THIS IS A GREAT BUSINESS. What makes it great are all the knuckleheads. All the people just slightly left of center. This business seems to attract them. People who don't find fulfillment anywhere else in the business world somehow end up on advertising's doorstep, their personal problems clanking behind them like cans in back of a just-married car. They come for very personal reasons, with their own agendas. They bring to the business creativity, energy, and chaos, and from the business they get discipline, perspective, and maturity.

All in all, they make for an interesting day at the office, these oddballs, artists, misfits, cartoonists, poets, beatniks, creepy quiet guys, and knuckleheads. And every one of them seems to have a great sense of humor.

In 1923, Claude Hopkins—famous for his hard-sell advertising approach—wrote, “People do not buy from clowns.” He was suggesting there's no place for humor in effective advertising. Forgetting for a moment whether Mr. Hopkins was wrong or extremely wrong, the thing is this: people do buy from clowns. Every day, millions of Americans use something sold by a clown, because the ad industry employs clowns by the tiny-circus-carload.¹

Don't get me wrong; most of the people in the stories that follow are smart businesspeople. You'd want them on your team. But they're world-class knuckleheads as well. Agencies are full of ’em.

Why this should be so continues to elude me. I know only that most of every working day I spent laughing—at cynical hallway remarks, tasteless elevator bon mots, and bulletin board musings remarkable for their political incorrectness.

Submitted for your approval: this small collection of incidents and idiocy culled from agency hallways and stairwells around the nation. All true. And all stupid.

A finicky agency president has his own executive bathroom. No one else is allowed to use it, much less step in there. One day when the president is out to lunch, creatives are seen going into the bathroom carrying two muddy cowboy boots and a cigar.

Cut to the boss coming back from lunch. He goes into his private restroom and immediately comes back out, really pissed off. “Who in God's name is the dumb cowboy sittin' in my stall smokin' a stogie?” His assistant has no clue.

The boss waits outside for the cowboy to emerge. Ten minutes pass, and the boss peeks back in only to see the same creepy tableau—muddy boots below the stall door, blue smoke curling above it.

Cigars can smolder for about half an hour. Bosses, even longer.

A senior account person decides to do a number on the recent hires. Sends an email to all the junior account people in their modular offices, informing them the building management has hired “burlap rakers” to come in and spruce up the walls of the cubicles. “Please remove all materials tacked, stapled, or taped to your walls until you receive further notice from the burlap rakers.”

The young account executives obey but never receive further notice. A week later, the receptionist's left eyebrow goes way up when a young account guy asks him, “Hey, do the burlap rakers come in at night or on the weekends?”

The illusion required several large 12-by-8-foot sheets of foam core, a dirty plaid shirt, an old Playboy magazine, several dead roaches, a broom, a mop, and a bucket.

After returning from his honeymoon, a young writer opens his office door to see he has been replaced with a broom closet. Asked later for his thoughts: “It broke my mind.”

A big New York agency lands the Revlon account. The client says only females understand the market and wants only women to work on the account. But a staffing crunch forces the traffic manager to assign a male writer—a guy named Mike. Mike is assigned a new name—Cindy. The client never meets Cindy, but receives email from Cindy, and reviews and approves great work from Cindy. Client states later that “Cindy understands women.”

Two copywriters working on a national account at a large agency play a word game under the noses of the account people and the client. The creatives agree on a random word or phrase and the first one to use it in a produced ad, wins. Weeks later, no one in America notices the winning phrase in the copy of an ad for a giant tire manufacturer: “fancy pants.”

Quotes from actual creative work sessions:

“Which is funnier? ADHD or narcolepsy?”

“Obviously, it needs more vomiting references.”

“No, I'm serious, man. I just don't think Julie Andrews would ever do that.”

Favorite brave comeback to a client who told the art director to make the logo bigger: “Put your face closer to the ad.”

Left over from the technical equipment purchased for a TV commercial is a curious piece of acoustic equipment, one that shoots a targeted laser-like beam of sound toward a single person with such precision that no one on either side of the target can hear a thing. The device has been hidden behind the ceiling tiles in an agency meeting room, and we cut now to the scene happening there.

The creative director is sitting in the target chair and listening to some creatives present work. Suddenly his face turns pale. The creative director whips around, looks to his left, his right. “Who said that??” The creatives go, “Who said what?” The creative director says, “Nothing. Never mind.” Everybody shrugs and the presentation continues … as do the evil words the creative director hears being whispered directly into his skull: “Kill them… . Kill them all.”

This last one was submitted by a reader, Reid Holmes. I'd heard of this story several years ago but thought, as did many, it was urban myth. Apparently not. Thank you, Reid, for your first-person account.

My first job in Chicago was at Ogilvy, where I worked under the tutelage of a cantankerous but really talented senior writer. He taught me a lot about writing radio. Word was, at his previous job over at FCB, he'd pissed off some people and was getting frozen out, uninvited to meetings, not given any assignments. It went on long enough that he applied for and got a job at Ogilvy, but he never quit the job at FCB.

