O’Brien, Lipschitz, and Partners: A Satire

By John Nieman

In the aftermath of a new business pitch, a new advertising agency is born. It is not the smartest agency on Madison Avenue, but it is certainly the most outrageous. Most of the campaigns they create are sexy, silly, spontaneous, and surprisingly successful. In fact, the shop was named the best small agency of the year by the trade press. Its enough to attract even more clients and make their key players more valuable and vulnerable to temptations from other shops who want some of their fairy dust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984530653

John Nieman

John Nieman, an accomplished artist and writer, has exhibited his paintings throughout the United States and in Europe. His first book of art and poetry, Art of Lists was published in 2007. He has published two novels, The Wrong Number One and Blue Morpho. In addition, he recently published a childen's book called The Amazing Rabbitini. Mr. Nieman lives in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and is the father of five children.

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Copyright © 2018 by John Nieman. 778927

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018906254

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 06/19/2018

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Contents

Preface

Chapters

1. Out of the Blue

2. On the Other Hand

3. The New, Weird Agency

4. Herbert Hooter

5. Be the Only One in Your City to Drive One

6. The Truth … with a Twist

7. You Know Where. You Know When

8. Just Put a Band-Aid on It

9. I Lost Eighty-Seven Pounds in One Week

10. Dave’s Day

11. I Dough, I Dough

12. It’s in the Bag

13. Cowboy Vodka

14. O, Yes

15. M&M&M&M’s

16. Match

17. Staples Makes It Possible

18. Shelly’s Party

19. The First Defection

20. Drugs—They’re Not As Good As You Thought

21. Become More Delicious

22. Shouldn’t Your Dog Eat Better than You?

23. DIY

24. The Best Small Agency of the Year

25. Readers Cheaters

26. Love Beats Money

For all my creative, courageous, and outrageous friends who brightened my years in the advertising business.

Preface

Before I became an artist and an author, I spent thirty years in the advertising business. For the most part, it was loads of fun. I remember coming up with dozens of ideas, sometimes in a week. As a former actor, I loved pitching new business. I was proud to get many spots in the Super Bowl. As a worldwide creative director, I was particularly fond of the global travel (180 days a year). As I look back on my résumé, I was fortunate to work at many of the top ten advertising agencies and create work for Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Hallmark, Burger King, Mars, Qantas, Cadillac, Lincoln-Mercury, P&G, and dozens of other adventurous brands.

This particular business is in a perpetual state of change. It always has been. An agency that is hot may be old news in a few years. An old-fart agency may gain a renaissance with a new creative director. And of course, social media has changed things dramatically.

One thing I have particularly noticed in recent years is that straight, feature-benefit advertising doesn’t gain much attention, unless the client has a multimillion-dollar budget. Humor works. Outrageous gains headlines. Anything unexpected earns a certain amount of respect.

That new inclination is the gist of this book.

The other factor is the people who work at an ad agency. Some are goofy. Some are reticent. Some are straight. Some are gay. Most are liberal. Some are archconservatives. The combination of these types creates a fabric that I always found interesting.

It’s an exciting environment. As you turn the pages, I hope you will find it to be one.

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Out of the Blue

According to most pundits on Madison Avenue, Ogilvy & Mather was a slam dunk to win this account. For starters, they were on a hot streak, having won Merrill Lynch, FedEx, Unicef, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson baby powder over the past twelve months.

Admittedly, these were not the most creatively challenging accounts in advertising industry. However, that was not O&M’s stock and trade. They were known as a solid, business-oriented agency, and a very successful one at that—both in the USA and internationally.

Consequently, it was widely assumed that the Serta mattress company in the Midwest would be a perfect fit with the agency.

The key point person on this pitch was a woman named Shelly Lipschitz, who had five years’ experience as an account manager and two years at the helm as new business director. She was smart and had a savvy, intuitive instinct of client needs, and she was good on her feet in a presentation. To her board of directors, she declared, If there is ever an ideal client for Ogilvy, it is Serta. After all, nobody knows feature-benefit advertising better than us. Besides, we are pitching against the minor leagues. I guarantee we will win this account!

