The Real Mad Men (18 page)

While on vacation in Manhattan, he read in
The New York Times
that the Swissair business was up for grabs. He contacted them, got the agency on their pitch list, made the presentation single-handed and won the account. The first the Detroit management knew the account was loose was when Ally called them to tell them they'd won it.

Impressed, they agreed he should be based in New York permanently, not just for servicing Swissair but to expand the office.

The New York office was a sleepy hollow; a handful of functionaries going through the motions of handling a few quiet local offshoots of GM business. But Ally shook it up. He was, as Amil Gargano wrote in his book about the agency,
Ally and Gargano
, ‘an earthquake in a nursing home', literally moving into the office and sleeping in a sleeping bag.

THE FIRST HELP ALLY
needed was creative so he asked for James Durfee and Amil Gargano, a copywriter and an art director he'd worked with back in Detroit. Ironically for Durfee, he'd joined Campbell Ewald only because his previous agency, JWT Detroit, had wanted to transfer him to New York and he hadn't liked the idea. But with his second New York offer in a year, he decided that fate was trying to tell him something and this time he agreed to move.

Amil Gargano was more than ready to go. Born in Detroit on 4 June 1932 to Italian immigrant parents, he showed early promise as an illustrator and entered the world of advertising as a paste-up artist at Campbell Ewald. Within just six months Gargano had been promoted to assistant art director.

Two years later, an art director new to the agency introduced Gargano to the New York Art Directors Club awards annual. It was an epiphany. For the first time he saw advertisments for Levy's and Orbach's and the work of Bob Gage, and that was when he asked for a transfer to the only place he wanted to be – New York. Ally's Swissair win made that move possible, and in April 1959, Ally, Gargano and Durfee were together for the first time in Manhattan.

Ally quickly added to the Swissair win. His high-profile air force presence in the two wars resulted not only in the belief that he was the model for Yossarian from Catch 22 (a story promoted largely by himself but credible to those who knew him), but also in a huge contact list in the aviation business. Those contacts helped in the subsequent gain of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) account.

Carl Ally as a fighter pilot in Europe during World War II. Attitude? What does it look like?

His vibrant and usually oath-laden style was clearly paying off. But not everyone was finding Ally's exuberance and energy infectious. Problems on Swissair and United Aircraft, clients that the company wouldn't even have had if it hadn't been for him, had ruffled the feathers of the top management. First, they objected to him taking Gargano and Durfee on a fact-finding trip to Switzerland, seeing no reason why he couldn't go alone and brief the creatives on his return. (This was the same year several DDB staffers, creative people included, were making trips back and forth to Wolfsburg, Germany to learn about VW.)

Second, United Aircraft had not liked the campaign prepared for them and Ally was seeking the assistance of the Detroit management in getting it through. Instead, they backed UAC and, to the huge relief of the previous regime at the New York office, Carl Ally's charismatic but disruptive spell in New York crashed and burned just two weeks before Christmas 1959, when he was summoned to Detroit and fired on the spot.

Shocked, dismayed and disgusted with the management, Gargano made every attempt to get out, but as the only place he really wanted to work was DDB and they wouldn't even see his book, let alone him, he was stuck. Durfee, married with a child and living in Connecticut, had even less flexibility.

After a year without work, Ally was close to a breakdown. He was on the verge of going back to Detroit and starting over when Gargano suggested he talk to the lively new PKL, thinking it would be a meeting of minds – or at least attitudes. And he wasn't wrong. George Lois recalls, ‘Account guys bored me, they were full of shit but when I met Carl Ally, I said, “Gee, the guy's got blood running through his veins”.' He thinks for a second and then adds, ‘Amazing that I liked him – he was a Turk and I'm a Greek!'

Ally was in his element, established in the sort of New York organisation he'd originally envisaged. ‘Wings and wheels' being his forte throughout his life, he was happy on various automotive accounts, particularly Peugeot, but he became increasingly dissatisfied with his remuneration and particularly the partners' refusal to allow him any company stock. So in April 1962, when his Peugeot client, Jim LaMarre, told him he was
leaving to take up the job of marketing director at Volvo, Ally seized the opportunity and convinced LaMarre to allow him to pitch for the business with a new agency he would form around the account.

