A new major character is (eventually) introduced, and a bit more background to Al.
The following day Al realized that for once he wasn’t working on other people’s schedules, following their idiosyncrasies like a self conscious deodorant. This was a calculated risk, but for the first time ever he had a challenge that meant him, personally. He had always wanted to run an agency, his own. He had also discovered two people that he was quite certain were champions in the making. Bill and Carla had given him confidence, in the middle of a disaster.
Financially Keith had done him a favor but he could have gone on without that. Thanks to whatever kindly spirit had kept him away from the coke-bourbon-and-liver-transplant scene, he was quite well off. He was surprised to find that he could have retired. Wondering why he hadn’t checked with his accountant about that, he pottered about getting a decent breakfast.
All this domesticity was a bit new. Al’s parents were almost the exact rendition of The Salesman’s Family. On the move from birth, he had lived in most of the big cities, and in a few of the smaller small towns, on what had seemed a very ad hoc basis until he discovered that his father was going were the sales were. He had figured out with his mother’s help that they had lived in 42 different towns by the time he was 23.
His father Sam was a benchmark to Al. He’d seen him fall asleep from sheer fatigue on hundreds of occasions, apparently exhausted, unable to even read a newspaper. Then he’d wake up and do the various household jobs that would accumulate while he was away and be back on the road next day. He would return, flake out and revive again.
His mother glued the family together. Al and his younger brother, Sam Jr., were never short of anything. Toys, bikes, normality, education, all seemed to materialize as required. It had taken years to find out that his father simply left all the money in her care. He made the stout, colorless middle class suburban Puritans look like Sodom and Gomorrah in terms of financial morality.
His mother was a truly inspired financial manager. They prospered. If Sam was unable to work, they never suffered. She actually told him to stop once in the middle of his treks across the Midwest because she didn’t think it was worth his health for a few extra dollars. He was making about $5000 a week at that stage, a good time.
The sales background rubbed off on Al in a haphazard sort of way. He had gained a feel for sales spiel from his father that translated well when he bumped into a job with a small local ad agency in Illinois. They were purely local business, as much a letter-drop as an agency, and they didn’t try for work from Chicago, or anywhere else outside.
Small though they were, they knew talent when they saw it. Al found himself meeting real advertising people. The first thing they noticed about Al was that he could talk, and talk well. He even changed his speech patterns for better communication, faster for the Easterners, slower for the Midwesterners. He was funny, told good jokes, and was very quick on the uptake.
He found himself being asked to meetings with clients. He was there to put the local angle on sales campaigns, or so he thought. He wasn’t. They brought him along to add a touch of contact-empathy to the sales pitch for the campaigns. This he did, brilliantly, without even knowing it. Somewhere in his ancestry was the ability to grasp information well. He found he was able to describe target demographics, sales performances, and get people to listen and understand. That of itself was no minor achievement. People can be bored all the way to your competitors by that.
His agency tended to get all the local jobs; the quasi-rural, anonymous place was too small as a market to bother with and the Chicago agencies were happy to sub out the work. All the local agency had to do was sit on the ads, hatch them, and deliver the promotional materials, and the local guys would do the rounds and talk to retailers, distributors, and other exotic fauna. They soon noticed that this routine task was generating more interest than usual. The agency boss, Irwin, mentioned that his new gopher was a great face to face salesman. A visitor from Chicago discovered that the gopher had a way of holding the attention of clients.
To digress, anyone ever confronted with sales spiel knows that it comes in two categories; worthwhile and offensive. To kill a client, bore him, or patronize him, offend her, be dismissive to them. Insults to the intelligence are as good a way as any. Telling clients how to run their business is another failsafe. However good or profitable your product is, you can make an enemy for life.
Al managed to turn the sales into friendly get-togethers. He had more than enough natural savvy to know that people work best for their own interest. All you have to do is show them that you’re helping. He kept interest by sticking to the point and not using up valuable time with song-and-dance sales routines that wouldn’t sell anyway. He avoided inferences like “You should/must/have to” and made the client’s decision a result of informed choice. He didn’t tell them what their needs were, he asked. That also had the advantage of getting some definitions created, and some actual information. (David was the first one to mention that Al was the only person he’d ever met in the industry to never use a term that the client didn’t understand).
