Sometimes I’m asked how I know so much about serial killers. I say, “I met a few when I was in advertising.” Some were Thompson clients. One particularly odious marketing guy at Burger King, one from Nestlé, and several from Unilever come to mind and still give me the occasional nightmare.
Meanwhile, the advertising crazies just kept coming at me. I started working for a fascinating character by the name of Frank Nicolo. Frank had come from a small agency where he’d been very successful, a real advertising star. He introduced French-based Club Méditerranée (Club Med) to the U.S. with the line “Spend one week half clad, flat broke, and happy about it.” He did smart London Fog ads, like the one that showed a man next to a Salvation Army box saying, “So long, old friend,” as he reluctantly parted with his well-worn London Fog raincoat.
Frank was very, very good, but he was also a mad scientist—the genius kind. He was an incredible workaholic while somehow also being a sweetheart, an Italian mensch. People who worked for him wandered around muttering things like “Weekends are made for Nicolo” (a play on the old Michelob beer line “Weekends are made for Michelob”). And my personal Nicolo favorite: “If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother to come in on Sunday.”
One evening, late, Burt Manning came to see me and Nicolo.
He reiterated the conditions that had been in place since I was hired in ’71. Thompson New York was trapped in a decade-long tailspin. The creative work was bad. The clients were mostly difficult to work for (except the Kodak people, who were great). Morale was terrible.
Burt told us the New York office couldn’t afford to lose any more accounts. In private, he’d already explained Nicolo’s Mad Men methodology to me. “Frank will get to creative solutions most people won’t even think of, because he’s so obsessive. You’ll think you have the answer and Frank will keep pushing, pushing, pushing. He’s going to drive you crazy, but I think it will be worth it. You’ll come out of this as a better writer. Or you’ll wind up back at that madhouse you worked in as a college kid. Only now you’ll be a patient.”
Anyway, a new bank client was the New York office’s latest hot potato. Frank and I were given the account and told to save it at any cost to our mental or physical health. The hyperactive marketing guy who ran the bank’s business wasn’t a bad human being, but he was yet another total madman in my life.
All through the normal workday, every day, he would call us half a dozen times. Finally, Nicolo came up with an idea that only he could’ve thought of. He explained to me that the only way to beat this client was to out-crazy him.
So we started inviting the bank’s marketing guy into the office to join our day-and-night-long work sessions on his business. One afternoon around four days in, he actually fell asleep at Frank’s desk. That was the end of it. Our madman was better than the bank’s madman.
Like Frank Nicolo, Burt Manning worked seven days a week, twenty hours a day at times. The man never slept. I can remember waiting outside his office at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. He had a lineup of six creative teams waiting to see him. And just because you were the first in line didn’t mean anything. You waited until he said it was your turn.
I’ll tell you what, though. To Burt’s credit, he went on to completely turn J. Walter Thompson’s fortune around and restore it to its former glory—not only in New York, but all over the world.
Every day working for Burt was a little harrowing. But he taught me a lot. Burt liked to say, “I taught Jim everything he knows. Just not everything I know.”
I watch ads these days and I usually think, They need Burt Manning. The man could turn a phrase.