A Community of Friends.
If you’ve worked in advertising as long as I have, you likely have some fond memories of at least one of the organizations you did time with. For me, there actually are three firms that stand out.
The first is the agency you know as Digitas – I know it as Eastern Exclusives and later as Bronner Slosberg Associates – which gave me my (late) start in the business. That Digitas/Eastern Exclusives/Bronner Slosberg didn’t know at the time it was an agency is of little importance. It was a special place to work; sure, we were making it up as we went along, but there was something incredibly fearless about our approach to clients like American Express and AT&T.
The second was Foote, Cone & Belding, the first “real” agency at which I did a tour of duty. The office I called home, in San Francisco, did work that would rival anyone’s, for clients Levi Strauss, Pacific Bell, and Clorox, among others. Today it is merged with Draft and at best a shadow of its former self, but I was lucky enough to be there when it was a giant of an agency.
The third was Ammirati & Puris, inventors of BMW’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” tagline, renowned for true creative prowess, and filled with people of genuine distinction. My time at Ammirati was the best time I spent in advertising.
I’ve stayed in touch with friends from my those days – Vivian Young, Phil Palazzo, a few others – but the other day I received an email from an Ammirati alum, someone unexpected. Her name is Elena Shifflette.
Elena worked for Ammirati’s new business chief, Alyson Henning. She was one of a cadre of incredibly smart, unusually hardworking, and consistently steady and unflappable young people who collaborated with us on preparing for new business.
In those days presentation software was mostly beyond the skill set of people like me; Elena and her colleagues filled the gap. I remember working with her, side-by-side, to make changes to my new business presentations. More than once I called it a night the day before a pitch, knowing Elena and others on her team would get no sleep as they put the finishing touches on a presentation. It was one of several reasons why Ammirati was so formidable on pitch day.
What made Ammirati such an extraordinary agency wasn’t the senior leadership — although that by any measure that group was pretty impressive – no, it was what you might call the agency’s “bench.” Vast and deep, it was filled with people like Tom Sebok, Liz Deutch, Matt Welch, Ellen Wasserman, Peter Fekula, Kristi Faulkner, Andy Berndt, Sandy Sabean, Mike Aaron, Peter Leinroth, and dozens upon dozens of other incredibly talented, amazingly hardworking, and incredibly interesting people.
On Friday evenings many staffers would repair to the bar at Mesa Grill, on the first floor of the building where we worked, 100 Fifth Avenue, long before we relocated uptown. Now, it was the start of the weekend, and people could be just about anywhere in the world’s most entertaining city, but lots of folks chose to be start their weekend in an Ammirati melting pot, with people from all departments and all levels hanging out together. Why? Simple: they liked one another.
What made Ammirati special, I think, is that we took advertising very seriously, but didn’t take ourselves too seriously. We enjoyed making clients happy, we thrilled at doing great work.
And we had fun doing it. Sure there were office politics, runaway gossip, squabbling of all kinds – all the typical stuff you might expect at an agency or any great organization — but if you want to get a sense of what the agency was like, check out this 1996 holiday party video (is that Steve McCall playing guitar?). There are some inside jokes included that would take too long to explain, but even if you don’t get these, you still will come away with a sense of what it was like to work there.
So how did my old colleague Elena find me? LinkedIn, of course.
The genius of LinkedIn isn’t that it’s a job search site – I actually think it’s pretty lame in that regard – but instead is a way to reconnect with old friends. It helps you rediscover people like Elena, and reminds you that the best part of this business is that it is a community of friends.