Monday, March 18, 2024

Help Me, I Think I’ve Fallen.



For whatever reason, clumsiness, old-age, lack of sleep or an un-diagnosed inner-ear problem, I took an unannounced tumble down a steep flight of steps on Sunday morning. The great comedian Fred Allen once said the ad agency, Batton Barton Durstein and Osborn sounded like a valise falling down the stairs. I never worked at BBDO, not even freelance, but I did a fairly creditable imitation of the onomatopoeia.


If you want to picture me falling ass over tea kettle down a flight of steps--and who wouldn't--this scene from "Kiss of Death" starring Richard Widmark should do the trick. I'm sure there's some Adobe program that will let you put this on continuous loop. That's yet another way to enjoy my pain.

Since my head over heels-ness, I've been self-monitoring my dissolution. Can I read aloud? Am I slurring my words? And I backing my 1966 Simca into the hydrangeas? Am I taking a long walk up to Coogan's Bluff to watch the New York Giants play a twin bill against the Boston Braves in the Polo Grounds where bleacher seats will cost me two-bits and I can get a tall cuppa Rheingold for just four more of the aforementioned bits.

Naw. But somehow, in a flurry of mental slurry, I had a flashback to one of the stupider things I did habitually when I played baseball for Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla and the Seraperos de Saltillo (AA) in the Mexican Baseball League way back in 1975. 


       At :40, look how Mr. Mays dekes the outfielder and smarts his way around the bases.


Whenever I hit a ball hard, in the gap, over an outfielder's head or straight down a line, I routinely imitated the amazing Enos Slaughter or the now-disgraced Pete Rose or the immortal Willie Mays.

Like Mays, I'd stutter-step into second to draw a throw from the outfield into second-base, and the accelerate around the second sack and chug with avid vehemence into third. By those means, probably a dozen times or seven or twenty, I stretched a double into a three-bagger, a triple.

Hector would chide me for my aggressiveness. Why, he'd ask. There's little difference between a double and a triple, really. With either one, a single brings you in.

"I dunno," I'd answer. 'I'd see the outfielder anticipate. I'd see him not thinking. I'd see the outfielder exhibiting a certain fielder's lassitude and expecting the same lassitude from me running the bases and, Hector, I'd say to myself, 'why not? I made it this far already.'"

"I made it this far, already." Hector would laugh. "No one's ever said that having hit a double."

I would laugh back. "Maybe it's my way of just being a bastard by doing more than I have to do and getting away with it.'

Stretching a double into a triple.

It was a work thing too. 

Selling six spots when the client wanted three. Or presenting sixes, spreads, long-form and more. Or finishing the work and more early before the brief was even done, with full-copy, none of the lorem-ipsum shite. Taking the extra base even when everyone from your supervisor, to your partner, to the people running the business would tell you to hold at second, wipe off your flannels and take the breeze.

Maybe that stretching doubles into triples is why I’m stretch out now with 6 feet 2 inches of black and blue. And blues.

I dunno what age or falls or my impending diminishment will do to me in the future--like this afternoon, tomorrow, or even next week. I dunno how much longer I can take the extra base because I've made it this far already.


For the first time ever I fell down a steep flight of stairs. I could have a Thomas Wolfe (the real writer, not the white suit guy) cerebral hemorrhage and be laying in a pool of crusted blood before I even awake to post this.

Or not.

I've made it this far already.










Friday, March 15, 2024

Part I: Scar-Tissue Copy. Part II: Len.

This story about Bill Bernbach is probably apocryphal, meaning it's plausible but probably never really happened. A bit like Yogi Berra's famous quotation or non-quotation, "I didn't really say all the things I said." 

The story I heard was a client asked Bernbach why his agency's copywriters spent so much time laboring over copy, "nobody reads it anyway." 

Bernbach, it's said, replied, "Ten-percent of people read copy. That's who we write it for."

As I write this, I've been thinking as I do, about writing. Writing that moves people. That informs them. That makes them think. Words, as I posted not long ago, you could stub your toe on.

I write ads for a living. But a lot of clients seem to call me--often out of the ether--because they're looking for words they're unlikely to get from anyone else. I regularly tell clients I work in epigrams. Short, memorable statements that capture the essence of something larger.

In a way, epigrams go beyond taglines. FedEx could have used "When it has to be there overnight." That would have been a perfectly good tagline. "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight," added swagger, meaning, with and dimension that brought it to another level.

Good writing, good art-direction, good design can do that. It can take work beyond.

There's a line from Cole Porter's great song, "You're the Top," for instance. "You're the purple light/ Of a summer night in Spain."

Since I heard that line at 1:20, maybe fifty years ago, I've spent many an evening looking for purple light--in Spain and elsewhere. They're words that stayed with me somehow. Maybe in all my years and all the words I've heard, I've never heard "purple light before."

