The Real Mad Men (23 page)

It was the most controversial from a decade of controversial covers. It offended a lot of people. Lois isn't bothered. He bathes in the reaction and exults in the uproar.

 

“We're being bought by McCann—do you know what that means?”

DON DRAPER TO PEGGY OLSEN MAD MEN

I
n a triumphalist piece in
New York
magazine Jerry Della Femina proclaimed the old-style agencies vanquished by the creative revolutionaries who were now carousing uninhibitedly up and down the Avenue. It actually appeared in the April 27, 1970, edition but one section could have been published at any time from the early sixties, with increasing accuracy as the decade went on.

“In a sense [clients of] the older agencies are asking for divorces, and then they're running out with these young chicks. And so what the older agencies do is try to act like a woman who is trying to hold onto her husband.… The older agencies go out and buy a load of cosmetics and eyeshadow and they put all this stuff on and do their hair—this is what they're doing when they start hiring freaky young kids at star salaries.” Della Femina should know—he'd only recently been the happy recipient of a handsome salary from Bates for exactly that reason.

The older agencies were fairly certain they knew what their clients wanted—more of what they'd been giving them for years. But even in the late fifties as Benton & Bowles demonstrated when they hired newer, edgier creative people like Amil Gargano and Ed McCabe, they were already looking over their shoulders at this strange new competition coming up on them. As the decade went on they thought they should have
a few more exotic writers and art directors around to prevent their clients from flirting with the newer, sexier agencies.

JWT, still the largest agency, took it one stage further when in 1967 they lured Ron Rosenfeld away from DDB to be their creative director on a record $100,000 salary. It was a Judy Wald placement and widely recognized as a gamble; Lore Parker, still happily at DDB, said at the time, “It never seems to work for an old-line conservative agency to bring in DDB people to work under the old system. I am holding my breath to see what will happen with Ron Rosenfeld going to JWT.” She didn't have to hold it for long. You can't graft one culture onto another—unless there's a massive upheaval, the existing culture will always squeeze out the interloper. Within eighteen months the experiment was over and Rosenfeld had left to set up his own agency with Len Sirowitz and Marion Harper—Harper, Rosenfeld, and Sirowitz.

BY MID-DECADE
the gulf between Old and New had become a chasm. Bernbach's style of advertising and of running an agency was either loved or loathed—there was no halfway point. Shorthanded as “Creative Advertising,” it was either the curse or the savior of the industry.

Driven by a combination of incomprehension and fear—and some justifiable concern as much of the new work was not conceived with the discipline of DDB's creative department—the criticism came from those agencies too inert, and with clients too entrenched, to adapt.

Barton Cummings, President of Compton-Advertising, the major P&G agency responsible for some of the dreariest of Madison Avenue's output, described it in Richard Gilbert's
Marching up Madison Avenue
as as “The Museum of Modern Art School of Advertising” and accused it of wasting clients' money. “What really produces sales is not art work but solid merchandising, research, and media spadework backed by straightforward, convincing advertising.” You can hear the quivering indignation.

The creative side, when it could be bothered, hit back. In a brilliant satire,
Communication Arts
magazine gravely demonstrated the “shortcomings” of DDB's “Think Small” (see overleaf) and step by step systematically ruined it by showing how a Compton style agency would have “improved” the ad. It attracted at least one approving letter.

In business terms the “creative” agencies and the clients they represented were a tiny proportion of total advertising activity. Nevertheless, the noise within the trade was coming entirely from them. In 1965 when Mobil, at the time a major gasoline advertiser, took their business from Bates and gave it to DDB, it was perceived if not as the beginning of the end, at least the end of the beginning of the Creative Revolution, with the spoils going to the renegades.

At Bates, Reeves suddenly retired, claiming it had always been his intention to go at fifty-five. There's some evidence to suggest that he was beginning to wonder whether he'd got it all entirely right after all. He confided to Ed McCabe that he felt “over positioned,” that he'd found himself, as a necessary business gambit, defending the tasteless work he'd secretly begun to hate.

Ogilvy & Mather (they'd dropped the Benson in 1964) was growing healthily but the agency's reputation for interesting and original work was a fast-fading memory, stuck as they were with Ogilvy's rigid and increasingly discredited rules.

BUT BIG WASN'T NECESSARILY
all bad. Y&R had maintained a degree of creative integrity for several decades and flourished in the new atmosphere. They found the perfect creative leader for their times in Steve Frankfurt, an intelligent and articulate art director. Yet another student of Alexey Brodovitch and the Pratt Institute, Frankfurt's initial experience had been in film, and he brought that to bear in his advertising career, approaching commercials in a less rigid way than had hitherto been attempted.

