The Real Mad Men (15 page)

‘I wrote an ad for Ancient Age bourbon. Bill went down to the client – copywriters didn't but the account people and Bill went. He came back and stood in the middle of the art department and said, “They loved my line”. And I said, “That's my line, not yours”. And he said, “No, it's my line.” So I called over Bert Steinhauser who I'd done the advert with and said, “Whose line is this?” and in true heroic form he said, “I forget”.'

It wasn't an isolated incident. Three years before, in March of 1957,
Time
magazine had published a brief piece on the agency, specifically mentioning Judy Protas as the writer of the Ohrbachs ‘Cat' ad. Bernbach
immediately leant on the magazine and two weeks later a very similar piece ran which, without direct reference to the issue, made it clear that Bernbach was the author. Although Protas had written the body copy, which is superb, the idea was Bernbach and Gage's. So some of the credit was justified – but was the effort to capture it?

The indignation of the creative people was leavened by the fact that they accepted that as the creator of the environment, Bernbach could claim partial involvement in all their work. (Don Draper makes the same point to Peggy Olson when she complains that he has taken an award for an ad that she wrote.) Even Koenig, irritated as he was, could see Bernbach's position: ‘Everything in the agency was his. I realise that he thought it was his ad, in the sense that it would not have existed if it had not been for him.' But Koenig had also had a run-in over a tyre commercial with Joe Daly (the Head of Accounts), and was in a truculent mood.

He went to meet Papert and they immediately recognised each other from the racetrack – four decades later they were still going to the races together – and to a mixture of incredulity and ridicule on the part of the rest of the DDB creative department, the deal was announced.

PAPERT KOENIG LOIS
(PKL) opened its doors on the 36th floor of the Seagram Building on 1 January 1960. The offices had previously been those of Papert & Free which, coincidentally, Lois had helped them secure a year earlier. Edgar Bronfman of Seagrams had been having trouble letting whole floors as he wanted, and Lois got a tip through Bronfman's son-in-law, a friend of his, that a deal could be struck.

Five people occupied the office on that first day. Says Lois, ‘I felt off-the-wall excited – and nervous and apprehensive. I didn't know if it was going to work out.' Their first client was
The Ladies Home Journal
, inherited from Papert & Free, quickly followed by Dilly Beans. For these two clients, one staid, one small, they managed to create eye-catching work and they were off and running.

The offices were stylish and hip, the organisation cool but chaotic. A visitor once found staff wobbling aimlessly around the office on French Solex motorised bicycles. It looked like a time-and-motion-inspired efficiency initiative; in reality they'd taken on the account and then
discovered the bike had no retail outlets in New York. So they decided to become not just advertising agent but dealership as well. It was not a success – no one had bothered to find out that a licence was necessary to ride them on the streets, and the surplus stock ended up in the office.

But within a few months, to give them gravity, they hired an experienced marketing man, Norman Grulich. The agency's work was terrific – possibly even more concentrated than DDB, the ballsy innovative campaigns streamed out and the cream of New York creative talent had a new path to beat. ‘People wanted to come to us because we were free spirits', says Papert. An ice cream truck driver named Ron Holland decided to switch to a career in advertising based on an ad he saw for Dilly Beans – he wanted to work with people who could write a line as subversive as ‘If your dealer doesn't stock Dilly Beans, knock something off the shelf as you walk out'.

Through Bronfman's company, Seagrams, PKL picked up Wolfschmidt vodka. New Yorkers were startled by a campaign that personified the bottle as a man promiscuously picking his partners from suitable ingredients for a vodka-based cocktail. A vodka bottle flirting with an orange was a long way from the tuxedoed and evening-gowned stiffs that were usually featured in classy alcohol advertisements. It was also, on the threshold of the sixties, deemed a little risqué –
The New Yorker
refused to run the ‘Who was that tomato I saw you with last night?' version.

Of course, having an ad banned for being risqué, with the notoriety that brought, was meat and drink for the renegade agency. And not all their work was edgy; Koenig was still ever the elegant writer, and Harvey Probber Chairs got the velvety persuasive treatment in an ad whose authorship is still to this day in vigorous dispute between Lois and Koenig.

