In 1967, when I opened my ad agency, Jerry Della Femina & Partners, a group of us started an Agency Sex Contest. For more than twenty-five years, one week at the end of every year was devoted to Animal House-like antics. This was, until today, the best-kept secret in advertising. Thousands of people took part in the Agency Sex Contest.
The contest had everyone in the agency voting anonymously on paper ballots for the three people they most wanted to go to bed with. They were also asked to vote on the person of the same sex they would consider going to bed with. And, of course, there was the ménage a trois category, in which they selected the two other people they wanted to go to bed with. Sometimes as many as 300 votes were cast.
For one week the walls of the agency were covered with posters made by people who were campaigning for themselves. One very shy girl in Accounting got into the spirit of the contest, Xeroxed her breasts and hung pictures of them on the walls. Another young account executive had as her slogan: VOTE FOR AMANDA [not her real name]. LIKE BLOOMINGDALE’S, I’M OPEN AFTER 9 EVERY NIGHT.
One very attractive female executive had a sexy picture of herself that she sneaked into the agency’s men’s room, and put up on the wall that a man would be facing. The caption under her provocative photo read, CAN I HELP YOU WITH THAT? This almost caused a disaster when a rather priggish client called and said he was on his way to visit the agency. In the hour before he arrived, we feverishly took down every campaign ad. Then, in the course of the meeting, the man excused himself to go to the men’s room. After a few minutes I let out a scream. We had forgotten to take the campaign posters off men’s bathroom wall. The client returned ashen-faced. He never said a word about the signs but he kept shaking his head. I would walk out of the meeting every five minutes just to giggle and then come back looking like the proper head of a major advertising agency.
Voting was on the up and up. One year I had our accounting firm tally up the ballots. You never saw so many accountants looking so amused and animated in your life.
First prize for the winning couple (even if they hadn’t voted for each other) was a weekend at the Plaza Hotel, paid for by my agency. Second prize was a night at the Plaza. Third prize was a night uninterrupted on the couch in my office. Winners of the ménage a trois got dinner for three at the Four Seasons Restaurant. Winners of the gay and lesbian part of the contest won a $100 gift certificate to The Pleasure Chest – a store in Greenwich Village that sold sex toys.
The results were announced at a party where as many as 300 of us would lock ourselves in a giant Mexican restaurant. At one party, I was concerned that the entire agency had imbibed too much cannabis and too many margaritas, and that the party was getting dangerously out of hand. When one older executive passed out, his head went into the plate of food in front of him. The woman next to him shouted, ‘He’s OK, the guacamole broke his fall.’ A pretty, young, Asian woman, whom I’d never heard say a single word, jumped up on a table and started stripping and dancing with wild abandon, and accidentally kicked one of my art directors in the head. I rushed to the restaurant’s manager and asked him to tell his waiters to cut down on the drinks. He smiled at me and said, ‘Señor, it’s too late. My waiters are all stoned and they are in the middle of the party.’
Was it sophomoric? You bet.
Was it politically incorrect? You bet.
Will you be seeing it in future shows of Mad Men? You bet.
By 1972 we were one of the fastest growing advertising agencies in the world. That’s the year I decided to buy a smallish British agency called Saatchi & Saatchi. Why not? My book had been a best-seller, I was riding high and I decided I had to do something to tone down my image. Too many people saw me as being a wild man, and the larger, packaged-goods advertising accounts like Procter & Gamble and Lever Brothers would not deal with a wild man. I’d opened an office in Los Angeles – but no one ever changed his or her image at the Beverly Hills Hotel. So I looked to the UK for respectability.
I sent the president of my advertising agency, Jim Travis, to scout agencies in London. He came back and said the picking were slim. There was one agency – Collett, Dickson & Pearce – that was turning out great work, but they gave no indication that they wanted to be purchased. Our best chance was Saatchi & Saatchi, and they had expressed some interest in being acquired. I confess I had never heard of Saatchi & Saatchi, but I jumped onto a plane and went to London to make the deal.
I was greeted at the door of Saatchi & Saatchi like a conquering hero. ‘We’ve all read your book,’ someone said. ‘We loved it,’ someone else said. This was followed by fifteen minutes of small talk that frankly turned my incredibly swollen head. Compliment after compliment after compliment. They’re very nice, I thought. I still remember admiring the large poster on their wall for Great Britain’s Health Education Council (HEC) that featured a distinctly large-bellied man with the caption, ‘Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?’ A great ad. This, I thought, will be a good deal for both of our companies.
Fifteen minutes later, with the small talk out of the way, I remember thinking, They’re smart. More talk, more talk on how we might get together. I remember thinking, They’re very smart.
Another fifteen minutes went by, as they told me how I might buy them and proposed a complicated reverse takeover. That’s when it hit me. Oh my God. They’re smarter than I am. I’ve got to get out of here while I still have an ad agency. I remember backing out the door, and heaving a sigh of relief as I stumbled out into the daylight. It was a close call – a street-smart Mad Man from America had just escaped the clutches of a couple of even smarter Mad Men from the UK.
A few months after my meeting with Saatchi & Saatchi, John O’Conner, a reporter friend from Advertising Age, called and said, ‘Got some news for you. Compton Advertising just bought Saatchi & Saatchi.’
Now if there was an advertising agency that would have epitomized Mad Men it was Compton Advertising. Their former copy chief/president, Milton Gossett, could have been a double for Don Draper. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Saatchi owns Compton.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘You didn’t hear me. Compton owns Saatchi.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Saatchi will eventually own Compton.’
‘You’re out of your mind’ was O’Conner’s answer. I hung up the phone after making a small bet with O’Conner that the minnow from the UK would swallow the whale from the US. A few months later, in a reverse takeover, Saatchi & Saatchi owned Compton and proceeded to take over the advertising world.
In 1986 I bowed to the British buying spree and sold my agency, Della Femina McNamee, to a British company called White Collins Rutherford & Scott. It was sort of a mini reverse takeover on my part, because my agency took over all the agencies that White Collins Rutherford & Scott had acquired in the US.
Everyone who watches Mad Men asks me the same question: Has the advertising business changed?
Yes, dramatically.
To paraphrase Mr. Ogilvy’s comment in 1968, the lunatics are back in their cells, dead or retired. The internet is king. Newspapers are dead or dying. Magazines are shrinking every day. Ad budgets are being cut. The bottom line is now the only line in advertising. Copy has taken a back seat to design, and television advertising is shrinking because every client is looking for digital solutions. They want more and more, and want it to cost less and less. A few nineteen-year-old students from the School of Visual Arts in New York can design and produce a brilliant campaign in a few hours that once would have taken weeks of late-night creative work by fifty people to produce.
Me? I’m still in the business, running an ad agency called Della Femina Rothschild Jeary & Partners. I’m as in love with the business