This is our job. Our calling. Our value-add. To make what could be otherwise disposable, indelible.

To make what could be disposable, indelible.

One thing many of us along the way have lost is the time and attention it takes to do a close-reading. To enjoy the sound of words themselves. And how sounds create creases in our brain and embed in our memory. If Dizzy Gillespie or Claude Debussey or Rachel Joyce said the magic of jazz is the space between notes, we might find similar wells of meaning between words. Meaning, feeling, purple light is how we can own a piece of real estate in someone's brain.

More simply, as friend Rob Schwartz has so often said, "Clients buy words." In any event, they're what I sell.

If you've ever wondered how people could memorize epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey and Gilgamesh (these are long books, not Archie comics) it's because they were created to be remembered. No matter their length, they were created as word-music. The sound, conjunction, shape of the words all help meaning embed. I know this is pretty "English Graduate Lecture" for an advertising blog. But advertising is about being noticed and recalled at the right time--just like art. Just like the purple light above.

I was a close reader even when I was a boy, I don't exactly know why. But at a Captain Kangaroo-age, I remember, examined and perseverated over:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.
Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,
Was he?

That seemed 60 years ago, and today, about as good a piece of writing as you're going to find. 

Can you get a little Fuzzy Wuzzy in your script? A memory device, repetition, a word-play, a laugh?

More recently, my now-deceased-bestie Fred--I suppose in an act of self-elegizing--sent me a poem called "The Waiter," by David McCord:

By and by,
God caught his eye.

Have you ever seen a spot, read a headline or sat through a powerpoint with more trenchant entrenched-ness? 

Back in the late 1950s, in ghetto Newark, the great African-American poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) wrote the poem below. I realize copy about polyunsaturated corn-oil spread, Saran Wrap or motor-oil is unlikely to make you gasp like this loaded poem does. But still.

Can we strive?

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note 

Karl Westman, the Soul Captain, my music guy of many years while we were together at Ogilvy taught me more about story-arc than anyone I ever worked with. Like Paganini or Bernstein, he conducted commercial music so it had an arc, so it had a resolution, so it had an uplift. He taught me to write copy the same way. It took you on a journey and made you better when you arrived.
Kurt Vonnegut got that. Understanding the algorithm of stories long before the first sentient computer ate our lunch.
The poem above hasn't a merry ending.
It's a poem about despair.
The terror of being a father in a world gone mad.
But it has what a good piece of copy has.
The question when we create shouldn't be, did you get all eleven mandatories and nine copy points in? Did you fix all the twelve colors-worth of comments in the track-changes? Did you abide the coterie of over-paid frustrated lawyers chomping at their retainers?
The question should be did it stay in someone's brain after they flipped the page.
Act now!
Learn more!
Triple-play bundle!
Hurry!
--
WORKING WITH LEN.
Len Sirowitz, the legendary Doyle Dane art-director died the week before last at the age of 91. You can read his New York Times obituary here. You can read Dave Dye's incredible portrait of Len here.
I worked for Len back almost 40 years ago when I was a young man. He and his Hall-of-Fame writer-partner, Ron Rosenfeld owned a mid-sized agency called Rosenfeld and Sirowitz. As time went by names were added and subtracted to the overall name of the agency. But it remained Ron and Len's place.
For about a year of my twenty-month tenure at Rosenfeld and Sirowitz, I was Len's favorite writer. His daughter worked at the agency at the time, and though I was young in my career, Len had me working with Laura to help improve her writing. That Laura left the business completely after about a year with me is a testament to how good a job I did.
A lot of big names used to like me because I've always been a student of advertising and I knew and studied their work. I might have had more Len Sirowitz ads stored in my memory than he himself. It wasn't ass-kissing on my part. His ads really were that good. And I've always, touch wood, been an avid-learner.
One night, outside freezing rain was coming down and cabs were careening down lower Fifth Avenue like cabs careening on lower Fifth Avenue, most of the office was gone for the evening. I was at my primitive Flintstone's era Smith-Corona word-processor doing what I do best--noodling on something. I've always had a weakness for carbs.
Len, a big man who breathed through his mouth and could barely contain his enthusiasms, came into my office like a cold wind.
"George," he snorted. And he handed me a Life Magazine-sized hard-cover book. The cover had these words on it "The Better Vision Institute."
Inside were about 75 full-page black and white ads Len and copywriter Leon Meadows had created, basically to get people to see their eye-doctors. My memory of this moment might be rose-tinted, but I don't think there was a "meh" in the entire book.
"Len," I said--focused on his ads not his eyes--"can I keep this for a while?"
"Sure sure," he stacatto'd. "We did great work, dint we?" (He never lost his Bronx.)
"These are amazing," was all I could say.
Some weeks later I walked from my office about a full-block to his. I knocked about 71-percent too timidly, went in and handed him back the book.
"Good, huh?" He asked. Like most creatives he needed, still, validation.
Validation?
Forty years later, I wish I had stolen that book.



