn't like it and blamed the agency. “Why aren't our commercials as good as the work you do for your other clients?”

The spot never aired. I swear this happened.

There is a list I've seen posted on bulletin boards in many agencies. One of those jokes that get photocopied and passed around until the type decays. This was the list:

The Six Phases of an Advertising Project

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and honors for the nonparticipants

What was once a joke tacked to a bulletin board had become grim reality. What began with enthusiasm ended as a new agency search.

Funny thing, though. The account did in fact leave the agency, but a month later we heard the woman was fired.

And, wouldn't you know it, in her absence the client's advertising improved. Which is always a little hard to take. I mean, the mature thing to do is wash the blood off your hands, wave good-bye to an account, and wish the brand your best. But you secretly wish your old girlfriend, after she dumps you, ends up dealing crack from a culvert. Currently, the on-the-job life expectancy of the average chief marketing officer is 48 months² before being fired and replaced by the next one (who always has his own ideas, if not his own agency). This often means the only steady hand on the rudder of a brand is the ad agency's junior account person.

I had another client who was a meat puppet, working in a company run by fear. He was about as far down the corporate food chain as you could get—cubicle plankton. He even looked the part: that pale-white kind of guy who always gets killed in the first five minutes of a movie. Yet, to get an ad approved, you had to run it by this guy. And a bullet from his ratty little Saturday night special was as deadly as any other.

He was perhaps the tensest person I ever met. One morning, he was seen standing in front of the company coffee machine holding an empty cup, growling through clenched teeth, “Brew, goddammit.” He had such high blood pressure, we worried if he sustained even a paper cut, arterial spray would redden the ceiling.

But as scared as he was, he had a little power game he ran. It was brilliant. Whenever you presented ads to him for his approval, he wouldn't look at you. Or the ads. Wouldn't look at all. He'd just stare down at his legal pad in front of him.

There you were, having taken a two-hour plane ride, hauling your luggage in and out of cabs to arrive in his conference room. You did your setup and then presented the work, ta-da!…to the top of his head. And if it was a visual concept, it drove you crazy. Because you found yourself having to use words to explain an image you came up with to avoid using words in the first place.

He, too, was a meat puppet. Unable to make any decision without imagined repercussions from above, he chose to make none and, instead, passed his decision on to the next guy up the food chain.

There is nothing you can do about a meat puppet. Your boss is going to have to go above him, to whoever's yanking his strings. Such a decision is not yours to make, and you'll need one of your higher-ups to talk with one of theirs. Sometimes it works; most of the time not.

Pablum Park

It's a 10 o'clock meeting on Monday morning at Martini, Yesman & Longlunch. Coats come off, and hands are shaken. Coffee poured and ties flattened. Everybody's excited because the client, the big regional power company, wants a new campaign.

“Okay,” asks the agency, “about what?”

“Well, just about us. You know. Us.”

“Okay, but what about…us?”

“We care.”

“You care?”

“We care.”

“You care about what?”

“We just…care.”

“Okay, I get the caring. I get it. But what is it you care about?”

“Why do we have to care about anything in particular? Just a general sort of caring, I think, would be fine. In fact, Dick here was just saying on the way to the agency how that would be a workable theme-slogan sort of thing—‘We Care.’”

Dick nods, sagely.

Uh-oh. It's a client with absolutely nothing to say. You are now entering Pablum Park. Abandon all relevance, ye who enter here.

A power company is a good example of this kind of client. There's nothing they can say without ticking customers off. Why they advertise at all is beyond me. Where else are you going to “shop” for electricity? (“Oh, I think I'll use that plug over there.”) Many hospitals and health care plans have the same problem. They can't say, “Our doctors are better than their doctors.” They can't say, “We cost less.” They can, however, say, “We care.”

So the Pablum Machine is turned on, and everything begins to run together into a saccharine slurry of Caring and Sharing and People Helping People. In fact, Pablum Park is populated entirely by “People People®.”

“We're not just a giant corporation. We're People People® Helping People.”

In Pablum Park, the police are “People Protecting People from People.” Morticians are “Living People Helping Dead People.” And lawyers are “People, Trying to Be People, Trying People.”

If you watch even an hour of television, you'll see many commercials spouting this kind of drivel. Peel away the bluster and bombast, the jingles and clichés, and you'll find drivel. Nothing of substance. Words that sort of sound like you should be paying attention to them but are ultimately empty.

The best drivel I've ever read was in a wonderful parody called Patriotic Spot—60 Seconds, by Ellis Weiner. I reprint it here in abbreviated form.