Durfee had by now moved back to semi-familiar turf at JWT New York, Gargano to B&B, but in nine months he hadn't had a single piece of work published and when Ally approached them with the idea of forming an agency, both were ready to go for it.

They worked on the pitch after their normal working day. And, despite the fact that the limited resources and cramped timeframe caused the layouts to carry the brand name misspelt as ‘Valvo' (Ally being Ally, some recollections inevitably have it as Vulva), they won the business.

GARGANO AND DURFEE
are both mild-mannered, civilised, considered men. Even allowing for youthful brashness, they were a direct contrast to the pugnacious, occasional combatative style of their colleague. But together they created a campagin for Volvo that was probably the most confrontational – literally – in the history of US advertising to date. Until then, any product comparison in advertising was by implication only, and you never ever named the competition. Yet right from the start, in commercials and print ads, they not only named competitive cars but showed them as well.

The campaign had the same frank freshness of VW. Ad after ad reiterated the Volvo's rugged construction and longevity, while ridiculing Detroit's built-in obsolescence, which made the Volvo not the aspirational choice or the stylish choice or the sexy or high-performance choice – it made it the clever choice.

Following Volvo was another candid and compelling campaign for the New York automat chain, Horn and Hardart. As pioneer fast-food restaurants, the high quality of their food was belied by the basic surroundings. Simple meals, prepared fresh on the premises, were placed in small glass-fronted display boxes, released by dropping a nickel in the slot. It was low-budget eating but the advertising never claimed anything else. Quite the reverse, in fact – it claimed that the money saved on pretentious surroundings and elaborate service went on the one thing you'd want – good food.

Carl Ally's Volvo campaign, the first direct comparison advertising.

The Carl Ally campaign for Horn & Hardart; a lesson in clarity and candour from Ed McCabe.

The campaign was written by a punchy, young Irish-American copywriter, Ed McCabe. From an underprivileged Irish background and a tough upbringing in Chicago, he left school at the age of 15 and took a variety of jobs. One of these was in an advertising agency, where he'd noticed that the copywriters seemed to do the least work and have the most fun, so that's what he decided he wanted to do. He started writing spec ads in his spare time and getting them in front of as many people as possible. With that dedication he worked his way into a copywriting job at McCann Erikson Chicago in 1954, then on to New York in 1959, where he started at Benton & Bowles on the same day as Gargano.

As with Gargano, B&B's old school style frustrated McCabe and he joined Carl Ally within a year of the start up. He eventually became the youngest copywriter ever elected to the One Club Hall of Fame.

His style is simultaneously direct and disarmingly conversational, writing with wonderful clarity. In contrast with the WASP copywriters of old, he spun the lines with tremendous energy and impact, using vernacular and slang. For some, McCabe is the copywriter's copywriter.

WITH CHARACTERISTIC PRIDE
Ally would say, ‘At DDB they like to goose the consumer – but at Carl Ally Inc we punch them on the nose', appropiate from a man who once told a meeting of the Volvo sales force ‘You guys couldn't sell c*** in a lumberyard'. And, from Hertz's point of view, it wasn't just the consumer that needed the punch, it was Avis.

So when representatives from Hertz called Carl Ally Inc to help them attack the Avis campaign they couldn't have made a better choice. As the Ally presentation team told them, ‘You're getting your asses kicked and it's time to kick back'. Between 1963 and 1966 Avis's market share had risen from 29 per cent to 36 per cent and Hertz had fallen from 61 to 49 per cent. It's not too fanciful to suggest that, given another three years, Hertz could have been ‘Only No. 2' and having to try very much harder themselves.

With a licence to get down and dirty, Durfee and Gargano were acutely aware that the world (well, the ad world at least) would be watching with more than usual interest. Responding directly to a rival in public in any field is often unwise and always highly delicate. The slightest false note could make you look petulant, worried or even downright rude. And even though Avis had started the fight, it was easier to be them. Everyone loves an underdog.

From left to right: Art director Amil Gargano, copywriter Jim Durfee and Carl Ally.

The looming rumble was going to be a spectacle for the ad business and all the heavyweights of the trade were filling the ringside seats, waiting for the initial counterpunch from Hertz. The team knew they had to be firm, but cool and confident, as befits a market leader.