My Life Inside The Brand Building Machine Part 2

This is the second in a series of four posts that outline my career, and also tells the story of what it was like to be in advertising in the 70s and 80s. It comes complete with some of the more important things I learned along the way.
I think this will be especially useful and informative to those people whose careers began after the start of the digital revolution. This was pretty much around the time when my second career, outside the advertising agency business, started.
If you’re a late arrival you can check out Part One.

Where We Left Off

My first agency, Butler MacKenzie had moved to the boondocks and that was it for me.

My First Big Time Gig

I charmed my way into Vickers & Benson in the early 1970s. It came as a bit of a culture shock to me, having come from an environment where everybody did a little bit of everything to a world where everything was compartmentalized in order to make the sum of the parts add up to a big fat whole.
And V&B was certainly that. They were the hottest agency in the country during the period I was there and for quite a while after I left.
The first thing that happened was that I automatically went from sorcerer’s apprentice to senior copywriter. I guess they must have thought that clients would be willing to pay big bucks for what was in my head.
The second thing that happened was that I was thrown into a group that consisted of people who had been in the creative business for many years, as opposed to my measly two. But they treated me completely as an equal, assuring me that what I didn’t already know about copywriting, I would pick up in a matter of weeks.
Far be it from me to complain about such regal treatment. In fact I was actually flattered by it and I’m sure it went a long way toward building my confidence, scared to death as I was going in.

My First Group

My first partner was a superpro art director named Gene Turner, who had come to V&B along with our group head, Terry Hill, from Detroit.
I asked Gene why he had left America to come to Toronto, which was not exactly a creative mecca at the time. He told me that one morning, he woke up, put his hand on his pregnant wife’s tummy to feel their baby kick, then got up to see that there was a tank (Sherman style), parked on his lawn, as a result of the anti-Vietnam riots that had been going on there.
He decided then and there to get out of Dodge. (first time I ever heard that expression).
Over the next few years, I had the time of my life. Gene and Terry Hill taught me what real creativity meant in this business. It flowed out of them effortlessly and it was contagious.

During this period, I also discovered that I was an extremely good headline writer, almost as good as the big creative honcho Terry O’Malley (pictured here).
After my first year, account guys on pieces of business I didn’t even know we had, started showing up in my office with headline challenged layouts, asking in the most polite way imaginable if they could have a few Jim Murray headlines for their ads.
It was the first time in my life that my name had ever been used as an adjective. I was flattered and more than happy to oblige.
My first group also included a brilliant art director named Katie Knox, an amazing writer named Terry Bell and another great writer named Peter Langmuir. Both Terry and Peter ended up playing big parts in my career as time went by.

Really Special People: Jim Ronson

It wasn't long before the awards started rolling in, and the agency continued its seemingly endless growth pattern. After a year, I was moved into another group run by one of the owners, Don Murphy. I was also partnered with a new art director named Jim Ronson. Jim was just off the plane from London. O’Malley had met and recruited him while he was judging at Cannes. (A big advertising awards thing)
Ronson was probably the only real creative genius I have ever worked with, and I worked with a lot of really brilliant people over the years. But Ronson was special. He was amazingly tuned into what it was that turned people’s cranks. This is not something that you can learn, you kinda have to be born with it, and we all are to a greater or lesser extent, otherwise we probably wouldn’t get anywhere in life.
But Ronson was something else. Everything he did became a classic. As you can guess, it wasn’t very long (a year) before he was gobbled up by a huge multinational, in this case Young & Rubicam and put on the General Foods account and paid huge bucks.
Ronson and I stayed very close over the years. In all that time I never called him Jim. Nobody did. He was one of only a handful of advertising buds that I would classify as a personal friend as well. He never became a creative director or agency owner, always worked as an art director and group head, but over the years his genius was responsible for the birth and re-birth of dozens of big time brands. He was a real behind-the-scenes game changer in this town.
After two years at V&B, I got canned. I can’t remember the specific reason but it had something to do with the internal politics of the agency business—the management of which, at that time, was not really my long suit.
Needless to say I made it a point to learn more about that stuff as I moved along. But it really didn’t worry me. Because t in the agency business, copywriting division, I was officially a known commodity.