You're waking up, America. It's morning—and you're waking up to live life like you've never lived it before. Say hello to a whole new way of being awake, America. Say hello to us.…We're watching you, America. We're watching you when you work—because, America, you work hard. And we know that afterward you've got a mighty big thirst. Not just a thirst for the best beer you can find. But a thirst for living. A thirst for years of experience. America, you're thirsty.…America, say hello to something new. Say hello to quality. Quality you can see. Quality you can feel. Quality you can say hello to. (How do you spell “quality,” America? Real quality—quality you can trust? The same way we've been spelling it for over a hundred and fifty years.) We're Number One. You're Number One. You're a winner, America. And we know what you're thinking. We know how you feel. How do we know? Because we take the time to tell you. We take the time to care. And it pays off. We're here, America. And the next time you're here—the next time we can tell you who we are and what we do—we'll be doing what we do best.³

You're not completely without hope with this kind of client. But it'll take some work on your part. Every client has a story. Even the big, ugly ones with names like Syntheti-Corp have a story that can be made relevant and meaningful to their customers.

International Paper's trade campaign by Ogilvy & Mather in the '80s is a good example. International was a faceless corporation that made a product not famous for brand loyalty—paper.

Yet their campaign of award-winning ads was exquisitely readable (Figure 18.2). Above a spread filled with long, well-written copy were headlines like “How to improve your vocabulary” or “How to enjoy poetry.” Each ad was authored by a marquee name like Kurt Vonnegut. And at the end of the ads, the copy seamlessly brought you around to International's take on the deal: “We believe in the power of the printed word.”

The Koncept Krusher 2000®

This actually happened.

After several weeks of work, we finished a campaign for a large account and presented it to the client. The client approved it, “pending research.”

The account guys sent the boards to an advertising research firm retained by the client. A week later, the results came back. We'd scored okay with the traditional focus group tests. But we'd failed the “Andrea” test and had to start all over.

“What is the ‘Andrea’ test?” I asked the client.

With a straight face, she said, “Well, the thing is, we give your storyboards to a guy there at the research place. And he and another guy, they take it into a room and they close the door and then come out about, oh, three hours later with the results. And we know if your spot works. Yours didn't. I'm sorry.”

“But what did they do in there?”

“The research firm tells us that's proprietary.”

“Pro…can I talk to this ‘Andrea’?”

“‘Andrea’ is just the name for the test. There is no Andrea, and the methodology is proprietary, as I've said. They don't have to tell us what they do in there. The results they come out with always seem to be right on the money.”

I stood there, blinking. The client, I'm sure, thought I was trying to think of some counterargument. But what I was thinking about was social work. “I like people. I could help someone, maybe a little kid. It would be nice to get away. Peru or something. Maybe a little shack. Wouldn't be so bad.”

I came to in the cab on the way to the airport, holding a fat spiral notebook full of all the things wrong with my ideas, courtesy of “Andrea.”

Many research companies stay busy by selling fear to brand managers. (“Are you sure you want to spend money on this idea? You suuurrre??”) And so the kind of clients who use test results to approve work will always be with us. There's no escaping it. That's the good news. The bad news is, with some clients, research will kill all of your work all the time.

A few large corporations have whole floors devoted to advertising/research, and they have it down to a system. They feed your ideas into one end of a process that's very much like a machine, with a name like, I don't know, “Koncept Krusher 2000^̈.” As your campaign goes through the device, you hear all kinds of nasty things happening (“It's negative!” Muffled sounds. “We can't say that.” Unidentified thwacking noise. “Why can't they all be happy?”) and what comes out the other end you wouldn't want to air on a clothesline, much less network television.

The really bad news is there isn't a thing you can do about it. Once these huge research machines are in place, they're usually there to stay. Somebody somewhere is making a lot of money off this research (and it isn't the client). No good idea will ever get out alive. Generally, it's the older, larger clients who've been advertising for years that have an overheated K/K 2000 down in the basement, running day and night.

I worked for several clients like this, where I think I did some of the best work of my career. But you've never seen it. On one particularly baneful project I remember, the Krusher must've been set on “high” because it went through hundreds, literally hundreds, of our ideas.

After I burned out on the project, the agency threw other people at the snapping jaws of the research machine. And then another team. And another. A full year later (I'm not making this up), the Krusher spit out this tepid little idea-thing that both research and the client had approved.

There on the conveyer belt lay the idea—a trembling, pathetic little mutant that did not like being looked at directly. A sort of marketing Frankenstein—chunks of different departmental agendas and mandates, all sewn together by focus groups and researchers into something that looked like an ad campaign but was, in fact, an abomination. We should have hammered a spike through its heart right there.