 

 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Quitting While You're a Headline.

Last week, my friend Rob Schwartz and I were texting. We text with, what is for me, a good amount of frequency. We're also in a group text together--but when we want to get right to the heart of matters, we text directly to each other.

I'll admit, I've not really accepted texting as a regular form of communication. I think Martin Boase, founder of the great Boase Massimi Pollitt agency once said something about advertising being an uninvited guest in your living room. 

In my world, texting--even calling someone on a cell phone--is a bridge too far. You're no longer invading the phone on their wall or in their hallway--you're all at once in their groin pocket. That's about 97-times more intimate than I'm willing to be with people.
And, really, I am not anti-groin.

For years I've buffeted Rob with my conviction that people in journalism are doing a better job reaching viewers than people in advertising. All that old-fashioned AIDA stuff that the ad-industry's forgotten, seems more alive in magazines and newspapers. Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.

I even keep a 28-page (and growing) compendium of sites I like that take complicated information and make it simple--from both a design and a writing point-of-view. If there are 500 urls listed in my document, 490 of them come from journalism; ten from ad agencies. 

(Years ago, when I was head of copy on IBM, I'd growl at media people. 'On a complex brand,' I'd froth 'your job is to find a media space that allows us to simplify an involved story. Like we used to do in print. Just because print has all-but disappeared doesn't mean the need for print-like thinking has disappeared.' Invariably, media would come back with a plan that included little but 728x90 and 300x250 banners.)

I had sent Rob an article that I related back to advertising. And I wrote, how could anyone not respond to this headline:


We quickly had this exchange:





I've taken to saying of late, that my stock in trade, the butter and jam on my bread, is my headlineification ability. 

I can sling 'em like no one else. Or practically no one else. As I like to say, "worms matter."

Writing headlines is not about advertising alone, of course. Headlines go beyond that. They represent the speaker, writer, or editor's ability to coalesce and synthesize information in such a way as to get attention and heighten interest. That's about 97.94650-percent of effective communication: getting attention and being interesting while communicating.

I remember the late Chris Wall, Vice Chair of Ogilvy, all 6'10" of him, standing and berating a group of us. In one hand, he held a New York Times. In the other, The Wall Street Journal. "I don't want to hear about how much you have to do. They fill these papers every day and do a pretty good job." 

Yep.

Writing headlines is important not matter what your job. If you're an art director, you also need to find imagery and design that stops the viewer, that makes her think, that brings them deeper into the communication. If you're an account person, a planner, in media and you present in meetings, it's no good to present a flat-line powerpoint. It pays to get people's attention and keep deepening your connection with them.

So much what I see in the advertising world forgets that it needs to get attention and that it needs to be interesting. Regardless of media, so much just assumes that because it's on the air or ostensibly published pixels, it's worthy of being looked at. In other words, 97.94650-percent of all work lays there like the detritus that collects in storm drains after a deluge. 

There are about twenty headlines below. Which ones stop you? And which ones are soporific? And why?

Why can't we do better?














 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Stubborn Stubbing.



David Brooks of The New York Times had an op-ed, or essay, in The New York Times last Thursday called "Surviving the Ugliness of It All." 

Maybe it's not healthy to bring nearly everything I see, think and do back to advertising, but bear with me for a moment. If you trade in "headlines" as I do, tell me how you can avert your eyes from Brooks' headline, how you can ignore it, how you can pass it by.

That aspect of being a communicator, in whatever form you communicate, to children, to teams, to consumers in whatever channel you work in seems to have been forgotten. I'm not sure why. However, it seems to me--and I see a lot--that about 97.73764-percent of all messages communicate no importance, have no stopping-power, show little concern for the time they're asking their audience to give.

In any event as I said, I look at the world and think about my world. My world which is advertising, and my business, which is GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. I don't read business books to learn about business. I read books about the world and see how they apply to business. There's usually an extra-cognitive step involved in learning this way, but as William Carlos Williams might have written, so much depends upon that step, and as Robert Frost might have written, that step makes all the difference.

So, I read Brooks' piece about Churchill and Roosevelt. And I was able to reduce it to two sentences. 

Then, I realized that those two sentences could serve as a universal brief for any brand, any agency mission, any relationship and anything we do.

First, the reductive two sentences.

One: Churchill saved the British Isles--and defeated Hitler--by reminding England WHO WE ARE. 