What You Need To Know Here

A couple of things that V&B, especially Terry O’Malley taught me.
1. Effective advertising is like having a conversation with your neighbour about a product you just bought and are really happy with. If you can capture that in your writing, you’ll be ringing bells all over the place.
2. Advertising, as a career, is like baseball. There are a lot of ways to win. There will be times when you're in a slump. There will be times when you hit everything out of the park. And over the course of time, if you can hit .300 or better, you’re beating the 80-20 rule by 10% and that technically makes you a stud.
I don’t think many people in advertising these days think in those terms. They’re mostly into grabbing attention with cheap gimmicks and fart jokes and not really having any sort of conversation with the customer. They pay lip service to it, but what I see is mostly just a lot of yelling "Look at me".
On the one hand, it really sucks. But on the other hand, clients who are tired or afraid of that crap are how I make my living these days.

Base Hamilton & Other Mysteries

The reason I wasn’t upset or even unhappy about getting canned from V&B, was because I was basically young and stupid. This is one of the few situations where young and stupid works in your favour.
Fortunately I was young and stupid with a fabulous book (portfolio) a ton of metal (awards), and the attitude that I would always end up being alright.
Now if you’re looking for a job in advertising, there are several ways you can go about finding one.
You can get a headhunter, which will take you a while, what with all the process they have in place to earn their fees. You can send out resumes, which get filed with hundreds of others in some HR department filing cabinet. You can make phone calls that will never be returned. Or, and this is usually the most effective, you can go have a beer.
At this point in Toronto advertising history there were several places you could do that. But because I wanted to work right downtown, as opposed to the burbs or up the hill at St Clair or beyond, my watering hole/schmoozefest turned out to be a place called Brandys, which was a big pub on the corner of Church and The Esplanade. It didn’t get more downtown than that.

Schmoozing With The "English Mafia"

Before I got married I shared a flat with a guy named John Wild who I met in Ottawa. John was a photographer who was, at the time, working out if a very big art studio (before Macs) called Tyler Clarke, which was owned by two Brits named Mel Tyler and Frank Clarke.
Mel was a little strange, especially with people who weren’t British, and Frank was the most well connected guy in the city. John introduced me to Frank and Mel and over the course of several weeks, Frank introduced me to every British art director in town.
One day, he introduced me to a guy named John Speakman who was working at a hot boutique agency called Base Hamilton. This was run by a writer named Barry Base, who was rich and arrogant and very, very good at what he did. Speakman set me up with an interview and voila, I had a new job as his partner.

Brothers In Arms

Barry Base believed that advertising was all about copywriting. He was a big fan of long copy ads and basically taught me how to write them.
Despite his massive ego, Barry was a very thoughtful guy and had quite a positive disposition. He was the first guy I met in advertising who had an almost purely intellectual approach to it, which didn't always serve him well.
Having said that, their approach worked at the time, and allowed us to have a really decent client roster. (Granada TV, Meadowvale Homes, Gooderham Warts (booze), Savyette Department Stores and a part of Westons (baked products).

Base Hamilton was located in the Flatiron Building, which was just perfect for me. Barry lived in the Beaches and I lived close enough to the Beaches to be considered a civilized individual, so I was pretty readily accepted.
I worked mainly with John Speakman but I also did a little work with the other art director there, Chris Hughes, who was quite mad and brilliant at a time when mad and brilliant were considered to be desirable. Chris was also a country singer who sounds very much like Willie Nelson. I forget his stage name, but it was pretty cool too.
Barry managed to create a rather forceful ‘Us Against The World’ persona for his agency. But as it grew and the people in it grew along with it, we started to see this as a bit isolationist.
This eventually led to anarchy, with a couple of the key players leaving to form their own shops and, of course, taking a good deal of the agency’s business with them.
This, coupled with some creative differences of opinion I was having with Barry, led, after two years, to my demise once again, and opened the door to a whole new world, both at work and at home.

What You Need To Know Here

1. Long copy ads will not save the world. Sometimes ads with no words in them are every bit as powerful.
2. Writing advertising is really more an art direction function with words as the primary tools.
3. Creative boutiques come and go. Then come and go again.
To be continued...

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