THE WORK THAT ANNOUNCED
their arrival as a fully fledged, grown-up agency capable of handling national brands came about by a succession of lucky bounces.

One Saturday morning after a major snow storm, Fred Papert decided to walk to the office to retrieve the gloves he'd left there the previous evening, towing his kids on a sled behind him. In the brief time they were in the office the phone rang. It was Xerox asking if they'd like to pitch for the launch of their new photocopier, not a difficult question for Fred to answer. He later learnt that one of the reasons they won the business was that Xerox were impressed he was working on such an inclement Saturday morning.

The disputed Harvey Probber Chair advertisement, created by George Lois and Julian Koenig.

1960 PKL advertisements for Wolfschmidts, by George Lois and Julian Koenig.

The call itself was also due to fortuitous circumstances. DDB had been offered the business but they couldn't handle it because of conflict with Polaroid – clients have always been hyper paranoid about having their business with an agency that is simultaneously handling a company who could even remotely be considered a rival.

According to Julian Koenig, ‘Ned Doyle called me up and
sotto voce
told me about an account we might be able to get and says “but don't tell Bill”.' Xerox had asked Bernbach to give them a list of agencies he would recommend and ‘he made a list of ten including some quite lugubrious ones, but he omitted us… Bill was an old friend and he would embrace me but he did everything he could not to help. He was offended that we (a) left and (b) succeeded.'

Bernbach did have an agenda. Referring to PKL, Bernbach had told Edgar Bronfman, ‘There's a difference between being smart and smart alec'. Bernbach didn't like his children growing up and leaving; when George Gomes, a DDB art director setting out on his own as a commercials director, went to see him to say goodbye, all Bernbach said before he turned his back and walked away was, ‘Yes, I heard you were leaving'. Gomes later heard through former colleagues in the agency that Bernbach had forbidden the department to use him.

There is always the possibility that he genuinely didn't think PKL was right for the job, but if so, in this instance his famed creative radar was out of tune. PKL, and specifically art director Sam Scali and copywriter Michael Chappell, turned in a demonstration commercial about as perfect as can be made. But even in this, fate took a hand.

To illustrate how simple it was to use, they had a small girl make copies on the machine, in real time. It was straightforward, direct, carefully written and impressive enough to irritate competitors into complaining to the networks that the complexity of operating the machine was being understated. PKL's answer was a typical mixture of belligerence and brilliance; not only did they reshoot the whole commercial, in front of TV executives, but instead of the girl they used a chimpanzee.

The resulting commercial, with almost no voice-over and the simplest of camera work and editing, is mesmerising. The chimpanzee is asked by a desk-bound executive – like it happens every day – to make a copy of a document. He takes the document, waddles to the machine, confidently and competently follows the procedure and insouciantly hands the two sheets to the executive, whose only question is ‘Which one is the original?'

The TV ‘Chimp' advertisement for Xerox: monkey see, monkey do.

BY 1962 CONFIDENCE
was high, billings were at $17 million and, true to their iconoclastic behaviour to date, they took one of the most radical steps ever in the history of advertising – they became the first agency to go public. The move was loudly opposed by just about everyone in business. The righteous justification, intoned for public consumption by agency chief after agency chief, was that ‘we are in the service of our clients, not anonymous shareholders'. The real reason was that few successful agencies wanted the balance sheet scrutiny that would necessarily follow the announcement of a flotation.

Agencies were remunerated by a commission from the amount their clients spent on their media exposure, a hangover from the days when their main business was the selling of space. It meant in theory – and very often in practice – they were rewarded for not doing new work; if the same advertisment ran year after year, they would earn their commission for having done nothing more than buy the time or space from the broadcast or print media. It also meant that they had no incentive to keep media expenditure down. On top of that, revenue was bumped up by commission charged on production costs for print and TV executions, as well as on research and other ancillary services. All of which meant these advertising agencies were productive little cash machines from which their owners could withdraw more or less what they wanted, when they wanted it.

Consequently, most of them lived – and rewarded their senior people – far more handsomely than their equivalents at the client companies, something the clients could suspect but never prove. But once you go public, the covers are off.