And yet, her antennae told her that this was not a straight-ahead, a dot the i’s and cross all the t’s kind of pitch. The client had hinted more than once that they would like to be surprised. She told her creative staff in charge of creating a prototype campaign, Don’t take this one for granted. I’ve got a hunch they may want something slightly out of the box.

The creative staff toiled for a week or so and came up with S-E-R-T-A—how you spell comfort. The commercial featured vignettes of men, women, and kids against sleepy music. The head copywriter on the pitch bragged about the spelling of the client’s brand. That will stick in people’s brain. They might even repeat it going down the street or going into a mattress store.

Really, Shelly asked skeptically. Did you have another campaign or two that was a close second?

The consensus of the group was that this one was the clear winner. People need a good night’s sleep to compete in today’s world, the creative guy said.

Maybe you should put that in the ad, Shelly advised. That sounds meaningful.

As in most big advertising agencies, the creative people do not like to take advice from account people. However, it did sound like a good idea. Reluctantly, the creative guy said he could probably add a short sentence in the spot to indicate that a good night’s sleep in comfort can add to success in the next day.

Yes, Shelly appreciated the concession. But don’t spell out success, S-U-C-C-E-S-S, she added with private sarcasm.

No, no, no. That would be too much. The only thing we spell out would be S-E-R-T-A.

Good, Shelly said with some irony. Go to it.

After the group left her office, Shelly sat at her desk, shaking her head at the state of the advertising business. It was more fun seven years ago, before she started guaranteeing to the board of directors that they would definitely win this next new business pitch.

Rather than dwell on it, she began to create the deck—basically a reasoned dossier about why Ogilvy & Mather would be the perfect partner for Serta. It began with the client’s business. It outlined their issues and opportunities in today’s world. It then chronicled O&M’s track record with similar clients, along with samples of their more famous ads. At least the last half of the document addressed the agency’s particular approach for Serta. As a sop to the creative staff, she did make some hay about spelling out the Serta name. She also stressed the importance of a good night’s sleep in comfort—how it makes a difference in the next morning’s acuity, balance, creativity, and spontaneity.

She actually researched this topic online and found it to be quite true. According to the AMA, a good night’s sleep (with good REM dreams) makes an amazing quantifiable difference in productivity the following morning.

She sent that link to the creative guy in charge of the pitch. He sent back a smug email. We’ve already included a sentence to that effect. Please stress the S-E-R-T-A spelling of the brand.

With a sigh, Shelly completed the document, which was seventy-four pages long. She then tried to assess her competition on this pitch. There were two midsize ad agencies from Chicago, which might give them a geographical advantage for the Illinois client. However, they did not seem to have stellar reels or great raves from their clients. There was a rather successful midsize agency in NYC called Tatham-Laird & Kudner. Not bad, but not a great track record on new business pitches. And then there was an oddball entry—an upstart agency called O’Brien, O’Brien. It had all of three employees. One of them was Ryan O’Brien, a senior account guy who spent decades at Y&R, where he dealt with many big-ticket clients and continued with many contacts in his senior years. Perhaps he had a personal connection with the Serta client. Otherwise, why would they be in this pitch? The other principal? His son, Jack O’Brien, a haywire creative guy who had written some nutsy campaigns for his clients at several boutique agencies. He was definitely out of the box. And the third employee was a woman named Naomi, who was the receptionist for the shop and a cheerful presence at the agency.

The notion that this oddball agency was even included made no sense to Shelly. It was an option out of nowhere, completely out of the blue.

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Shelly felt capable of defeating every other agency in this pitch, but the upstart agency gave her pause. What do they have to lose? she asked herself. They could present the most outrageous campaign and gain points just because they were different.

On the internet, there was little to be learned about young Jack O’Brien. In his early years, he was the copywriter at several New York agencies, where he did mediocre work for the US Postal Service (We deliver, we deliver) and Yuban Coffee (Ooh, it’s rich). And then he turned to more aggressive, more outrageous work. It included work for Art Fair NYC, Gotham Comedy Club, and the National Enquirer.