Two: Roosevelt saved the West, the Allies, the English-speaking world--and defeated Hitler and Tojo--by showing America HOW TO GET IT DONE.

And there you have it.

For any advertising assignment.

Who we are. What are your values? What do you make? What do you believe in? What do you do to help people? Why are you important?

How to get it done. How to buy us. How to use us. How we operate. How we help you.

Who and How, if you want even more reductiveness.

It seems to my glaumy eyes, that nearly every person, every company, every social organization, and certainly every ad agency, including, sadly, Wieden & Kennedy is struggling now with these two question marks.

Who are we? 
How do we do what we do?

I'd say as an industry we're pissing up a rope when it comes to these ABC basics.

We make the problem more severe when we answer the above with banalities like we practice "borderless creativity." 

About six months ago, I listened to a podcast from The Economist on how to write gooder. 
 In that podcast, Lane Greene, a language correspondent for the magazine said: 

I start with words. We like to use the old, short words of the English language. Winston Churchill once said that short words are best and old words when short are best of all. That means the concrete, the simple. If you're interested in language history, the words that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period of the English language constitute the real bedrock of the language. Ideally, those words should be concrete things. Things that you can stub your toe on....

 In as short as I can make it, make your brief, your thinking, your work simple so they explain:

1. Who are we? 
2. How we do what we do.
3. In language you can stub your toe on.

Yeah.

All that from one article in the Times. The kind of article we used to wrap fish in.

No wonder I don't sleep at night.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Eight Things I Learned from Someone You Should Learn From.

Early on in my career, I went to work for a mid-sized agency that was led by two advertising Hall-of-Famers, Ron Rosenfeld--who at one time was the youngest copywriter ever elected--and Len Sirowitz, an art director who did many of my favorite ads when he was a star at DDB.

For whatever reason, I left that agency for a better agency. Again, that agency was run by two advertising Hall-of-Famers. Mike Tesch--who was the ECD of the place (when that was the top creative title) and Amil Gargano, whose name was on the door and who was the conscience of the agency.

Eventually, I made my way to Ogilvy where I got to work with Steve Hayden, Chris Wall, Steve Simpson and, though she's not a 'creative,' Shelly Lazarus. While there, I also shot a good bit with Joe Pytka and Errol Morris.

When I started at Ogilvy I got tossed into a maelstrom named Brian Collins. In fact, when we first worked together, I very nearly got into a fracas--a genuine Pier Six Brawl--with Brian's account partner. You know those veins at your temples? Mine almost exploded.

The thing about working with the names I dropped above is simple. You observe them like an ornithologist spotting a rare migratory yellow-bellied pupick. You work with them, sure. But if you're really on top of things, when you head back to your desk, you take notes about what you learned. Some of those things are techniques. More often, they're approaches, or behaviors or ways at getting to problems, or most often of all, gaining the confidence to believe in yourself so you can be yourself.

When you write a blog with the <er> perspicacity that I write this blog, you're always on the look out for annuities. Not an annuity like a financial instrument that pays you monthly, but a creative annuity that you can keep coming back to. 

I've been lucky enough to work, still, with many of the names I listed above. I've been lucky enough to have Chinese food with them, or a beer, or kibbitz by phone or e. I'm lucky enough to count a lot of these people as my friends.

In the interest of annuity-izing some of these relationships, I thought I'd write down in this 83,000 readers/week-space some of what I learned from some of these people. Some of this is self-aggrandizement on my part. Swagger that comes from having worked with a veritable Pantheon.

Like the time I wrote a commercial for Gorton's original-style fish sticks and I got Federico Fellini to shoot it (he was $11 million over budget and 22 weeks late.) Or when I was working on the El Pollo Cubano restaurant chain and I persuaded Fidel Castro to help us promote a sandwich I named after him, the Fidel O' Fish. Or more recently, shooting a 150-minute film on the origin story of Peeps marshmallow treats with "Peep" Davidson.

Working with these luminaries is like hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group or drinking 19 dry martinis at the Algonquin. But writing down my learnings is more than just ego gratification on my part.

It's an attempt at a corrective to an industry gone awry. An industry that trains no more, that treats the past like it's as stinky as yesterday's Bouillabaisse, and has forgotten the truths that made it a) a great way to make a living and b) the greatest driver of brand value and capital appreciation in the history of the world. Phew.

All that to say, here are eight things I learned from having worked with, for, alongside and at loggerheads with Brian Collins for more than a quarter of a century. [Working with Brian includes working with Katya, Lee, Nick Ace and his wonderful crew. All of whom are, always, relentlessly on brief.]


I marked down just eight things I learned, though I just as easily could write 18 or even 81. But Collins has helped teach me economy, too.

