My Life In The Brand Building Machine Part 3

During this period, my friend John Wild had gotten me interested in photography, even found me an amazing deal on a Pentax Spotmatic outfit.
So I was also doing a lot of photography at the time, mostly natural light streety type stuff. But some of my work had been published and most of my friends were art directors and knew about my photography, so when they found out I was on the loose they started calling me to do odd little bits of work for them.
This is not something I ever really marketed, it just kind of happened.
Within a year I had traveled across the country a couple of times doing photos for Shell Canada & Volkswagon as well as Weekend Magazine among others, where I had a chance to shoot some fairly famous people like Mordecai Richler, Gordon Pinsent, Leonard Cohen and Prime Minister Jean Cretien when he was Justice Minister. This was very cool. I was also doing photography for Attic, which allowed me to go on gigs with my wife, as she also had to travel a lot in her job as promotion manager.

The Clancy Chronicles

The writer who replaced me at Base Hamilton was a guy named John Stewart, who at the time was working at a small indie agency called Stewart, Clancy, Headford and doing a lot of work for the CHUM media group. CHUM is a big deal radio group in Toronto.
Stewart was a really nice guy and was leaving his gig because he had a kind of falling out with his partner, Michael Clancy.
After having lunch with me one day and getting all the inside dope on Base Hamilton, he decided that Clancy and I might get along very well. He said that Clancy was pretty much a raw creative genius and one of the best bullshitters he had ever met. But Stewart was a little too laid back for the energy level that Clancy created and it made him hyper and unhappy.
He knew Barry Base and believed they were cut from pretty much the same cloth. So I said okay, because I’d had a taste of high end small agency life and I liked it. So we basically swapped gigs.
Clancy, as it turned out was from Agincourt and actually went to school with my wife. He was a little more well formed as an all round creative person than I was, but it was close enough for cowboys.
We hit it off right from the first minute we met. Ideas flowed out of him like a river of whiskey. He always thought big and then scaled it back later. This was the beginning a friendship and a working relationship that lasted on and off for about 15 years, the details of which, are yet again a whole other story.
We worked closely together for the next three years on all kinds of stuff. I was always amazed at how astute Clancy’s understanding of advertising was, despite the fact that he had never worked in an agency.
He was a natural leader, and I was his sidekick. These were heady times indeed. And by that I mean, much tequila consumed.
One of Clancy’s biggest achievements at the time, was the creation of a pop culture publication called The New Music magazine, which was sponsored by CHUM.
He and I did a lot of writing and I did a fair bit of photography for this publication. Later on, when the CHUM Group got into bed with the CITY TV group, this idea was appropriated and turned into a very successful TV show. This was something that always Clancy off, because he had proposed it to CHUM, and they basically gave it to CITY and Clancy never even got so much as a nod or a credit of any kind. Which would really piss anybody off.

What You Need To Know Here

1. There are all kinds of ways to make a living in advertising if you’re creative and lucky enough.
2. Primadonnas usually get found out in the end. Barry Base ended up folding his hot little boutique down into a consultancy and we lost track of each other. I actually believe he passed away a few years ago.
3. A career in advertising is like one of those Dubai to Daakar offroad races. Lots of bumps and detours along the way, with long stretches of smooth road. In order to finish, you really can’t avoid either one.

Back In The Saddle...Sort Of

One day, for no reason that I can recall, Clancy called Jerry Goodis. Jerry who was a Canadian Advertising icon, had recently unceremoniously quit a rather lucrative position at MacLaren, which, at the time was Canada’s biggest agency, after more or less folding his former agency, and the place that made him a legend in the city, Goodis Goldberg.
We found that Jerry was now in an office in the Eaton Centre, so we made an appointment to go and see him, mainly because we both agreed that he would be a pretty cool guy to work for.
So we did. We had a great chat. Got along famously, despite the fact that he had never heard of us, and he hired us on the spot to be the first creative team in the new Jerry Goodis agency.
Anybody who knows Jerry Goodis knows how smart he is. He is the ultimate advertising sales guy. Watching him in a meeting with clients is like watching a great illusionist keep pulling rabbits out of hats, sawing women in half and making elephants disappear.
I learned more about effective presentation, watching Jerry for the three short months I was there than I did in pretty much my whole career up to that point.