Most commercials shot by New York agencies in the fifties and early sixties were made by three major companies, with technicians and directors more used to shooting live commercials within sponsored programs. Many had limited experience of the wider aspects of filmmaking yet they controlled the business, treating the process like a factory production line, exercising minimum imagination and very little effort, while the creative teams were given almost no role in the execution of their ideas.

The revolutionizing of this system aided the larger Creative Revolution. Photographers who had previously been employed by agencies for stills
shoots gradually began to be used by those same agencies for commercials. They brought a few advantages: they had already worked in color and were ready for its increasing presence in TV commercials throughout the sixties; they were used to the ways of the advertising system and understood the relationship between creative people and the account people, the agency and the client; and they were more prepared to cooperate.

At Carl Ally, Amil Gargano found the director that their agency producer had hired to shoot their first Volvo commercials patronizing, inflexible, and lacking in enthusiasm. He fired him after the first day and employed Mike Cuesta, a photographer he'd used before. It was the start of Cuesta's career as a commercials director.

Irving Penn, Steve Horn, Bert Stern, and Harold Becker all trod the same path, while Bob Giraldi and George Gomes made the switch across from agency art director. Howard Zeiff, who'd shot stills for Levy's and Polaroid for DDB in the fifties, became the most awarded and sought-after director of the late sixties. His reel by 1970 was a roll call of the absolute best of US advertising, stories told with exquisite timing and bathed in humanity; affectionate, realistic and always funny.

As an art director at Y&R, Frankfurt saw his commercials with an imaginative advertiser's eye, asking for techniques and ideas that wouldn't have occurred to the hidebound directors who were normally employed. A spot with no words at all was unheard of then but it didn't stop Frankfurt; for Johnson & Johnson he shot a baby in close-up from the mother's point of view rather than the conventional posed setup, making it more personal and emotional. He used stop-motion and borrowed from contemporary art—he saw no barriers to where you could go to make a commercial.

His talent and creative leadership skills earned him the presidency of the agency in 1967, unprecedented for an art director. Of all the agencies that predated DDB, Y&R under Frankfurt's leadership was the only one to garner any respect from the new creative generation, with such work as their emotional Wings of Man campaign for Eastern Airlines. But in 1971, at the age of forty, he stepped down, later saying, “I never had a frustrating day in that company—until I became president.”

He went back to Hollywood to a new career in film publicity, back to his core skill as an art director. Amongst his subsequent output was the world-famous poster for
Rosemary's Baby
.

Back on Madison Avenue, according to a
Newsweek
article on the state of US advertising, in the first seven months of 1969 more than a hundred new agencies had started up. This is a little difficult to believe—that's roughly two every three working days—but it does reflect the optimistic fervor with which the creative community regarded the business. As the article says, “Most of them have been the undertaking of one to four young creative people who have served a term with an old-line agency… who seek… the freedom to exercise their talents (and dress) as they wish.”

Their dress, in keeping with the times, had transformed since the day those sixteen Italian art directors lined up for their shoot.
Newsweek
reported the head of one of the leading agencies as saying, “You should see the things walking around back in our creative department. Frazzled hair, denims, neckerchiefs, the works.” Another said, “My God! We hired a new copywriter the other day—a very good one—and he came to work in his bare feet!” Fifteen years earlier Al Reis, a young account man at a Madison Avenue industrial agency, received a querulous all-staff memo from the president demanding that male staff wear knee-length socks so that no bare leg would show when they sat down.

Enthusiasm is one thing, foresight is another. Already there were signs that perhaps this “freedom to exercise their talents” was not all it appeared to be. PKL had already imploded, the partners barely speaking to each other. Koenig, by his own admission, was bored and absent a lot of the time, Lois was angry, and Papert was distracted by the demands of running what was now a public company. By 1967, Lois had left with Ron Holland to set up Lois Holland Callaway.

Further, the move to gain respectability and transparency by going public had apparently backfired; according to Papert, far from making the agency look respectable “PKL looked like it was doing better than P&G. They accused us of looking after ourselves rather than P&G.”

BUT NONE OF THIS
turbulence had any effect on the one man whose ideas were light years away from the writers and art directors cavorting in their newfound freedoms. Marion Harper Jr. had set his sights on issues, both personal and professional, of truly immense consequence.