Koncept Krushers can be bigger machines than just a client's research department. The whole company may, in fact, be structured to blowtorch new ideas. This sounds cynical, I know, but I've seen it. I've stood right next to these furnaces myself and felt the licking of the flames.

Try this on.

The client in question was one of those Sisyphus accounts I described earlier. A big Fortune 500 company. Huge. The kind that asks for tons of stuff that's always due the next morning, and you find out later it's for a product they're thinking about introducing 10 years from now.

So, anyway, this poor art director is assigned to this joyless account. She doesn't know what they're really like, so the day she gets a job for a big SisyCorp TV commercial, she's all excited, right?

Well, she and her partner begin working on it. After a vast amount of work, they have a couple cool ideas. I mean some really smart things that also happen to be potential award winners (or “podium wobblers,” as they're called in Britain).

Cut to next scene, meeting number one with the client—all of the ideas are dead. The reason? Doesn't matter. (You'll see.)

So they get to work on another series of ideas to present in meeting number two. Days later, there's excitement in the creative department, rejuvenation. “We've done it again!”

Time wipe: It's meeting number three. The client opens the meeting by announcing they've changed the strategy.

Okay, here's where we cut to that movie cliché—the clock hands spinning 'round and 'round, the calendar pages flying off the wall. The changes keep coming in. The client doesn't like the idea. Or they cut the budget. Or they change the product, or they change the strategy. One time it's the client himself who's changed—fired, actually—and now there's a new client who wants something totally different. Whatever it is, it's always something.

It gets worse.

During meetings number 4 through number 63, the campaign is watered down, softened, and diluted so much that the final commercial is precisely as interesting as a bag of hair. It is in meeting 63 that the last interesting thing in the commercial is successfully removed. An optimist might say things should have gone smoothly from here on out. But there are no optimists in advertising.

It's Friday. The scheduled day of meeting number 64.

Meeting number 64 isn't even a very important meeting, given that the CEO signed off back around meeting number 50 or so. But there needed to be a few dozen more “for your information” sort of presentations, and if any of them went badly, the agency would have to start over.

The meeting begins. The art director goes through the old moves, trying to remember the fun of presenting the idea back when it was still good. But there's no spark left. She just…presents it.

The client sits there. Says nothing at first.

The client then reaches down into her purse and pulls out a small Kermit the Frog doll. (This really happened and I am not making it up or even exaggerating.) It's one of those flexible dolls, and she begins bending the frog's arms around so that its hands are covering its ears. Then the client says: “Mr. Froggy doesn't like some of the things he's hearing.”

This really happened.

The client actually said, “Mr. Froggy doesn't like some of the things he's hearing” (Figure 18.3).

Let me put it this way. There are two kinds of hell. There's “Original” and then there's “Extra Crispy.” This was Extra Crispy.

Well, Ms. Froggy-Lady, as she came to be known, wasn't able to kill the commercial, only make it a little worse—a feat in itself. And so, finally, in meeting number 68, the whole company had signed off on this one idea.

All in all, it took 68 presentations to hundreds of MBAs in dozens of sweaty presentation rooms. In fact, there were some sarcastic agency memos to the media department suggesting that since the commercial had been shown to thousands of people already, there may not be a need to air it at all.

The creative team went back to the agency, opened two beers, and sat looking at the sunset through the windows of their offices on the 30th floor. There, over the body of the original storyboard that lay on the floor, they performed an advertising postmortem, discussing the more shocking moments of its horrifying death.

Eavesdropping, a casual listener might have thought the two had just come out of the theater and were talking about a horror movie. (“Yeah! And remember when that one guy came in and ripped all its guts out? Man, I did not see that coming at all.”)

That's when they noticed something out their window—something disturbing.

Outside their window was a 40-story building.

The thing is, the 40-story building wasn't there back on the day they began working on the commercial.

With horror, the creative team realized a building had been raised, built from a 30-foot-deep hole in the ground and 40 stories into the sky, faster than their little 12-frame storyboard had been destroyed and approved.

Why do I tell you this? To chase you away from the business?

No, to steel you for it.

This stuff happens all the time. And keep in mind, none of these clients were stupid people. (Well, we can discuss Froggy-Lady later.) They were all pretty sharp businesspeople, trying as hard as they could to solve a problem for their brands. But as smart and nice as they all were individually, a calcified approval process had crept into the company's structure, and it became completely impossible to get a decent idea out the door.

This happens all the time. Be ready.

