The motivations for setting up an agency are ego and money, probably in that order.
Advertising is a blatantly immodest business, and you will rarely find an agency that follows its own sound advice to clients by adopting a short, descriptive, and memorable name for its product. (There was once an agency called Service Advertising, but it was buried long ago under a pile of forgettable surnames.) Advertising people are addicted to the eponymous, and with very few exceptions their companies are named after themselves, no matter how cumbersome the end result.
The last one to be invited to the christening is, ironically, the person who will have to wrestle with the agency name most often: the long-suffering woman on the switchboard. It is she who has the task of reciting what can sound like the forward line of a multinational soccer team every time the phone rings. Imagine, for example, how you would feel after answering perhaps a hundred calls a day with the seductive greeting “Still Price Twivy Court D’Souza” (believe it or not, a genuine agency name) before you could commence a normal conversation. Two weeks of that is enough to give someone a speech impediment.
One day, agencies may train parrots to take over, but in the meantime what usually happens is that these uncomfortable laundry lists become eroded in use until only the initials or the first couple of names remain. When founding an agency, therefore, it is crucial to get your name at the top end of the list. Failure to do so will lead to relative anonymity, a fate worse than being seen in an unfashionable car.
The only real thing needed to start an agency is a client—preferably a client who spends his money on television rather than in the more labor-intensive and therefore less profitable print media.
With this one potential money-maker as collateral, the members of the new agency can make their first clandestine presentation. Taking an afternoon off from work—they will still be holding onto their old jobs, just in case—they will submit their plans for a golden future to a bank. They need money for premises, for cars and lunches (because appearances will have to be kept up), and for salaries. They will not normally receive any income from their client until the advertising has actually appeared. Before that can happen, the work has to be produced and paid for and the TV time and press space has to be bought. The members of the media like to be paid within thirty days; clients often take up to ninety days to pay the agency. The unpleasantly long gap between forking it over and raking it in, with interest accumulating at the rate of several zeros a day, is one of the hazards of launching a new agency.
That, however, is a problem that can at least be foreseen and measured. The real hazard, more fundamental and infinitely less predictable, is how the new agency’s founders are going to work together. It is one thing to be united in a common disdain for your tyrannical and money-grubbing employers, who wouldn’t recognize a good advertisement if it got into bed with them. It is quite another thing to find yourself and your new colleagues in the position of having nobody to complain about except one another. Getting on with one partner whom you can tolerate over a period of years without wanting to throttle is hard enough, but getting on with three or four partners is almost miraculous, and such miracles are few and far between. The corporate divorce rate in advertising is high, and the pages of the trade press are spattered with breathless pieces of prose reporting breakaways, boardroom rifts, and filched accounts, complete with sour quotes from those who consider themselves wronged and want to put in their two cents (no comment being the words most ardently hoped for but most seldom used).
But those days of high drama are still ahead. For the moment, the new agency’s founders are busy presenting a united and enthusiastic front to anyone who will listen to them.
Traditionally, agencies are started by individuals who can bring different but complementary skills to the partnership. The old favorite—three young people walking around in alphabetical order—consists of an account executive, a copywriter, and an art director. These three, if they are sufficiently well known in the industry, will enjoy a period of limelight and novelty, maybe lasting for months, when they will give interviews to the business press and presentations to prospective clients. A “prospective client,” in this atmosphere of overcranked optimism, is someone from a client organization who can be persuaded to accept lunch from you; a “hot prospect” is someone who can be persuaded to visit the agency without the benefit of lunch.
The gist of the interviews and presentations is the same: the reason, other than ego and money, why yet another agency should be added to the 640 agencies that already exist. The difficulty here is that there is only one valid commercial reason for a client to change agencies, and that is to get more effective advertising. It won’t be significantly cheaper or produced any more quickly. The meetings won’t necessarily be any more stimulating. The working lunches will be just as earnest. All the client can hope for at the end of the day is that the work produced by the eager trio will be better than his existing advertising; and that, as any realist will admit, is not a result that can be guaranteed. So it comes down to a question of confidence. If the prospective client can be made to feel that there is a justifiable chance of getting better value for his advertising money, he might take it.
