The owners called at 6:52, two days after the Halloway pitch. Gordon knew it was about money, even before he picked up the phone. Quite frankly, they only ever called him about money; anything else, like a holiday well-wishing, a congrats for an industry award, condolences on the death of a coworker, any of that would arrive by email, drafted and signed by someone’s assistant. Money got a phone call, always.
North & Main was founded in 1987 by two admen who believed that advertising was like show business, but for people who were afraid of Los Angeles and felt superior to people who lived there. They had long since retired to separate islands, and the agency now belonged to a firm out of Greenwich.
There were four voices on the call, and when Gordon really focused in, he could reliably identify two of them. He didn’t ask any questions or ask anyone to state their names; that was set dressing on a call where the fewer questions asked, the better.
“We’ve been looking at the run rate, and we don’t like what we see.”
Gordon wrote the words “run rate” down on the notebook in front of him.
“The truck thing obviously didn’t land, said the second voice. She wasn’t asking him about the pitch or the meeting; she was making it clear that news of a failed pitch moved very quickly.
“We’re still in conversation with Halloway,” Gordon pushed. And that still was technically true. They hadn’t said ‘no’ outright, but that pitch was definitely an abject failure.
“The new business pipeline just doesn’t work with the current cost structure,” the first voice said. “Headcount is our lever.”
Levers, shapes, structures; if the FBI had wiretapped the line, they would have no idea this call was about actual human people and their actual human jobs.
“How much of a reduction are you recommending,” asked Gordon.
“Half.”
Gordon wrote 50% down on his paper, thinking to himself that a percentage felt more abstract and less severe. His current staff was sixty-one humans, and doing the math on that, and giving himself the optimistic +1, he wrote down thirty.
“Gordon?”
“Yes, understood,” Gordon responded.
CLICK. And just like that, the call was over. Gordon peeked out over his monitor, through the glass walls of his office. The office floor had emptied out hours ago.
Gordon walked through the rows of empty cubicles. The Sonos played an algorithmically optimized playlist for an audience of empty chairs. It was fairly upbeat, so the mix must have been called something like “Just One More Hour, Don’t Die on Us.”
He didn’t ask Pam to send him the org chart; she would ask why, and her face did a weird, judgmental twist when Gordon made tough choices that she didn’t agree with. He didn’t want her opinion. For a woman trained in the dark arts of HR, she carried a lot of baggage and hard opinions on things. He walked back to his desk, flipped through files, and found it himself. It took around 40 minutes.
Then he built a spreadsheet with dainty little columns labeled with names, titles, salaries, and projects. He added a fifth column he labeled “transitions.” After twenty-six years in advertising, he was a bit disappointed in himself that he couldn’t come up with a better, clearer descriptive word that would ultimately mark who would stay and who would go.
He started by listing everyone’s name, their title, and their department. It was like he was taking inventory on a factory floor, making sure all the machines were accounted for. He was, in a way, aware that his next step was to decide which parts of the assembly line could be removed without production fully shutting down.
The first department was easy: Media Buying. The other teams would make the pieces of content; media buying would buy the placement. The commercial spot at the Super Bowl, the Meta ad spend, the bus shelter in Secaucus. They delivered a tangible output that was clear and trackable; that means they got to stay. ROI, return on investment. Now that’s a term that sounds good in a quarterly meeting.
The account team lost all their middle managers. The juniors were cheap and hopeful, and the seniors knew where everything was. Easy. The people in the middle were just forwarding emails back and forth anyway, right?
The edit team went from five editors to two. Same volume of work; they would have to make it work.
Production, he decided, would not be a “flex team.” One of those corporate terms that meant there was no production team at all; they now existed only as a spreadsheet of freelancers who wouldn’t require health insurance and would only be contracted after creative was locked in with clients.
Joel stayed; Gordon felt that was the obvious choice. Clients had asked for him by name, and that meant he was in some way a product that the agency could sell.
Eli also stayed; this was less of a slam dunk for Gordon, but ultimately a ‘yes.’ His copywriting was strong, and he delivered on a level that wasn’t embarrassing to read aloud in meetings.
Marie stayed because she could understand metrics in a way Joel never could. She could also act normal in front of clients in a way Joel never could.
Then there was Georgia, who sat under Joel on the creative team. Gordon wasn’t sure he needed more than one full-time art director, and that person definitely wasn’t Georgia. The only reason to keep her was to keep Joel from coming completely undone, but Joel had delivered some of his best work during the darkest times of his life. The same day his divorce was finalized, Joel won the agency 7.5 million in creative work with Apple. It was unprecedented, and it was beautiful. Gordon pretended not to see Joel crying out front by the dumpsters at the end of the day.
Gordon worked through the remainder of his list, and at 11:40 emailed Pam.
Pam -- I’ll need 30 separation packets prepared for Friday morning. Standard terms. We can book conference room B in 15-minute increments to handle the deliveries.
Pam would bring her own Kleenex, stopping by Duane Reade first thing in the morning before she came into the office. She knew that crying at work was very much out of fashion, but who knew what the day would bring. Maybe some of these stoic admen would cry, or scream, or punch her right in the nose. Who knew what the day would bring.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.