The things I've learned from Collins have helped GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company grow more, get bigger, do better work and have bigger, better clients than I ever imagined I'd have when I got tossed out on my keister at the Ancient Mariner age of 62.

I happen to think the things I've learned from Collins could help any agency in the world that wants to do good work and treat people well. And make money. Any agency in the world that wants to help clients, respect itself and its people and be different. And make money.

If I were a little smarter and had better art-direction skills, I'd put three black dots equidistant from top to bottom alongside the left hand margin of my eight things list. That would be my semiotic way of saying, "This shit is smart. You should save it."

I bet the people at Collins would like that "design" idea.

But I leave it to you to do what you want with it.



Monday, March 11, 2024

John Brown's Body (of Work.)



On Sunday morning, I woke up and saw the ad above and the story below in my Linked In feed. 

I thought I was connected to absolutely everyone in the industry, but I wasn't connected to the person who posted these items, Scott Reames.

When you write a blog every day for almost seventeen years, you get a nose for a story. And you lose, along the way, any reticence you might once have had about talking to strangers. My nose and abeyance of reticence helps in blogging and in running my own business. I don't dally dilly or dilly dally. I go and get it.

Within minutes, I had written to Scott and requested a post from him. Almost as quickly, Scott wrote back to me and said yes.

I didn't want to burden Scott. So I made this fairly simple request. 


Again, Scott wrote back in two-shakes of a timesheet:



There are at least seven things to learn from Scott's response to me, at least as I see it. Most Holding Companies--and agencies, and agency people, and clients could learn from all this. Nike's great advertising didn't just happen. Somehow, the preconditions for great advertising (below) allowed that advertising to be created.

  1. Make your own job. Scott saw a need for an historian, wrote a proposal and found a calling he kept at for about half of his professional life.
  2. Stories need consistency. Scott noticed the inevitable drift in story retelling and recognized the importance of consistency and codification.
  3. Likewise, companies and brands need consistency. The "meaning" of a company--if it's true--can't blow with the wind and change with every trend, fad and caprice.
  4. Stories win. The history, heritage and culture they capture are a "HUGE" competitive advantage.
  5. The next generation is important. Not just the next quarter. It takes commitment to--and money and people in for the long-haul for a brand to win over time.
  6. Ethos trumps execution. Executions come and go--but the foundations of a brand should endure.
  7. Writing things down is good. That's how they become consistent, codified and credible.

And now, Scott's post. The thing that started all this:


THERE IS NO FINISH LINE

THE STORY OF JOHN BROWN AGENCY.

 

I was sad to learn today of the passing of John Brown. You may not know his name, but if you know anything about Nike history you know of his work ... a string of five words, just 19 letters, that are at the very core of what defines Nike.

In 1976, an ad campaign for a local Portland bank caught Phil Knight's attention. He learned it had been created by an agency in Seattle called John Brown & Partners. Knight reached out to one of the agency's clients - the Seattle Super Sonics - who recommended Brown and encouraged Knight to hire him. Phil did.

[Note: I don't have access to the transcripts of the interviews I did so I'm going from memory on all the quotes in this post.]

John told me "in the beginning we wrote one new ad each month, focusing on the introduction of a new model, and placed an ad in Runner's World." The ads were tech-heavy, touting the benefits of the shoe.

One month in 1977, however, there was no new model ready for release so Nike ad manager Patsy Mest told Brown to "write something that makes runners feel good about themselves."

Brown created an ad with the headline "We run a million miles a day" that featured a lone runner on a country road. Creative director Denny Strickland told me he wanted a "romantic" shot of a runner who was not the center of the shot but part of the larger picture.

Photographer Bob Peterson found a location in Redmond, Washington where he captured a man enjoying a morning run along an urban road. The man was Howard Miller, a friend of Peterson's, who ran to work every day at the University of Washington. In the photograph there is no discernible Nike Swoosh...the runner is so far away you can barely see him. Bob told me the goal was to "focus on the environment and not the runner." [Mission accomplished.]

Patsy Mest was ... let's say unenthused. So Brown presented the same image of the runner but this time with a five-word tagline: "There is no finish line."

Brown told me that Mest said she was "okay with it but next month we can get back to doing our shoe ads."

But then a funny thing happened. "Runners sent letters to Nike thanking them for supporting them," Brown told me. The ad was so popular that Nike made a poster-sized version and soon learned that retailers were selling them to customers. This ultimately led to the creation of Nike's own poster line that would feature scores of iconic images (Ice Man, Supreme Court, etc.).

Several versions of "There is no finish line" soon followed, both in print ads and in posters. It was the first Nike advertising that focused on the brand rather than a specific product, and would become the foundation for decades of ads to follow. Many long-time Nike veterans, including yours truly, consider "There is no finish line" to be closer to the core of Nike's ethos than "Just Do It."