The bait offered by new agencies to inspire confidence will vary in the way it is stuck on the hook, but it will usually be a combination of three elements, with the emphasis changing according to the personalities and abilities involved.
First, credentials have to be established. As the agency is new, it won’t have a track record of successful case histories with which to dazzle the audience. So, necessity being the mother of appropriation, it borrows them. The founders pool their past efforts, taking care to forget the flops, and wheel out an array of household names and famous campaigns on which they have worked. The connections in some cases are best described as tenuous. It is not unknown for two or three copywriters with conveniently faulty memories to give the modest but definite impression that each of them was responsible for the same campaign. Since any long-running campaign will have received contributions from a number of writers, this kind of creative slipstreaming is almost impossible to disprove. So it is with executives who have been “associated” with a successful brand. The implication is that they steered it to success; the reality is often different but, unfortunately, less impressive.
Thus in one way or another, with or without scruples, the new agency is able to equip itself from the start with a convincing and familiar body of work.
The second element in the presentation is where bullshit meets science. Advertising people are trained to ferret out minor differences among competing but similar products and to promote what they feel will be the difference that makes the sale. With commendable faith, they will often apply this technique to themselves, imposing severe strains on credibility and syntax alike. Their intention is to distill their own methods of working into an easily digested formula—their very own agency philosophy—and give it a label that separates it from all the other formulas being bandied around by their competitors. A great deal of time and ingenuity is devoted in these early and desperate days to getting it right. Or if not right, at least different.
One of the most energetically trumpeted agency philosophies was devised many years ago by Ted Bates, the American agency. It was based on the premise that every product could be given a “unique selling proposition” (but only by Ted Bates, who had the secret). This phrase has now passed into general advertising language, possibly because it is two-thirds perfect: Unique and selling are words that can, and indeed did, evoke an almost Pavlovian response among clients. And there have been other magical recipes, equally sharply defined, if not so seductively worded: the prime prospect, the four-point process, the reduction of risk through research, the preemptive factor, the dormant benefit—dozens of them, all attempting to reduce the complex and uncertain process of persuasion down to a simple certainty. Alas, for agencies and clients, certainties don’t exist. As long as there is room for free and intelligent choice in society, they never will exist, and no amount of behind-the-scenes waffle can do more than provide a rational introduction to what may look like an irrational idea. Agency philosophies are, at best, common sense dressed up as the Holy Grail and, at worst, specious and cynical bunk.
The final element in a new agency’s presentation can be, for a limited time, very attractive. It goes something like this:
Here we are, experienced, talented, and hungry. We have left our comfortable jobs with big agencies because we had to spend more time administering and delegating than preparing advertisements. We have seen what happens in big agencies when the honeymoon period is over, when clients used to dealing with the managing director are palmed off with beardless boys, when the best brains of the agency are busy on someone else’s account. But if you give your business to us, we personally will devote our enormous energies and skills to it. We, the proprietors, will cherish your business as though it was our own (which, of course, it is). You will always be able to pick up the phone and talk to the boss.
This is all very well and even true, up to a point. But the question sitting up and begging at the end of the conference table is what will happen to the delightful intimacy of the proposed arrangement if the new agency should get another account, or another dozen accounts. The question is rarely pursued, because any remotely perceptive client knows the answer. He will just have to hope that the founders of the agency are confident enough of their own talents to hire equally talented people as their business grows. In the meantime, the client will benefit from the fact that new agencies need to make their mark with their first accounts, and he’s likely to get the best that they can give in the way of service and creativity.
If their best is good enough, it won’t be long before the agency starts to make its presence felt. The advertising community spends a lot of time in bars and restaurants gossiping about itself. One good opening campaign and some adroit self-promotion can have an effect out of all proportion to the agency’s size and accomplishments. It becomes hot.