The Bully

There is another kind of bad account. The account run by the Bully client. Bullies anywhere are bad but Bullies with corporate power are enough, as Anne Lamott says, to make Jesus drink himself to sleep.

Bullies aren't born that way. They develop over many years, like wine gone sour in a forgotten cellar. They come out of the cellar with a vast amount of knowledge, all of it wrong, down to the syllable. The one I'm thinking of had been in the business some 20 years when I was put on his account.

He had spent most of his career on a second-rate brand of beer and was personally responsible for one of the worst campaigns ever to foul a TV set. And he was so proud of that beer campaign. Women with big breasts. Wild beach parties with lots of what he'd call “jiggle.” And always ending with that tired old shot, a bartender holding two frosty bottles in each hand, offering them to the camera. “Product ID!” he'd say.

He would brag about this awful campaign, measuring our work by it one day, smacking our hands with it the next. When it was just us guys in the room, he'd say, “You wanna know why that campaign worked? I tell ya why that campaign worked. We had girls with them big ol' titties and trucks and everything.”

I'm not kidding. He said that. It was like every nightmare any woman has ever had about the way some men behave behind closed corporate doors. He was a pig.

Even his boss knew his beer campaign stank and would occasionally interrupt him in midbrag to tell him so. The Bully would good-naturedly chuck his boss's shoulder and remind him of the slight upward drift of his beer's sales curve. He projected his own inadequacies onto the market and made the mistake of thinking the customer is none too bright. And it was reflected in the advertising he forced all of his agencies to do. Pile-driving, “no-nonsense” nonsense.

During your career in advertising, you will meet this man. He will know nothing about advertising but will wield great power. “All hat and no cattle,” I've heard him described. No argument will be eloquent enough to sway him from his sledgehammer approach to advertising. There is no poetry in the man. No subtlety. He is a paper tiger. A tin-pot despot lording over his little product fiefdom, spouting rules from advertising's Bronze Age, and pointing to modest sales increases whenever his excesses and crudities are exposed.

And the day all intelligence in advertising dies, he should be brought in for questioning.

Hallway Beast #1: The Hack

Yes, clients can misbehave. Thank God, most of them don't. And to account for all that awful work you see on TV every night, those bad clients must have a few friends on the agency side of the business. They do.

Like everything else in life, the quality of agencies out there forms a big bell curve. There are a few truly great agencies, then a whole bunch of agencies that are just okay, and then a few bad ones.

To get off to the right start in this business, you're going to need to know how to spot those bad agencies. And it's not as easy as you think. Just because an agency has a commercial in the latest awards annual doesn't mean you want to work there.

What you've got to do is, during your interviews, look for the Hack. (Let's call him Hallway Beast #1. There are others in the menagerie.)

The first warning sign you're in the presence of a Hack is he'll somehow bring up his One Good Ad from Way Back. He won't call it that. In fact, he'll show it to you and say something like, “This is the kind of work we do here.” That's when you notice the ad is on brittle, yellowing paper from a magazine like Collier's.

All Hacks have one of these ads. They made their name on it. They've been riding its tired old back for decades and look about as silly doing it as Adam West would now look in his old Batman suit.

It can be a great ad. Doesn't matter. Ask yourself, what else has the agency done? Talented people with a gift for advertising keep doing great work, time and again, for a variety of clients.

Another warning sign that should send your Hack-O-Meter into the red is how the person talks. And oh, how this kind does talk. In fact, talk is all a Hack can do, being incapable as he is of producing an ad that a fly won't lay eggs on. He'll know the buzzwords. And worse, he'll have a few of his own. “At this agency, we believe in advertising with Clutter-Busting® Power.” If you hear something like this, just drop your portfolio and run. You can put together another book. Just run. Don't risk the elevator. Go for the stairs.

Agencies are the way they are for a reason. It's no accident they're doing awful work. They have clients on one side asking for awful work, Hacks on the other side giving it to them, and a guy in the middle counting all the money. Talk is cheap. Especially talk about how “we're going to turn this place around.” If you hear this phrase, you should turn around. Again, go for the stairs.

The quintessential giveaway, however, is the creative director who denigrates creativity in general and awards shows in particular. This was the kid in the playground who didn't have a big red ball, so he told the other kids, “Big red balls are stupid.” He can't do it. So, of course, he's going to denigrate it.

Some of these guys kill ideas simply because they're unable to generate ideas of their own. In fact, to kill what you've come up with actually seems like an idea to them. They'll go: “Hey wait! Shhhhh…I have an idea! Let's…not do your idea!” Their ideas are like antimatter. They don't really exist until yours does, and when they meet, they're both gone in an instant.