Rest in peace, John. And thank you for sharing your amazing stories with me and my DNA colleagues over the years.


--

Here's a bit more from John Brown himself. I haven't yet found his obituary.


John Brown • Written 6/20/2011

John Brown

John Brown’s first lesson in commerce was as a ten-year-old boy, buying and reselling boxes of Christmas and holiday cards to customers in bars and restaurants in his hometown, Albany, Oregon. After high school he joined the U.S. Air Force hoping for some adventures around the world. Instead, he spent the next 3-1/2 years at McChord AFB near Tacoma working as an accounting clerk. He met his wife-to-be after a co-worker in the accounting office brought her to see his performance as an M.C. in an Air Force talent contest called Tops in Blue. He won local and regional contests and finally competed for a spot on the Ed Sullivan show. During his college years at the University of Puget Sound he worked as a bill collector for Weisfield’s Jewelers. After graduating with a BA in English in 1964 he tried unsuccessfully to find a job in an advertising agency. He was selling “Selectric” typewriters for IBM when an odd coincidence prompted Cole & Weber to give him a shot at the business. During his career there and at John Brown & Partners he has won more than 400 awards for excellence in copywriting and creative direction. His biggest regret: turning down the offer to merge John Brown & Partners with Chiat/Day when he had the chance. He has six grandkids from son Jason, a director producer and daughter Julie, a homemaker.

The following commentary was written for the author’s overdue enshrinement among the MARKETING IMMORTALS. It’s also being posted here to ensure that our readers don’t miss reading about one of the truly remarkable careers in Northwest advertising.

My advertising career was sparked to life by a fateful coincidence.

A couple of guys were making small talk at a weekly discussion group in Tacoma where a few carefully selected people gathered around a bottle of bourbon and a bowl of peanuts to talk about a book they’d all read the week before. One of them was Tom Sias, the copy chief of Cole & Weber. The other was Hal Simonsen, Chairman of the English Department of the University of Puget Sound. Tom recalled my applying for a job at his agency and that I was a UPS graduate in English so he asked if Hal thought I had the potential for becoming a copywriter. My favorite professor gave me a thumbs up. Tom decided to track me down with a job offer of $450 a month. Without that happenstance event my career in advertising would never have happened.

By the time Sias called me I had forsaken the ad business and was working as a sales rep for IBM office products in Tacoma. The job at C&W paid $450 per month, far less money than I was earning by then. But I’ve always believed you should follow your passion.

My passion led me to an office at C&W which was formerly a coat closet, barely big enough for a desk, much less a lamp so I brought one in from home. With a beginning like that, everything looked like up to me. For the next few months I worked hard and learned a lot about writing copy on projects Tom assigned to me. Until another career-changing coincidence came my way.

The office of the legendary ad maker, Hal Dixon was just across the hall from my closet-office. He and his partner, Hal Newsom, were working late and I just happened to be there, too. I overheard them trying to come up with a sequel to the locally famous billboard campaign they had created for Puget Sound National Bank. Example: George Weyerhauser saves $40 a month with a Puget Sound National Bank automatic savings account. (Bet you thought he didn’t have to.)

I worked later than they did that night and finally hit upon this campaign sequel: More and more Opticians have Puget Sound National Bank automatic savings accounts (They know a good deal when they see one.) I wrote a series of these--each with a different occupation--and dropped them on Dixon’s desk before I headed for home.

The next morning Hal came by and after I told him I had written this campaign, he asked me to move into a real office next to his friend and creative partner, Hal Newsom, who would become my new mentor.

Hal was a great teacher and one of his most valuable lessons was this: “Keep working on a campaign concept or an ad headline to make it better. Good enough is not good enough. Keep going and don’t stop until time runs out. Then go with the best idea you’ve got.”

Cole & Weber was then the biggest agency in the Northwest and over the next 11 years I had the chance to work on many of its choicest accounts. I was promoted from copywriter to creative supervisor. And then another career-changing coincidence occurred. Bob Recate, the beloved creative director of C&W’s Portland office, dropped dead.

Hal Dixon offered me that job the next day and after consulting with my wife, we were packed up and on our way to Portland 10 days later.

Hal Dixon’s advice to me about the Portland office was something like this: “The client list is made up mostly of industrial clients. They are conservative clients, not looking for wild stuff. Do the best you can without making too many waves.”

I thought to myself. “Right, just you wait, Mr. Big Guy. Somehow, I’ll find a way to make some great ads.”

Four years later, if memory serves, my team in Portland won more awards than the headquarters office. Dixon and Newsom asked me to show the Seattle staff our Portland creative work. A week or so later they asked me to return to Seattle to replace Hal Newsom as creative director.