He'd show up in the morning at FCB, put a hot cup of coffee on his desk, leave a coat around the back of his chair. Then walk across Michigan Avenue to spend the day working at Ogilvy. I heard he double-dipped for at least a month before FCB figured it out and cut him loose.

Hijinks like these don't happen every day, but advertising can be a rough business and the occasional tomfoolery can make life in the foxholes more bearable. But as tough as this business can be on the creative spirit, it is in fact like ’60s ad star Jerry Della Femina once described it: “Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”²

I mean, look at what you're doing. You're an image merchant. You're weaving words and pictures together and imbuing things with meaning and value.

Mark Fenske said advertising is the world's most powerful art form. Is he right? Well, Picasso was great, but I've never looked at one of his paintings and then walked off and did something Pablo wanted me to do. I know that sounds silly, but advertising is like no other form of creative communication, because it has the power to affect what people do. And it works.

In the 1920s, Claude Hopkins sat down in his office at Lord & Thomas and wrote, “Drink an orange.” A nation began drinking orange juice.

Steve Hayden sat down in his office at TBWAChiatDay and wrote, “Why 1984 won't be like 1984” for Apple computers. A nation began thinking maybe computers belong in homes, not just in corporations.

Dan Wieden sat down, wrote “Just Do It,” and changed the world. When he wrote it back in 1978, there weren't many joggers on the side of the road. (Even the word didn't exist—jogging. What the hell is jogging?) Now you can't throw a stick out the window without hitting five of ’em.

“Nike killed the three-martini lunch,” says Fenske. Nike told us to get off our collective butt and just do it, and suddenly it wasn't okay anymore to lie around on the couch wallpapering our arteries with lard. We started taking the stairs.

At the wheel of this national change of heart: an advertiser, a great agency, and the world's most powerful art form—advertising. Whether you agree with Fenske that “Nike and Coke brought down the Berlin Wall,” the power of advertising to globalize icons and change the behavior of whole continents is undeniable. The venerable Bill Bernbach had this to say about our industry.

The world has progressed to the point where its most powerful public force is public opinion. And I believe in this new, complex, dynamic world it is not the great work or epic play, as once was the case, which will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the tools of public persuasion. The metabolism of the world has changed. New vehicles must carry ideas to it. We must ally ourselves with great ideas and carry them to the public. We must practice our skills on behalf of society. We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in.³

In Adcult USA, James Twitchell wrote: “[Advertising] has collapsed … cultures into a monolithic, worldwide order immediately recognized by the House of Windsor and the tribe of Zulu… . If ever there is to be a global village, it will be because the town crier works in advertising.”⁴

STAY HUMBLE.

This is indeed a great business.

Look at what you're getting paid for: putting your feet up and thinking. This is what people with real jobs do when they get time off—put their feet up and daydream, drift, and think of goofy stuff. You, you're getting a paycheck for it.

I remember we had this new secretary in the creative department. He kept walking into the offices of art directors and writers, interrupting their work, just to chat. Somebody finally said to him, “Listen, we'd love to talk another time, but we have to get this done. So if you could …”

He backed out of the room, apologizing, “Geez, I'm sorry. You had your feet up. You were talking, laughing. It didn't look like you were working.”

From Breaking In, I quote my old friend Mike Lear as he talked about his job: “I got paid today for looking at different takes of a guy on the toilet. That was my job today. Seriously. ‘Eh, I don't know, does it look like he's constipated or something? This needs to be funnier. Maybe this one where he's also on the phone might be funnier?' And then the next day, the check shows up in my bank account. Man, that's just awesome.”⁵

Yeah, this is a great business. This fact was brought home to me one day on a train ride from downtown Chicago to O'Hare airport.

I'd just left a very bad meeting where a client had killed a whole bunch of my work. I fumed for the first couple of miles. (“That was a really good campaign! How could they have killed it?”)

As I sat there feeling sorry for myself, the gray factories passed by the train windows. Miles of factories. On the loading docks, I could see hundreds of hard-working people. Laborers forklifting crates of Bic pens onto trucks, hauling boxes of canned peaches onto freight cars. They'd been there since six o'clock in the morning, maybe five. These were hardworking people. With real jobs.

And then there was me, feeling sorry for myself as I whipped by in an air-conditioned train on the way to my happy little seat on the plane with its free peanuts. Peanuts roasted and packed by some worker in another gray factory as he looked up at the clock on the high brick wall, waiting for the minute hand to hit that magic 10:30 mark so he could get out of the noise for 15 minutes, drink a Coke, scarf an energy bar, and then it's back to packing my stinkin' peanuts.

You should remember this, too.

There are research firms out there that will tell you the sky isn't blue. Clients who will kill an idea because it has a blue flyswatter in it. And agencies that will make bloody fortunes on ideas like Mr. Whipple. But the next day, you'll be back in the hallways telling jokes with the funniest people in corporate America, putting your dirty sneakers up on marble tabletops, and getting paid to think. Nothing more. Just to think. And to talk about movies.

You'll be paid a lot of money in this business. You'll never have to do any heavy lifting. Never have dirt under your fingernails or an aching back when you come home from work. You're lucky to be talented. Lucky to get into the business.

Stay humble.