Adland (15 page)

Although it's probably a fallacy, there is a widespread belief in the advertising community that when an agency gets bigger, its creative output becomes less daring. Big, in other words, equals bad. Jay Chiat spent much of his career wondering how big his operation could get before it became bad. At its peak, in 1992, it had billings of US $1.3 billion and 1,200 employees, as well as a Frank Gehry-designed headquarters shaped like a pair of binoculars. (Chiat once described himself as a ‘frustrated architect' – and it is partly to his theories about creativity and the working environment that we owe the cliché of loft-like advertising agencies stuffed with punch-bags, pool tables and other toys. He robbed executives of offices and then everyone else of personal desk space, inventing ‘hot desking' in the process.)

Chiat had also attempted to grow the agency through acquisition, acquiring an Australian outfit called Mojo MDA in 1989. But the deal unravelled. Global expansion plans sputtered to a halt and the recession suddenly began to take its toll. Laden with debt and struggling to reduce overheads, in 1995 Chiat finally agreed to sell the business to the Omnicom Group, where it became part of TBWA Worldwide. Against his better judgement, Chiat had finally joined the navy.

He left the agency soon after the deal was completed. His last job was as chief executive of Screaming Media, an internet content provider, which he joined in 1999 but had been observing since its founding in 1993 – always ahead of his time. He died of cancer, aged 70, in 2002.

Commenting in
The New York Times
after Chiat's death, Clow said that his boss had combined ‘the aggressiveness of a New Yorker with the freedom of California' (‘Jay Chiat, advertising man on a mission, is dead at 70', 24 April 2002). On a more poignant note, he added that Chiat ‘pushed us to the edge – and when we got there, he challenged us to find a way to fly'.

08

The French connection

‘Vive la publicité'

M
aurice Lévy had just stepped out of a restaurant on the Champs-Elysées when he noticed a sickly amber glow in the sky. Lévy, a technology wizard, was in charge of computer systems at the advertising agency Publicis, based a little further up the celebrated avenue. He turned to his dining companions and said without a soupçon of humour, ‘I think the agency is on fire.'

His friends assured him that this was unlikely and advised him to go home. Unconvinced, Lévy marched up the street and discovered to his horror that his premonition had been correct: fire trucks were clustered around the blazing building at number 133 Avenue des Champs-Elysées. It was the night of 27 September 1972 – one that would have a major impact on the history of the agency, and on Lévy's career.

Lévy knew that the future of Publicis depended on the data stored on disks and magnetic tapes in the computer room. Sickeningly, he realized in the same instant that his information technology team's night shift was still on duty. ‘I became so determined to get into the building that I got into a fight with the firemen,' he recalls. ‘They had to physically pin me to the ground. Finally I calmed down and they let me hang around outside. I stayed there until about two in the morning, but it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to get into the agency. So I went home and tried to sleep for a couple of hours.'

At 5am, however, Lévy returned. ‘The main blaze had been put out, but the building was still smouldering in places. I met several members of the IT team's morning shift, who were looking on. There was a fire brigade command car parked nearby with a leather jacket and a helmet sitting on the bonnet. Without really thinking, I grabbed the jacket and
the helmet and put them on. There was one guard on the door. He nodded at me distractedly and I walked straight into the building – the first member of staff to gain access.'

The building was little more than a blackened husk – anything that hadn't been destroyed by fire had been ruined by water. The computer room on the ground floor was a twisted mass of charred steel and melted plastic. Still, Lévy reckoned some material could be saved. He broke a window and began passing wreckage out to the lingering members of his team. ‘What was left of the disks, the tapes, half-burned papers, programmes… in a few hours we removed anything that might be useful. And it turned out that we did the right thing, because a few hours later the building was sealed for good.'

Lévy and the team took the material to IBM, where they began working to retrieve data from the damaged tapes. ‘By now it was Thursday morning. We worked without a break and by Monday, miraculously, we were able to provide every member of staff with details of their clients, their suppliers, work in progress, ongoing campaigns… And we were able to invoice clients for work we'd recently completed, which you can be sure they weren't expecting. As a result, the agency was back up and running relatively quickly.'