I checked with my wife and we figured if I declined my career would have been stifled there. So back we came to Seattle.

That decision turned out to be a mistake. As much as the two Hals had expected to lead what they called Group X, a new business push with a goal of building C&W’s billing to 150 million, Hal Newsom found it difficult to give up his reins as creative director. When he asked me to change a campaign I was planning for Boeing and a couple of others I realized it wasn’t working. It grew more difficult week after week.

Then one day, out of the blue, Steve Darland called and said he had been retained by Don Kraft to find a new creative director for Kraft-Smith. I knew their work; some of it was very good. After chatting with Don, I decided to give it a go.

Don Kraft hired me to be the new creative director and member of the board of what was to be Kraft-Smith & Brown.

My stay there, however, was brief. Don Kraft is one of the nicest fellows you’re likely to meet but--despite hiring me as the agency creative director, he apparently reserved the right to change the creative work I was doing at any time and he exercised it by asked me to make some big changes to a campaign we had created for Olympic Stain.

I resigned the same day. So after a brief stay of four months, I put my stuff in a bag and headed for a tiny office I rented in a bank building in Pioneer Square.

That was the start of John Brown & Partners. I had no clients and only enough money to last about six months.

As luck would have it, an old pal of mine who ran a recording studio in Portland called to say there was a small Portland bank looking for an agency and all the good shops in town were unavailable because most of them already had a financial account of some kind. So off I went to Portland where I convinced the president of the little bank to hire my one-man agency.

Client number one was in the door. That night I called Dennis Strickland whom I had met at Kraft-Smith to handle the art direction as a freelancer. We made some powerful full-page newspaper ads that put this little bank on the map of the business community fast. The CEO took reprints of our ads to businesses around the community to drum up new accounts.

Back in Seattle, Strickland called to say he had heard Blue Ribbon Sports, a small athletic shoemaker in Beaverton, Oregon, was looking for their first ever ad agency. I immediately called the co-founder Phil Knight and invited him to lunch to introduce our fledgling agency. He told me frankly that he did not much like advertising but his dealers needed some promotional support but that I shouldn’t expect that this would ever be a big ad account.

Almost as if to show he wasn’t a big fan of advertising, he told me the story of how his logo was created. When he was starting the company that became Nike, Phil’s day job was teaching accounting at Portland State University. He found a design student and paid her two bucks an hour to design a logo. Her finished Nike “Swoosh” (now one of the world’s most recognized trademarks) cost him $75.* She was rewarded a few years later with Nike stock, now worth more than a million dollars.

I showed Phil my portfolio about a week later and he said he had indeed seen and liked the ads we had made for the upstart Portland business bank. Before I left I mentioned that Denny Strickland was doing the agency art direction and that helped close the deal. As it turned out, Knight was a runner for the University of Oregon track team at the same time Denny played basketball for the U. of O. Another fortunate coincidence.

When I got back to Seattle, Dennis joined me as the agency’s first art director. Phil hired us and client number two was in the door.

Blue Ribbon Sports--Knight’s company—sold about $25 million of Nike shoes that year. When we parted company nearly five years later sales had increased to $250,000,000.

Shortly after taking on Nike, I heard Ivar Haglund was looking for a new ad agency. Here’s where another convenient coincidence helped kick start the agency. While I was creative director for Cole & Weber, I had written and directed a TV spot for their client Rainier Bank that featured Ivar in a customer testimonial for the bank. When I called Ivar, he remembered that the bank spot had also attracted a boatload of business for his seafood restaurants. That peaked his interest. When I showed him my “book,” Ivar hired us and we worked for him until he passed away some 10 years later. He was more than a client; he was my good friend.

Back to Nike. Our work for them was a new business magnet. We won armfuls of local and national awards and that attracted lots of other clients. They included Pacific First Federal, Seattle City Light, Metro Transit, Virginia Mason Medical Center, Lamont’s apparel stores, Pizza Haven, Speedi-Lube, Everett Herald, Seattle Weekly, several political accounts, including Governor John Spellman, Senator Dan Evans and Congressman John Miller.

We also had several sports accounts besides Nike. Among them: Roffe Skiwear, Seattle SuperSonics, Precor fitness equipment, Pacific Trail sportswear, Pro-Tec protective eyewear and a tennis racquet manufacturer.

Our biggest success for Nike completely changed Phil Knight’s mindset about advertising. It happened because of a screw up in their factories.

One month their pipeline produced no new shoes for us to feature in a new ad. They didn’t want to re-run an old ad so they asked us to do something that “just pats runners on the back, a feel-good thing. It won’t make much difference in sales because we don’t have a new shoe to show.”

