Excerpt

I didn’t know a damn thing about advertising but it did fall within the wide band of Communication Arts, which I professed to be my college major. “What the hell, why not?” I didn’t know it then but that phrase was to become my mission statement and the inspiration of my ad career.

Responding to the University “call”, I put on my best and only suit and trundled downtown to what was to be the first of several interviews for the job. I first met with the person who would be my immediate boss, the Product Information Director, Bob C. Bob, the “product guy” came from a family of WASP money in Detroit and although I never really knew its source his lock-jawed delivery made him a dead giveaway. He belonged to Detroit’s “new money”, made during and after WW2. This demographic lived in the fashionable northern suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills and consisted of General Motors and Chrysler people. The rest of Detroit’s “new money” was mainly Ford people who lived in the almost equally fashionable western suburb of Dearborn. I later found out that Bob assigned the title Director to himself once he had someone else in the department to direct – namely me. It was Bob who told me what the job entailed.

The agency was looking for a knowledgeable car and truck enthusiast to verify the accuracy of the advertising claims made in the agency’s ads. I (who couldn’t identify one car from another without reading the nameplate) said, “OK” which prompted Bob to set up interviews on successive days with the then Car VP/Account Supervisor, Dean followed by the then Truck VP/Account Supervisor, Leo and finally the agency General manager Eamon. The interviews were basically the same. Question: “What do you know about cars and trucks?” Answer: “Very little, but if you give my ninety days I’ll know more that anybody else that works here.” That was my answer to every question thrown at me. What’s a hemi-engine? What’s a drivetrain? What’s a greenhouse? What’s a wheelbase?

The approval process for my getting the job went like this. Eamon couldn’t understand how a guy with my lack of experience ever got into his office much less into the building. The two Account Supervisors not wanting to look bad in bucking me up to the GM interview told Bob, the Product Information Director of no one yet until I was hired, that it was his decision to hire me or not. But if he did, it was his ass if it didn’t work out. Bob was so desperate for help that after thanking everything he held holy that I had at least survived the interrogation interviews he hired me on the spot. As for the future of his ass, he already had a plan for that.

In our shared office his desk and my desk were pushed together front-to-front which meant that we faced each other whether we liked it or not. Depending on how our individual day was going, we liked it or not. But it never became an issue. Our collective job was to make sure that everything we said in our ads about our client’s cars and trucks in terms of product attributes were accurate and correct. Stuff like our car really could accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 7.3 seconds. Or, our 1-ton stake truck really could carry one-ton. The creative writers said anything they wanted about the cars and trucks as long as their copy sang. It was up to Bob and me to keep all of us out of jail.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Bob favored car ads over truck ads. In fact he hated truck ads. So when he turned the truck ads over to me he effectively established two separate Product Information Departments – hence shared Director titles. Bob would go out to the car client who occupied offices in a brick building that housed the Corporate Headquarters in a little city called Highland Park that lay completely within the Detroit city limits. I, on the other hand, went to another brick building that housed the truck division’s executives. It was located on Detroit’s eastside and fronted a truck assembly plant. Directly across the street were bars lined up side-by-side for about two blocks. Every time I went to the client’s offices I would be amazed at the action going on across the street. It would be nine o’clock in the morning and the bars would be packed what with the night shift getting out an hour earlier and all.

The first piece of ad copy I ever reviewed was about a pick-up truck written by Klaus. The copy looked OK to me. It seemed to make sense but from a product descriptive standpoint it was deliberately and completely inaccurate. I took it out to the client product planners, engineers and lawyers for their approval but, instead, it got hammered. Word got back to Bob from the product planners and engineers that I needed a lot of personal training and supervision. Word also got back from the advertising and marketing client to our Truck VP/Account Supervisor that it was in his best interest to get Bob to review the truck copy instead of me. Klaus admitting his sabotaging the copy and that I was still within my self-proclaimed ninety-day trial period are the only things that saved my job.

One day Bob invited me to go with him to the car client. This was when I met one of the most extraordinary and influential persons in my life. He was the only client that I ever really liked and trusted as a fellow human being. His name was Patrick P. He was the liaison between the relatively monastic group of product planners and engineers and the rowdy ad agency guys whom the client felt didn’t and wouldn’t ever know anything about cars and trucks. Pat was half Cherokee and had the chiseled face to prove it. He was a big-boned, large man but not obese. He occupied a desk among the cluster of other desks in a large workspace that he sneeringly called the “bull pen” and referred to himself as the highest paid clerk in the corporation.