In an interview, this guy will look you straight in the eye and say, “Creativity is overrated. Client sales are what we're all about.” He'll get out a case history. Show you some commercials he'll call “hardworking” and then tap his finger on a number at the bottom of the results page. “This, my little friend, is what we do.”

Someday I'd like to try an experiment. It will cost $40 million. I'll give a fifth grader a brand name and tell him to shoot a commercial. Whatever he comes up with, I'll spend the rest of the $39-some million airing on prime time. In a couple of months, I'll bet Little Jimmy can take off his baseball glove and tap his finger on a similar sales increase. The point is, with a two-ton sledgehammer even a fifth grader can ring the bell at the top. (I suspect Mr. Whipple's war chest of several trillion had something to do with his high recall scores.)

On the other hand, you have what's called creative leverage—beating the competition's advertising by doing work that's more interesting. Years ago, writer Ed McCabe said, “Disciplined creativity is often the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over the competition.”

Compare that quotation from McCabe with this next one. I can't print this man's name, but to a national trade magazine he said blithely and without shame, “Sheer repetition can build awareness and equity for a client even if an ad is not considered creatively brilliant. A dumb dollar beats a smart dime any day.”

Sheer repetition? If I were this guy's client, I'd take my dumb dollar over to an agency that can give me 10 times the wallop with a dime's worth of sheer brilliance.

Hacks get easier to spot as they feed and prosper. In their mature years, they sprout long titles, some growing up to 10 inches in length. Recently, I saw a picture of a Hack in Adweek and below it, this title: “Executive Vice President/Vice Chairman/Chief Creative Director North America/General Manager/Worldwide Coordinator.” I'm not kidding—word for word.

Agencies may keep them on, sort of as expensive hood ornaments. They'll trot them out at big pitches, but during the rest of the year they'll give them what I call a Nerf account—something they can bat around without hurting themselves or anybody else. They are famous, as one wag put it, chiefly for being well known.

A closing thought on Hacks. One of the great things about this business is you'll be surrounded by vibrant, interesting, and genuinely nice people. I don't know why the industry attracts them; it just does.

And Hacks are no exception. Most of the ones I've known are people just as nice as you could want to meet. After office hours, they're great fishing buddies, loving mothers, and intelligent bridge partners.

But I warn you against joining their team during working hours. As a junior, you'll learn bad habits from them, habits that will be hard to break, even when you come under the tutelage of more talented teachers. We improve by surrounding ourselves with people whose work we admire.

Hallway Beast #2: The Prima Donna

This is the writer or art director who thinks he is God's gift to advertising. And they are all over this business.

The one I'm thinking of right now had that one dead giveaway, something all Prima Donnas share—the swagger. That walk people get when they think their DNA is better than everybody else's. There he goes now, down the hallway. And in his hand, a paper bearing his latest brilliant headline. (“Oh, how I wish he'd let me see his idea right now, and not make me have to wait 'til next year's award winners are announced.”)

Why they develop the swagger, I don't know. I mean, if that paper was a blueprint for world peace instead of a coupon ad for Jell-O, okay, sashay a little bit. But the Prima Donna seems to have forgotten what he does for a living. He's a word-slinging schmuck like the rest of us. But you'll never convince a Prima Donna he's the same species as we.

Wherever the Prima Donna is swaggering, when he gets there, you can bet he'll have something nasty to say about either how excruciatingly dumb account executives are or what blind bastards every single one of his clients is.

But you, you're okay—that is, if the Prima Donna is standing within 10 feet of you. Prima Donnas obey what I call the 10-Foot A-hole Rule. Anyone farther than 10 feet from the Prima Donna is an a-hole. He'll walk into your office and say, “Oh, you wouldn't believe the a-holes I was just talking to.” Of course, the rule applies when he leaves your office. Eleven feet down the hallway, he'll be telling whomever he's with, “God, I'm glad we left that a-hole's office.”

Prima Donnas would have made great Nazis, because they cultivate an air of entitlement and genetic superiority. Each one believes he is the center gear in capitalism's great machine. What the pen of Herr Donna writes today will tomorrow be on the lips of all the haggard supermarket moms he makes fun of in his off-hours.

You see, Prima Donnas have so much to teach us. If we would only listen. But as the years go by and he casts more of his pearls before swine, his poison ferments and his talons curl. Prima Donnas just get mean.

It's like this: When I look out my tall office building, I think all the people look like ants. He thinks that when he's on the street.