We answered with an ad that caused an explosion of response from runners. Our graphics were dominated by a beautiful long shot photo of a single runner on a lonely road out near Kirkland, shot by Bob Peterson. No picture of a shoe. This time it was all about running itself.

Headline: “There is no finish line.” 

The copy read: “Sooner or later the serious runner goes through a special, very personal experience that is unknown to most people. Others say its a new kind of mystical experience that propels you into an elevated sense of consciousness.

“A flash of joy. A sense of floating as you run. The experience is unique to each of us but when it happens you break through a barrier that separates you from casual runners. Forever.

“And from that point on, there is no finish line. You run for your life. You begin to be addicted to what running gives you.

“We at Nike understand that feeling. There is no finish line for us either. We will never stop trying to excel, to produce running shoes that are better and better every year.

“Beating the competition is relatively easy. But beating yourself is a never ending commitment.”

That ad created an explosion for Nike in terms of customer response. Even though it was pre-email, runners wrote and posted more than 100,000 letters to Nike after that ad ran. They thanked Nike for making high performance shoes and for understanding what a lifetime of running means. Many of these Nike fans asked for a No Finish Line wall poster and wanted it to include the body copy.

A couple years later I was a guest lecturer in an advertising class and ran into a young woman who was able to recite the body copy of this ad by memory.

This massive response taught Phil Knight about the power of brand advertising. It created “the idea of Nike” as compared to another “shoe from Nike.” It was the spark of ignition that blasted the Nike brand skyward.

About a year later Nike fired us. Our office location was the reason why, they said. We were in Seattle and they were in Beaverton, a Portland suburb. They said they needed agency people who could be in their office every day. We were flying or driving down there about twice a week but they still wanted more face time.

They asked Denny Strickland to join them as ad manager. He didn’t want to move to Portland. With all the award-winning work we were turning out for them, we simply didn’t believe they would dump us. Big mistake.

A graphic designer who had done a few projects for them said he knew a couple of Portland ad makers who could give them terrific work and be there every day. Their names were Dan Wieden and David Kennedy. And the rest is history.

It was a severe blow. However, as soon as the word was out one of Nike’s competitors invited us to his office in Cambridge, Mass. It was John Fisher, CEO of the company that markets Saucony brand running shoes.

We flew back there, made a presentation and he hired us on the spot. Over the next four years we won dozens more creative awards for our Saucony ads. They loved our work but didn’t much like our office being across the country three time zones away. They parted company with us as friends.

I could have made some sort of merger deal with a Boston agency to improve our account service to them, just as I suppose I should have opened an office in Portland to keep Nike. But that would have pushed me into focusing more on agency business affairs than making ads. I liked doing creative work more than fooling with financial reports and personnel management so I kept making ads. And hoping new luck would break our way.

Before long my Cole & Weber friend Dick Hadley called to say he was leaving the agency and was taking Puget Sound Bank with him, since C&W had won the much larger Sea-first Bank account. Dick asked to join our agency. That changed our name to Brown & Hadley and Partners.

Over the succeeding three years we made some powerful advertising for Puget Sound Bank, some of my best work for any financial institution. The concepts were based on an overwhelming fact. Puget Sound Bank was the last major commercial bank left around here. All the others had sold off to even bigger banks from other towns in other states. We turned that to our advantage. We showed big banks of depositors’ money being stuffed in sacks marked Sea-First and put on trains headed for California. Same for other competitors. The second prong of our campaign promised to make a contribution to a fund to help clean up the waters and shorelines of Puget Sound for every deposit customers made to their accounts.

Money poured in. It caught so much of Key Bank’s attention they eventually made a buyout-merger offer to Puget Sound Bank they couldn’t refuse. Goodbye Puget Sound Bank.

Game over. With the loss of the bank income and the rest of our clients cutting back or canceling budgets in a difficult economy, we could no longer cover our costs. Brown & Hadley closed its doors for the final time.

It was a wild ride and I enjoyed nearly every minute of it. I hired some outstanding people in my career, notably Bill Borders, Dave Newman and Mark Norrander in Portland and Palmer Pettersen, Steve Sandoz, Dan Wurz and Denny Strickland in Seattle. We had perhaps too lively a time doing good work and enjoying ourselves perhaps a little too often.

I decided to stay in the business as a freelance writer, creative director and consultant. I’ve been doing that for clients and agencies ever since.

And I’m still looking for work.


* This is what Scott wrote to me just a minute ago, as I showed him the draft of my piece. 

I absolutely LOVE that John Brown wrote that Phil Knight paid $75 for the Swoosh design. Phil actually paid $35. Voila, you have the crux of what I was talking about...stories that drift! And for all I know, Phil might actually have told John he paid $75. Other than my realization that I failed to include a close parenthesis in one paragraph of my post, it's fine with me for you to post.