Stocking the Zoo, and the Joys of Management

One of the more solemn clichés in advertising is that the real assets of an agency are the people who work in it. And it’s true: The ability to attract and keep talented staff is generally considered to be almost as important as bringing in new clients. In many ways, however, it is more difficult. Clients tend to be rational. They are used to working within certain corporate disciplines. They look for steady progress in their careers, and they are prepared to exercise patience as they climb toward the giddy eminence of a seat on the board. You can reason with clients—most of them, anyway.

Advertising people, in contrast, tend to be impatient, often irrational, usually impulsive, and almost always egotistical. These qualities, while useful and necessary in dictators, produce troublesome employees, and for the management of an advertising agency, maintaining some kind of productive harmony among the rank and file is like getting the Italian army to march in step. Not only do they have to contend with the outbreaks of greed, ambition, and office feuds that occur in any business but there is also a fundamentally disruptive element peculiar to advertising that is guaranteed, sooner or later, to cause grief and conflict. It is the creative department.

Creative people are not temperamentally suited to the orderly routine of office life. They find conventional working hours inconvenient. Meetings bore them. Clients exasperate them. Deadlines are beneath their consideration. They will spend weeks apparently doing nothing about a crucial job despite entreaties and threats and then, just before the ax comes down on their necks, they will work all weekend and expect applause and sympathy on Monday morning. They are intransigent and highly opinionated, and yet often curiously inarticulate when it comes to justifying those opinions. They take criticism badly and sulk easily. They are constantly demanding more money than there is in the budget, bigger spaces and longer time periods than there are in the media plan, and extensions to the deadlines they accepted or ignored weeks ago. Because of their occasional triumphs and because, in the end, nobody else in the agency can do what they do, they get away with behavior that should have gotten them thrown out on the street.

All this, of course, is about as popular as halitosis with their colleagues, particularly account executives, who have egos of their own and who see themselves as being equally necessary to the agency’s daily business. Account executives want to keep their clients happy. Creative people want to do work that will make them famous. In theory, these two aims are not mutually exclusive, but in practice very few campaigns are ever produced without friction and disagreement, and occasionally the odd drops of blood are visible on the office carpet.

It’s entirely predictable. The creative people have spent their customary weeks walking around the problem, sharpening their pencils, playing darts, and generally getting themselves prepared for a visit from their muse. The account executives watch the days go by and fend off increasingly insistent demands from the client, who is anxious to see what next year’s millions are going to be spent on. Finally, the campaign is presented within the agency and someone has the temerity to suggest that changes are necessary (as they usually are).

Stunned disbelief from the writer and art director ensues. They retire hurt to a convenient restaurant, tossing their curls and muttering darkly about stupidity and compromise. The account executives commiserate with one another about having to deal with overpaid children. When work resumes, as it must, because by now the client is sputtering with impatience, there is a distinct absence of friendly and respectful collaboration. It is advertising’s version of the eternal conflict between art and commerce, and the only people in the agency who can observe it with the detached amusement it deserves are the mail-room boy and the cleaning lady.

Everyone else is affected. From the secretary who is on the receiving end of a copywriter’s sulk to the financial director who queries a bundle of wine-stained and incomprehensible expenses from an art director, nobody is completely immune from the mysterious ways in which creative people move and the interminable sparring that goes on between them and the rest of the world. But that’s the nature of the business, and the compensations for putting up with a little strife each day are considerable.

There are four, or in exceptional circumstances five, varieties of inducement used by agency managements to hang on to their employees. Although they are set out here as a series of steps up a single ladder, it is very unlikely that one individual will stay long enough to complete the course with one agency, because changing agencies is a quicker way to make the quantum leap from getting a salary to getting a slice of the action. But, if you should stay put, your brilliant career in advertising will proceed as follows.

Money

To start with, there will only be money. It will probably be more than you could earn in most other businesses (apart from the freak money being picked up by adolescent bond traders on Wall Street), but that’s all it will be—a paycheck, subject to tax and, even worse, with no visible status attached to it. However, if you have any kind of aptitude and a reasonably intelligent and perceptive boss, it won’t be long before the thought of losing you to another agency will provoke the generous reflex that moves you up a step.

More Money, and a Company Car

It won’t, at this stage, be one of the black Porsches so dear to the hearts of middle-aged advertising executives (which is why they’re known as MenoPorsches), or even the beginner’s BMW that sits, with dozens like it, in city garages. But it’s a start, and if you shop around, you might be able to swing something a little out of the ordinary, such as a Harley-Davidson or a VW convertible. The great thing is to get a car that couldn’t possibly belong to a Procter & Gamble sales rep.

A Title

Your next step takes you out of the purely material rewards and into the officially anointed hierarchy. There are almost as many artfully contrived titles in advertising as there are in the Debrett’s—meaningless to the outside world, perhaps, but of enormous significance to the recipient. (Where else but in advertising would you find a man desperate enough to have International Deputy Vice Chairman printed on his business cards?) Your title will depend on your field of expertise, but it will usually include one or more of the following: supervisor, group head, Executive (with a capital E), senior personal (as in personal assistant), joint or co- (as in cocreative director), and so on. Nuance is all-important, and those who invent and bestow titles have to be very careful that by pleasing you they don’t deliver a terminal blow to the self-esteem of some of your colleagues. Anyway, that’s their problem. You have your title and, naturally, more money and a better car.