There was this one Prima Donna I remember. His first day at work he called the office manager in and calmly directed his desk be raised three inches. Three inches—I'm not kidding. Apparently, his keyboard had to be a certain distance from his chin to invoke his muse. When he could bully the producers into it, he'd fly only first class. And any suggestions from coworkers on how to improve an idea were laughed off or explained away. It got so bad finally no art director would work with him. He was about to be fired when he quit and took a job somewhere else.

The hurt and anger he left behind in the agency lingered for some time. Secretaries came out of hiding and admitted to farting in his office when he was gone. After a while, we tried to be philosophical about his character. The best we could say about him was: “If you cut him open, you'd find a heart of gold. And if you didn't, hey, you've cut him open.”

Hallway Beast #3: Mr. Important Pants

If this were a movie we'd introduce the brutal creative director by opening on an agency meeting. It would be a Sunday, naturally; maybe even during the holidays. We see the nervous creative team tacking ideas up on the wall. But where is Mr. Important Pants?

Ahh, here he comes.

His untroubled gait belies the fact he's fully 35 minutes late for a meeting he called. After setting down his soy mocha-decaf latte he begins to look grimly at the ideas on the wall. He brushes his ponytail off of his shoulder. He sneers, rips an idea off the wall, crumples it, and drops it to the floor.

He then dispenses what he calls creative direction. To his little clutch of “scribblers” he gives this helpful and articulate redirection.

“It's crap.”

Now he's working his way down the bulletin board and the campaigns begin to die one after another, in waves. Accompanying the death of each idea comes similarly helpful creative advice:

“Crap.”

“Bitch, pleeease.”

“Yeah, like I would do somethin' like this.”

And finally the wall is bare. No ideas are good enough for his majesty. As he takes leave, over his shoulder he quips, “I'll know it when I see it, people.” No discussion about what was right about the work, what was wrong. And though his title is creative director, there is no direction given to the creatives.

Okay, this latte-ponytail guy, he's just one kind of brutal creative director, but these schmucks come in all kinds of shapes. The worst ones actually berate and browbeat creatives, bludgeoning them with words that serve to improve neither the work nor the morale.

And when their words do, in fact, improve the creative, these guys will defend their behavior by describing it as “brutally honest.” Unfortunately, all that people remember is brutality, not honesty.

Imagine how stupid this kind of brutality would look if we could see it in some other venue.

Cut to Mcdonald's Manager Dressing Down a New Employee.

“Hey, I didn't get to wear this red paper manager's hat by makin' milkshakes as crappy as this!”

Why advertising creates so many of these angry little dictators is a mystery. What, pray tell, warrants any kind of arrogance at all? Dude, this is advertising. You're not pullin' babies out of burning buildings. You're not curing cancer or making peace. You make commercials for cry-eye. Websites. End-aisle displays.

If I could get one of these guys alone, my speech might go like this. “Dude, toss that latte and sit down. Listen, I don't care…I said sit down, Ponytail…I don't care that you were once on a ‘big Volvo shoot’ with Robert Goulet. I don't care you won an award that one time. I don't care that you wear sunglasses when you're indoors. The thing is, none of that crap gives you the permission to treat people poorly. Somewhere along the line, dude, you seem to have gotten the idea that establishing a high bar means you can whack people with it.”

In a recent post about good creative directors on the Denver Egoist, I read this:

You don't get people to want to work harder for you by shouting…abusing and humiliating. Motivation comes from a place of respect and trust. Good creative directors will want you to do well for you, not for them. They instill in you the kind of passion and drive that makes an eight-hour day become a 13-hour day. If your CD's idea of motivation is to threaten you with pay cuts, demotions, crappy accounts or losing your job, you don't want to work for that CD any more.…Sure, you'll work for the d-bag for as long as it takes you to find another job, but word will soon spread that the CD is in fact a d-bag, and the agency will find it more and more difficult to hire genuinely good creative talent.⁴

My advice?

If you find yourself working for one of these people, drop a dime on him or her and let human resources know. If you can get another job, do it and do it fast. And on your way out, spread the word. This isn't gossip. You're providing a valuable service to your creative brethren by putting up a warning sign: “Steer Clear. Toxic Douche-Bag Ahead.”

Hallway Beast #4: The Whiner

Lord knows, I've been one of these. And in my early years, I wasted a lot of time doing it. (Does this chapter count as whining?…Wait. Don't answer.)

It has been said that whining is simply anger coming through a very small hole. If so, then the Whiner is a very angry little man.