Why I Left This Gig

Clancy and I were labouring under the delusion that as the agency grew, Jerry would make us Co-Creative Directors. But then Jerry decided to bring in somebody else to fill that role, and we both kinda got pissed.
But Clancy really liked it there, because he was learning a lot from Jerry, and didn’t think that jumping ship was such a smart thing to do, so early in his ‘agency’ career. Clancy also knew that he could could pretty much be his own dog, whoever the creative director was, so he decided to stay.
I was kinda missing the bigger agency world and so I took a temporary job at Cockfield Brown, where the Creative Director was Harry Yates, who had been the head man at McCann during their great run in the seventies.
Unfortunately the political infighting in that agency basically ruined it and after about three months, I’d just about had it and needed some real stability.
As fate would have it, my friend Terry Bell called me. He was at Foster Advertising at the time and asked me if I was available. I said I was and he set up a meeting with Joanne Lehmann who was the Creative Director. The job was replacing Terry as he was going to McLaren. (We all moved around a lot back then). She hired me on the spot. Which was not unusual, because she knew who I was and respected the person who had recommended me.

The Government

Foster was an Ontario provincial conservative agency, because its president at the time, Tom Scott was a good friend of Premier Bill Davis. Half their billings were government ministries and crown corporations. I volunteered to work on a lot of it, because I didn’t have a lot of government experience and thought I could use some.
This was a fascinating time to be working on government stuff. The Ministry of Energy, which was my main account, was all about energy conservation, and so was I, so we were extremely compatible.

Danny Floyd - My Brother From Another Mother

After a couple of months of more or less working on my own, Joanne called me into her office. There was a guy sitting there, who could have been the younger brother of The Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltry. His name was Dan Floyd and Joanne had just hired him and had a hunch that he and I would make a great team.
She wasn’t wrong. Danny became my partner in a relationship that lasted about 12 years in the agency business and another two or three after that. Danny went to school at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts, which was close to Thunder Bay where he was from.
He had come to Foster From Ted Bates where he knew Ronson who worked there for a time. This is a pretty small world.
Danny and I worked together at Foster for about three years, during which he bought a house in the east end which turned out to the the house that my wife and I lived in before our move to Rosedale. We always thought that was kinda weird.
One day, three years later, there was a big management shift at Foster and I found out that Danny and several other creative people were gonna get canned, I was kind of protected because I was working on confidential Ministry of Energy stuff, directly for the Premier, Bill Davis and my liaison guy Charles Fremes (amazing dude) would not let them toss me.
But who wants to work for people who would fire you in a heartbeat if they had the chance?
Also I had a kid at this point and was seeking some stability. And this situation really sucked.

Pete Langmuir – My Other Brother From A Different Mother

Around the time Danny was getting canned, Peter Langmuir, (who I worked with at V&B, and hung out with from time to time after that) called. He was now Creative Director at Benton & Bowles and was looking for an art director to work with a junior writer they had hired.
I recommended Danny, and Peter was flipped out, because he knew Danny from Ted Bates. All Peter said was “Tell him to give his notice and get his ass down here.” I did. Danny did too.
So I continued at Foster on my own. The new regime shunned me like a rogue meertkat. I basically just sat in my office all day writing feature screenplays and lyrics, and the odd Ministry of Energy ad, chatting with the survivors and collecting a paycheck for pretty much the next three months.
Charles Fremes was really upset about the situation, but encouraged me to hang in. At this point it was no skin off my nose. I was talking to people and looking around but didn’t see much at the time that was interesting and I was really enjoying the paid leave.
One day Danny called and asked me if I wanted to maybe get a headhunter and see about going somewhere else together, because the writer he was working with was, in Danny’s words, “No Jim Murray, not even close.” and he was kinda turned off.
I was flattered and said sure. But told him to make sure that he explained everything to Peter Langmuir and give him lots of notice.
Later that morning, Peter called me, and asked me out to lunch. This was the beginning of the final, and far and away, best stage of my career.
What You Need To Know Here
1. At a certain point in any career you start to see your path more clearly and engineer solutions that will get your where you want to go. In other words, you start growing up.
2. Power tripping and insurrection, like the crap that was going on at Cockfield Brown, always creates situations that don’t end well. Literally 9 months after I left, Cockfield Brown was gone. Their accounts scattered to the winds, their people, the same.
3. Being known as a good guy in the business is just as important as being known as a talented guy. Or at least it was at the time.

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