Over the years, I worked at several different ad agencies; some big, some small. I met Michael Jordan, partied with the Super Bowl Bears, stood next to Oprah at the party when she was introduced to the media community (This is the new It Girl? Really? She looked pretty green then....). The longer I was in The Business, the perks grew in stature with my seniority and ample budgets. The high point was riding a camel past The Pyramids at dusk. All in all, I saw every concert worth seeing. Springsteen? Stones? How many tickets? I could have dined out for lunch as someone's guest everyday.
But in all of this funfunfun, there was a lot of hard work and accountability involved. The rule was "Soar with the eagles...." Actually I don't remember anyone ever finishing the sentence, but you get the point and so did we. No matter how hard you partied the night before, showing up at work and on time was mandatory the next morning. And the work did not could not suffer for it.
Advertising is your basic 9-5 job, except the deadlines have to be met, the changes have to be made, and products are introduced on a set date that cannot be missed. Twelve to 14 hour days are not uncommon, nor is the all-nighter. You do what you have to do until it gets done.
The introduction of PC's on every desk and the ensuing onslaught of information that could be accessed was the beginning of The Change. What used to be done manually could now be done quickly and easily, but now that there was all this information available, the demand for it grew. In no time, the information required to do the work had increased geometrically. What had been a simple report was now a full-fledged presentation with reams of backup research. And when a client realized what was available, the requests became endless and, for the most part, totally unnecessary.
With the addition of all this new equipment, costs had to be cut, and if someone wasn't let go, at least a needed new body wasn't hired. Why, with the computers making everything so fast and easy?
Then came the time of the Big Takeovers. Huge agencies were eating up little agencies, and it was impossible for the smaller companies to compete in the new arena. To make the company look good for sale, more bodies had to go. And then when companies merged, whole departments would be axed because they were considered "redundant" when added to the agency who was the buyer (and usually the winner in these cases). More bodies out of work, fewer people to spread the work among.
Advertisers had tightened up, too. While a certain percentage increase in budget had always been assumed from year to year, now the task was to keep the budget the same, but still get that same percentage more in product. Same money, more stuff. And that's not all.
Since the Gulf War, when no one wanted to advertise, what with the TV War running next to their car or baby food commercials, stations had been compelled to provide "added value": extra spots running in a schedule, an on-air promotion using the product, maybe a TV for the car dealers' Christmas party.
Now the advertisers expected not only more for the same money, but added value on top of that. And the competition among agencies was such that they were guaranteeing the clients that they would deliver.
All of the above was happening at the same time: more information required to do the work; fewer bodies to do the work/more and more work piled on fewer bodies; buyer required to demand more and more from stations.
By now, of course, lunches were few and far between. And I don't mean free lunches; I mean actually taking time to leave your desk and run to a takeout place to scurry back and eat between jabs at the keyboard.
At my last agency, I had been hired to cover four markets. By the time I left, the number of markets had grown to twenty, and the buying staff was half what it had started out to be.
But maybe the fact that I and my boss (whose name, strangely enough, is one you more usually hear in connection with a doggy or kitty), were the only two people over 40 in the entire department had more to do with my demise than the workload.
We'll finish this saga in Part III, I swear.
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