What he whines about most is his job. And he whines all the time. All of his clients suck. All account executives suck. The sad part is, if he could just convert half the energy he spends whining in the hallways to working in his office, he'd be doing better work. Yes, that work might die because sometimes a client may, in fact, suck. But those are the breaks of the business. Get over it.

The Whiner can have a job at the best agency in the world and he'll still find something to bitch about. And it's such a disconnect to listen to a Whiner strum his blues as he reclines amid the opulence of a large ad agency.

You'll find him whining in the employee kitchen while guzzling his 80th free Coke and eating a free lunch. (“My book is, like, so at the headhunter's.”)

You'll find him in a first-class seat of a jet on the way to a commercial shoot in sunny California, bitching about how they made him mention the client's product in a commercial about the client's product. (“That is, like, so expected.”)

You'll find him working in a comfortable conference room, grousing about having to work on smaller jobs like a brochure or direct mail. (“My old partner is on a TV shoot right now, and I'm here doing this crap.”)

Whiners can be poison to other people in the agency. It's hard enough to keep your spirits high in this business, and it doesn't help to have a Whiner draped over the chair in your office, going through the agency phone list rating employees. (“Loser, Hack, Mule, Mule, Hack, Loser…”)

When the Whiner moves on to that agency he thinks is so much better, it's the old truism: “Wherever you go in life, there you are.” To his horror, he discovers ad agencies are pretty much the same everywhere. There are hard clients, misguided research, and unreasonable deadlines everywhere, and because that's all he focuses on, these Harpies will follow him throughout all of his sad days.

I'm not saying you can't whine. It's good to let off some steam now and then. True Whining, however, has a vituperative edge to it. It's toxic. Pestilent. There's no hope in it. After a while, you wonder why Whiners don't just leave the business altogether.

Cut to the next scene, the Whiner's new job at the shoe store: “I should get a job over at Foot Locker. Those guys are so good. This place sucks.”

Hallway Beasts #5 and #6: Wack Jobs and Slash Weasels

If this book were politically correct, our next hallway beast might be described as a person who “does things differently.” But this is not that kind of book. I'm talking about people who are as crazy as six-toed cats on crack in a Chinese whorehouse; people who are total Wack Jobs.

What makes Wack Jobs such interesting specimens is they look crazy even in the loosey-goosey atmosphere of an ad agency. I'm remembering this one guy who could write only if he was wearing a full-face knit ski mask. Or this other one who could write only on days approved by his astrologist.

Also legendary was the Wack Job who had so little life outside the agency that he slept there. When you worked late at the agency, you grew used to the sight of him in his underwear walking through the hallways to the bathroom for a midnight pee. Which reminds me of this other guy who stood at the urinal in the company men's room with his pants and underwear dropped all the way down around his ankles. When you came into the bathroom, he would give you a look that just dared you to say anything.

Wack Jobs usually have very screwed-up personal lives that they vaguely allude to in the few meetings they turn up for.

“Sorry I'm late. I was in court.”

“Oh, jury duty?” someone asks.

“No.”

“Oooooookay, well, let's start our meeting, shall we?”

Wack Jobs move from giving you no information about themselves (“I'm from…out West”) to giving way too much (in the middle of a meeting, they'll lean over and whisper something like, “Years ago my mother was killed by clowns, and I feel sad today”).

Sometimes that excess information is medical. We had this one Wack Job call in sick and leave a long voice mail with grisly details about the viscosity of his mucus and the water content of his phlegm. The voice mail was played publicly at maximum volume the entire week.

The most damaging kind of Wack Job is the crazy creative director. One of the early warning signs of possible wackage is a proliferation of goofy props in his office—like those giant six-foot pencils. A giant wristwatch on the wall. A giant anything, really. Or a dentist's chair. (“See, it's an actual dentist's chair!”) Jukeboxes and pinball machines are popular; mannequins, too.

Wack Job creative directors think their office props say, “I'm creative! Who knows what I'll say or do next?” What they say or do next, however, is drive everyone insane because they change their minds about the work up to the last stinking minute.

I have a friend who worked for a Wack Job. Crazy-ass boss comes into my friend's office one hour before a client meeting with huge changes to the campaign. When my friend groans, the Wack Job whips out a bottle of pills, says, “You wanna split a Xanax?”

Creative directors can stay crazy even on vacation. I remember getting a phone call from a creative director's assistant: “Jim called from Barbados to kill that campaign he approved.”

Wack Jobs are, of course, relatively easy to spot in the agency hallways. More insidious is the Slash Weasel.