The Publicis fire was an accident.
Le Monde Diplomatique
once tried to suggest that it was an arson attack by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September (
‘Publicis, un pouvoir'
, June 2004), but this was strenuously denied by the agency. What is certain is that Maurice Lévy's quick thinking and subsequent hard work earned him the undying gratitude of the agency's founder, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. A French ad industry legend, Bleustein-Blanchet had become a mentor and something of a father figure to Lévy. Recalling the events surrounding the fire, Lévy admits, ‘Certainly, the fact that I showed a bit of initiative did not go unrecognized.'

Today, Maurice Lévy is president of the Publicis Groupe, one of the world's most powerful communications empires, which owns, among others, Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett. French industry mythology has it that Lévy's close relationship with Bleustein-Blanchet and his subsequent rise to the top of the agency were the direct results of his actions during and after the fire. The truth, as usual, is a little more complex.

The father of French advertising

Marcel Bleustein started Publicis in 1927 in two rooms above a butcher's shop at 17 rue du Faubourg Montmartre. He was 20 years old. The son of a Jewish furniture salesman, he had been born in the Paris suburb of Enghien-les-Bains, but was raised in Montmartre. Although unquestionably bright, he left school early, at around the age of 14, to work with his father. He discovered not only that selling came naturally to him, but also that he enjoyed the process of the sale more than its conclusion. He soon became intrigued by what the French called ‘
réclame
'. Adapted from the verb ‘
réclamer
', meaning ‘to call for', ‘to claim' or even ‘to beg', it was at the time the accepted term for the act of advertising. (It has since been replaced by the more genteel ‘
publicité
'.)

Explaining his motivation, Bleustein once said, ‘I chose the vocation of advertising because I felt irresistibly drawn to it; and because it would provide me with the thing I'd desired above all else since childhood: independence' (
Musée de la Publicité
website:
www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr/francais/publicite
). His father was reportedly unimpressed, commenting, ‘So you're going to sell air.'

The name of the agency was a simple contraction of ‘
publicité
' and the French pronunciation of the number six – because 1926 was the year in which Bleustein had conceived the project. He adopted a lion's head as the logo of the nascent operation. Some 50 years ahead of his time, he decided to base his kind of advertising not on ‘begging' for trade, but on building long-term relationships between brands and consumers. Early clients included Brunswick fur coats and furniture maker Lévitan. Slogans like the one Bleustein wrote for Brunswick,
‘Le fourreur qui fait fureur'
(‘Wildly fashionable furs'), appear quaint today, but at the time they were innovative – singsong forerunners of the radio jingle, which Bleustein also introduced to French advertising.

Three years later, Publicis was named the exclusive advertising representative for state-owned radio. When the government decided that public radio was to become an ad-free medium, in 1935, Bleustein resolved the problem by buying a small radio station and turning it into a successful private broadcaster. A few years later, he launched a company that made and distributed advertising films for the cinema, called Cinema et Publicité (which evolved into today's Mediavision). By the end of the
1930s, Bleustein was also handling advertising sales for many of the country's leading newspapers.

Central to the Bleustein legend is his valorous conduct during the war. During the Occupation, he joined the Resistance and changed his name to Blanchet, melting into the shadows as the company he had created was dismantled by the Nazis. Wanted by both the Gestapo and the Vichy government, he escaped first to Spain and then to England, where he became a fighter pilot for the Free French Forces. When the war ended, he was awarded numerous medals for bravery – but he had been ruined financially.

Fortunately, his pre-war contacts and clients stood by him. With radio now fully nationalized and resolutely non-commercial, the entrepreneur known henceforth as Bleustein-Blanchet concentrated on rebuilding his newspaper advertising sales house, and on creating ads for the cinema. He also moved into the transport advertising business, selling space on bus-sides and in the metro. Towards the end of the 1940s he travelled to the United States. He returned convinced of the importance of motivational research – and dreaming of opening his first branch agency in New York.

That ambition was achieved in the 1950s, a boom period for Publicis. Its advertising sales unit now represented newspapers with a total circulation of more than a million copies a day. Its mainstream advertising department won clients such as Shell, Singer and Nestlé. The New York office, the Publicis Corporation, opened in 1958. That same year, the agency moved into its new headquarters at 133 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the site of the former Hotel Astoria. On the ground floor, in imitation of the cafés/grocery-stores he had seen in New York, Bleustein-Blanchet opened the Publicis Drugstore. This innovation – which remains unique – was more than a way of inviting consumers into the agency; it also ensured that the Publicis brand name became almost as well known as those of its clients.

