The Kitchen Table

When I worked at Ogilvy & Mather, in the pitiable era of printed paper, I was always warmed by the civilized intelligence of David Ogilvy in his monthly columns in the company magazine. David would write to us about things we would pretty much never get to do ourselves–how to act at high-level client dinners, the secrets of selling big national TV campaigns, stuff we should never say to the Queen when we see her.

He wrote to us, you see, from a castle in France named Touffou.

Despite the seeming irrelevance of it all, you couldn’t help but feel that O&M was a place that championed intelligence, patience, humor and respect. It wasn’t true, of course, particularly not in New York. But, to paraphrase Hemingway, it was pretty to think so.

Anyway, in the interest of making it prettier around here, especially as we get bigger and more far-flung, I thought it might be good to attempt a short, more or less weekly, thing of my own. I don’t pretend that it will be any more relevant than David’s, but it might make you feel better, as his always did for me.

It might also help me organize my thoughts, get some feedback from you and do a better job here, which would be, uh, nice.

The Kitchen Table seemed like a good two-way kind of title for these things, a place where you can talk with your mouth full and say things you might not want beyond the walls. To allow you to skip the inevitable boring parts, I thought I might divide it up into digestible segments. For instance:

THE BASEBALL TEAM SPEECH.

If you’ve worked here for a while, you’ve heard this before, but I’m going to repeat it anyway.

Earlier in the life and times of our company, Rich and I would get very depressed when people left for other opportunities. We felt it was a reflection on us. We felt abandoned.

Actually, it was more often a reflection of the fact that the person had been offered a shitload of money we’d never match, or the chance to move into a position they would never get here, or that they wanted to start their own business or move closer to their family. In other words, it wasn’t about us at all.

I realized one day that advertising was going to be more and more like a baseball fantasy league—there was a limited pool of really talented people, and, if the company succeeded, a lot of them would work here for a while, but they would never ALL be here. The team would change from year to year—and that was a GOOD thing.

It was my job—all our jobs—to find and celebrate the greatness of the new team. Not to long for the old one.

Rich puts it another way: “There never were any good old days. The good old days are right now.”

Help us find the stars here. Hell, be one yourself.

THE DAY I MET DAVID OGILVY.

It was 1980. I was working at Hal Riney’s San Francisco office of O&M, occupying the critical position of the most junior, expendable writer in the place.

David Ogilvy himself came to visit. He was in his late seventies, the most famous person in advertising at that point. Everyone was scared shitless of him, so they put him in an empty office, and no one went in.

After a few hours of seeing him in there, I stuck my head in. He looked up, still twinkly and good-looking at that age, and damn if he wasn’t really wearing those red suspenders I’d heard about. “Mr. Ogilvy,” I said, “I just wanted to take the opportunity to welcome you to San Francisco.” I sounded like an idiot.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” David said.

“No, but I’ll find some.” I ran off to a nearby art director’s office.  “Thanks,” I muttered, as I maniacally shook a handful of cigarettes out of the pack on his desk.

David lit up and talked to me for the better part of an hour, I think. I told him I was working (with Rich) on a campaign for the Oakland A’s. He didn’t seem to care.

“How much do you write each day?” he asked.

I thought the answer should be high. “Eight or ten hours,” I said.

“Oh my goodness, that’s way too much. You should be working only two or three hours a day. The rest of the time you are out collecting things to write ABOUT.”

I have followed that advice as closely as possible since then.

A couple years later, the baseball campaign he didn’t care about won the David Ogilvy Prize for the agency’s best campaign of the year.  Rich and I got $10,000 each and were made vice presidents, which meant about as much then as it does now.

Ten years later, long after we’d left O&M, I saw David again in Europe. I told him I’d talked to him that day in San Francisco.

“Of course,” he said. “You wrote that funny baseball campaign.” He had to be almost 90.

WIEDEN AND KENNEDY.

I interviewed them the other night at the Art Directors Club in New York. Interestingly, it was emotional rather than informational.

Dan told a story about being fired and how much it has affected the culture of forgiveness at his company. He told it in great detail, about coming home to his wife, who was folding some laundry. “I was let go,” he said to her. “Well, that means there will be something better for you,” she said. He was really affected by her reaction.

Listening to him, you can see that that moment was really the source of those W+K corporate mantras like “The secret of success is failure and uncertainty.” “Walk in stupid every day.” And a sign they have up:  “Fail harder.” It’s one of the lovely things about the culture there and, I hope, here.

David was wearing a nicely designed T-shirt with “K+W” on the front in their company typeface.

As one of the blogs pointed out, “The words Google, Facebook and Twitter were not used the whole night, and no one missed them.”

Well, that’s the first one.

Tell me whether I should keep it up.