First thing you need to understand is the word slash. In ad parlance, it means “shared credit.” When an ad is accepted into a national awards show, the credits are listed below the ad. And when two people contribute to an ad's art direction or writing, their names are listed together, separated by a slash (/).

But those names in the award books? That's credit. And credit is what the Slash Weasel craves. So he'll creep around the creative department trying to get “slashed” into the credit lines of other people's work. They're basically the goal hangers of advertising. To ride your coattails, a Weez thinks all he has to do is make a suggestion about your ad. Upon seeing your work, he'll rattle off a couple of “did you try…” statements and walk away. Later, he'll insist he “helped” with your work and will include your ad in his portfolio. This really happens.

Remember that saying, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’”?

Well, there is a “we” in “weasel,” which is why they throw the word “we” around a lot, regardless of whether they're part of your team or any other. They'll just stand in your office when the boss comes by and go, “Man, we really like these ads a lot.” Another stunt is to pop into the creative director's office right before you present and say something like, “You're really gonna like what you're about to see.”

There's not much you can do about a Weez except steer clear. What's sad about them is Slash Weasels sometimes actually have talent. The problem is, they're in the business for the wrong reason—they don't care as much about their clients' brands as they do their own.

Hallway Beast #7: The Hour Gobbler

Hallway Beast #7 isn't a person. It's a thing. The Meeting. If you are near one, run.

Run, little pony, run, and never look back.

If the wheels of capitalism ever grind to a halt, the agenda of a meeting will be found caught in the gears. And in the advertising business, meetings thrive like mutant weeds, making actual work impossible.

There are meetings with doughnuts and meetings without doughnuts. Meetings to talk about ads you're going to do and meetings to talk about the ads you just did. All these meetings will be held in small, windowless rooms heated to forehead-dampening temperatures by digital projectors and all held during that torpid postlunch lull around 2:30.

As a junior, you probably should just shrug and show up for any meeting you get memo'ed on. But as your radar develops, you'll start to be able to detect which meetings are important—where big plans are made and things get done—and which aren't.

The ones I'm talking about are those meetings called because somebody needed something to do. “Background” meetings. Or “touching base” meetings. These aren't called because decisions need to be made. They're just called. And oh, how they go on. I was in one of these Hour Gobblers once, and I swear time actually stopped. I'm not kidding. Swear to God, as plain as day, the second hand on the wall clock just stopped. No more ticktock. Just…tick…and that was it.

It was a particularly useless meeting and three hours long. Just when we thought we were going to get out, someone raised his hand and asked a question—the kind of tired, lifeless query I call a “meeting extender.” A meeting extender is a question like: “Well, Bill, how do those figures compare with the results from Chicago?” That's when the clock stopped and began to sag like a Dali painting.

Speakerphone meetings are the worst. And the worst of the worst is the three-way speakerphone, client-on-a-car-phone conference call meeting. There you are, eight nervous people all huddled around a little black box, listening to an art director in L.A. describe a picture nobody can see, to a client nobody can hear.

Ending a meeting is an art it pays to develop. When the business at hand seems at an end even though the meeting is not, start stacking your papers together, evening up the edges, the way news anchors do at the end of their broadcast. It's body language that says, “Well, nothing interesting is going to happen anymore in this room.”

I hate it when I get pulled into an Hour Gobbler and have no work I can sneak into the meeting. I usually start writing jokes to myself to pass the time. In one meeting, I remember trying to make my buddy Bob Barrie laugh and instead blew my own cover. I started writing a joke: “Bob's List of Things to Do.” I thought I'd just slip it under his nose. Try to crack him up. So I started scribbling:

Bob's List of Things to Do

1. Ointment on rash?
2. Rotate bricks under car in front yard.
3. Apologize to that kid's parents.
4. Wash blood out of clown suit.
5. Peek under scab.

When I wrote “Peek under scab,” I did one of those bursting laugh-out-loud kind of explosions, and the whole room stopped thinking about Chicago and glared at me for an explanation. I simply had to fess up: “Hey, I'm sorry, I just thought of something funny, completely unrelated to these proceedings. I'm very sorry. Please continue.”

But the image of Bob Barrie peeking under a knee scab finally did me in. I just collapsed, boneless, and had to excuse myself from the room.

But it got me out of the meeting.

Yet as much as I try to avoid meetings, all the really important stuff in this business ultimately happens in one meeting—the client presentation.

This is where all the hard work you've done lives or dies. And where the future audience of an idea is decided. Will it be billions of people seeing your TV commercial on the Super Bowl? Or the janitor who glances at the sad crumpled pieces of paper before cramming them into the garbage can?

It's an important meeting. Be prepared.