By the sixties, the ‘kid from Montmartre', as he occasionally referred to himself, barely recognized the agency he'd started in two unprepossessing rooms 40 years earlier. Publicis pioneered TV advertising in France, creating campaigns that are still fondly remembered today for the likes of Renault, L'Oréal, (hosiery brand) Dim and Boursin cheese (
‘Du pain, du vin, du Boursin'
).

In 1970, Publicis went public.

The man who said
‘Non'

Maurice Lévy remembers the first time he met Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, on the afternoon of 2 March 1971. It was Lévy's first day at Publicis. Having built up a considerable reputation in the IT field, he had been headhunted from a smaller agency that had, coincidentally, just offered to make him managing director. Although Lévy had embraced management and account-handling responsibilities alongside his IT duties, he didn't feel ready for the top slot. He thought to himself, ‘If they think I'm the best person to run this agency, I'm at the wrong agency.' A few days later, he got a call from Publicis, which had fallen behind in the information technology race and needed him to upgrade its systems. Lévy would end up working from dawn to the depths of night for almost a year on that project – consequently saving the agency from ruin.

In the meantime, on the afternoon of his first day, Lévy had been ushered in to meet Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. ‘It was a meeting I can only describe as “enlightening”,' he says. ‘I was immediately charmed by this formidable gentleman. You have to remember that he was extremely famous at that stage, the equivalent of a personality like Richard Branson today. Right then I instinctively adopted him not only as my boss, but as my mentor. The meeting was supposed to last 10 minutes, but it went on for an hour. He told me about his life, shared his vision of the future, and encouraged me to express my own ideas. At the end of the meeting, he shook me by the hand, looked me in the eye and said, “One day, young man, you will be running this agency.” When I proudly told my wife, she said, “He probably says that to all the youngsters.”'

Lévy had never thought in terms of career plans, but from that moment on he had a mission: to earn the respect of Bleustein-Blanchet. ‘He seemed to sense that I would rise to any challenge he gave me. It was like being in the army. If he told me to charge a machine-gun emplacement or blow up a bridge, I would do it. He made sure that each challenge was more difficult than the last, to see how far he could push me. And I was determined to prove that no matter how hard he pushed me, I would never fail him.'

Following the fire, with the agency staff dispersed around Paris, Lévy was part of the core team that helped Publicis get back on its feet. Exactly a year after the blaze, Bleustein-Blanchet – who was a great fan of symbols – decided that a management reshuffle was in order. ‘He
came to me and said, “Listen, Maurice, I've thought hard about this, and I've come to the conclusion that you should become CEO of the agency.” I told him I was very flattered, but that it would be a mistake. Publicis was the most respected agency in France, it thrived on creativity, and I hadn't earned my spurs as an advertising man. I saw myself as an administrator – running an agency was not my metier.'

Lévy's rivals still take delight in pointing out that he does not come from a classic advertising background; that he trained as a computer programmer. These days, of course, he can afford to shrug off such barbs, but at the time he felt something of an outsider. Nevertheless, he agreed to take on the role of secretary general, which meant that he was responsible for preparing the agency for its return to 133 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, where an avant-garde new building in glass and steel was under construction. ‘After the fire we lost time, money and clients. My job was to return Publicis to the level of health it had attained before the agency burned down.' He was also handed responsibility for the agency's two largest clients: Renault and Colgate-Palmolive. At the same time Publicis began pitching for, and winning, new accounts.

In 1975, 27 months after the conflagration, the agency moved into its revamped headquarters. Bleustein-Blanchet now reiterated his offer. And this time he waved Lévy's protests away: ‘Don't bother arguing – the decision has been made.'

Lévy took over the running of the agency first at a local, then gradually at an international level. By the early eighties it was clear that Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet considered Lévy his natural successor. ‘From 1987, almost right up until his death in 1996, we worked extremely closely together,' recalls Lévy. ‘He pushed me hard, but it became a sort of game. He wanted to find out how far I could take the company. He would say to me, “Let's see what your limitations are.” And I replied, “I assure you, you'll never find out.” I wanted to demonstrate that I was worthy of his trust.'

Towards the end, when Bleustein-Blanchet had withdrawn to the role of non-executive chairman, one of Lévy's jobs was to relate the inner workings of the agency to him, down to the smallest detail. ‘If I ever presented him with merely the conclusion of a story, he'd become irritable. “You're spoiling it! I want to feel as through I was there! Tell me everything!” When the mood took him, he'd burst into my office and demand to be brought up to date, even if I was already in a meeting.'