A Share in the Equity

Now we come to the main move. This could set you up for life—or, if not life, at least for the next five years—and it causes untold agonizing in agency boardrooms. If you have become invaluable—by consistently producing good campaigns, let’s say, or by ingratiating yourself so thoroughly with a big client that he will follow you wherever you may wander—the top management of your agency will be obliged to nail you to the desk. This is a disagreeable situation for them, because it means that they will have to dig not only into their wallets but into their closely guarded hoard of shares in the agency, and there will always be one or two shareholders who will dispute the need to reduce their personal holdings in order to humor a young kid like you. Hence the agonizing. But what else can be done? They’ve tried keeping you quiet with a Ferrari, with a higher salary, fatter expenses, and the most important title they can think of, but they have nightmares that you and a significant slice of business will go and do something silly like start another agency. There’s nothing for it but to give you a share of the equity and a nice restrictive contract. This is done with varying degrees of good grace and everyone gets back to work.

Your Name on the Door

That is as far as it goes for the majority of people who make successful careers in advertising, and it’s enough, if the agency prospers and goes public, to make them millionaires. But what is mere money to someone who has been trying to keep the lid on a rabid ego all these years? There is a high incidence of egomaniacs in advertising, and they will not be satisfied until they have achieved the fifth and ultimate level of success; they have to be seen to own part of the agency. They want their name everywhere: on the door, on the letterhead, on the envelopes, on the compliments slips and the receptionist’s lips, and—the big thrill—on the stock-market listing. If they are sufficiently determined and sufficiently important to the future prosperity of their partners, they will get their way, requiring another heavy bill for reprinted stationery, another eulogy disguised as a press release, another placated ego.

And yet, looked at when the first warm glow of self-satisfaction has faded, there is still something… not quite right. The name will be visible, certainly, but it will be the last horse in the race. The agency name may have become Still Price Twivy Court D’Souza and Jenkins, but we all know what happens to those names that dangle at the end of a long list. They drop off. In practical terms of everyday usage, they might as well not be there. If one looks at it cynically (and cynicism does, from time to time, creep into these matters), adding to the agency’s name to keep a valued colleague from arranging a mutiny costs little and means less.

Ability is quickly rewarded in advertising, and the whole process that has just been described can be completed within ten years. If you make a couple of well-considered jumps from one agency to another, it might not even take that long, and therein lies the second ever-present problem for management, just as tiresome and occasionally more damaging than the war of attrition with the creative department. Rumor stalks the halls of every advertising agency, encouraging ambition and impatience with stories of salaries being doubled, five-figure bonuses, turbo-charged Maseratis, and all those other plums that are falling into the laps of anyone who is good enough to play the game of agency leapfrog. It is most unsettling. Why, any day now another agency that has just pulled a fat account could call you up and make you an offer you can’t believe, and if you’ve been having a normal abrasive time with the idiots that you work with, you will be hard put to turn it down. (The thought of encountering more, and maybe worse, idiots in the other agency doesn’t occur to you yet.)

Your management will know all about this kind of inducement because they do it themselves when they want to hire someone of established ability. They are also aware that some agencies, either because they’re stuffed with cash or hiring specifically for a major account, will make offers that simply can’t be matched in material terms. But even in advertising, money isn’t everything, and a handful of the better-run agencies are able to keep their best people without beating them about the ears every three months with a checkbook.

They do it by providing what corporate psychologists would call job satisfactions, one of those wonderfully vague but all-embracing phrases that can mean all things to all people and that looks so neat and tidy on personnel reports. In fact, it is neither neat nor easy to define, since it is made up of so many intangibles, but there are certain characteristics common to those few agencies that enjoy a high degree of staff loyalty and a correspondingly low rate of staff turnover.

The first and perhaps the most important of these is the reputation within the business. When an agency’s work is widely admired, when it picks up awards, and always providing it isn’t run by a bunch of Nazis, it becomes thought of as a desirable place to work. If you already work there, you are automatically part of an elite, and few things are more comforting to the human soul than a feeling of superiority.

Another essential is to keep everyone so busy that they haven’t got time to be bored. Boredom leads to all kinds of mischief—politics and vendettas, moonlighting, four-hour lunches, disastrous liaisons with secretaries, and all the rest of it. Agencies need to be kept slightly understaffed and slightly overworked, and an occasional bout of disciplined panic and “ghosting” (working through the night) is no bad thing.

But this will only be effective as long as the advertising produced within the agency consistently sees the light of day. When campaigns are mauled or rejected by clients after a lot of effort and overtime have been expended, it is difficult to persuade copywriters and art directors (who bruise easily) that they should try again. It’s no fun for the account executive. It costs the agency twice as much as it should to produce an acceptable piece of work. But above all, it is a dispiriting blow to morale, and if it happens too often, it is only a matter of time before word gets around and the best people get out. Successful and highly regarded agencies always have at least one person at the top who is capable of selling 80 percent of the advertising he or she takes to the client. Providing this can be kept up, such persons are worth their weight in expenses.

The other aspects of agency management, apart from the obvious requirement to keep generating new business, are details. They may be as important as using income and profits intelligently, or as trifling as organizing a good office party, but they are all secondary to the way the human assets are managed. Agencies don’t become rich and famous because of their impeccable administrative procedures or even their financial acumen, but because one or two people at the top have been able to hold together a collection of wildly conflicting personalities and motivate them into working with one another. It is not a skill that can be learned mechanically; it is a knack, rather like being good with animals.