He got a very good reputation in the small business community. They asked him to drop in. That was a first. Whether he was selling ads for washing machines or office equipment, or explaining the promo for a detergent, he was always welcome. He sold ads to people that didn’t even think about their advertising. To many people their own ads are like billboards, and they get about as much thought. See and forget. Expectations aren’t high. Al made them think. He also avoided patronizing the clients, who were usually out of their depth when you got to “market image” or other unearthly concepts. They asked, he explained, they saw results, they bought more ads. He was regularly approached with job offers by some clients.
Anyway, he was swiped by the Chicago agency for about five times his salary. Technically he was in “account sales”, meaning essentially getting advertising accounts with businesses all over the state, and this usually involved getting them away from other advertising agencies. Same methodology, same results, bigger scale. Someone made the contact, he sold them the agency’s services. He was good at it, too. His reputation grew and jobs came in. A contact would be made. Al would go and sell the service to the prospective client. This is what he was hired to do; he was specifically there to get contracts. (This is unusual; generally an agency will have a ritual of account management, oversighted by the principals of the agency. It’s very territorial. An account is someone’s pet: they find it, they keep it. Status in the agency depends on value of accounts, so it does matter who handles what.) At Parkers that part of the equation was soon all Al, and it paid for itself well. He never once came back without a new account, in eight years.
An interesting and galling feedback situation arose. The clients would come back after a promo or a campaign and ask Al for advice. Al was very junior, but the clients came looking for him. They almost universally ignored the agency reps, the production people, and generally trod on any toes available in the agency, albeit usually unintentionally. Not so strange, really, because he was the original primary working contact with the account, but the others thought they had something to do with it, too.
The agency sighed and took the long view that anyone bringing in business should be encouraged, and told the staff to live with it. Return business is not to be sneered at in an industry where your account can be very ancient history before you pick up the phone. New business is sacred. Times were very competitive, and nobody was taking prisoners. You sold, you were in. Not good enough sales, you’re dead.
The reps weren’t pleased. There were some scenes. They found that Al was able to talk another language they understood, too. The partners were more amused than worried to hear that one of their more verbose and pugnacious reps had been torn to pieces by Al in a slight altercation about turf. He buried the guy verbally, and then physically. There were no further attempts to argue with him, even behind his back. This is similar to a pack of wolves taking up vegetarianism.
Al patched it up with the reps by virtue of the basic fact that he never pretended to know things he didn’t know. After a controlled cooling off phase, he asked them for advice on the series of new problems created by this sudden rise to guru status. They found that he was as bemused by his new role as paragon of market wisdom as they’d been, and bridges were rebuilt. They even returned to bringing him along when handling difficult clients. The guy he’d had the fight with got sacked. Sufficient explanation of our employment policy, thought the agency.
Al, awash with work, was introduced to a new arrival on the production side. A New Yorker, almost an ad for the place, David Goldstein. David was nominally a copywriter then, but in practice he was all production. He was also brazenly witty, at anyone’s expense, including his own, tough, sharp, and slightly younger than Al. They clicked. David was abrasive, when he felt like it, but also very deep. Al was generally pretty smooth with people, but was quite capable of taking on anyone in a confrontation. Between them they covered a lot of angles. They learned a lot from each other. They became a de facto team, and organizational schematics went out the window, again. David was assigned to do a fair percentage of the work generated by Al.
Say a campaign was required. Al would do the spadework, and get the general strategy and logistics mapped out between him and the client. He asked for specific information about the job and he invariably worked with the person who had the final say, which saved a lot of time. They would pin down the parameters of the promotion and costs, targets, where, when, and how the campaign was to be run. Everything from letter drops to big conventions to TV commercials and competitions. There are few things in the world which don’t involve advertising of some type or another, and any or all forms of marketing could be expected to form a promotion campaign. This costs money, and production has to be super efficient, and properly costed.
Then the material had to be created. Al made a point of getting the clients’ views on how they wanted their product to be perceived and sold. Contrary to popular hallucinations, successful businesses have a very clear idea who they’re selling to, and are in no way impressed by spending their money on things they don’t like, however cute and underdressed. Al generally managed to get all this done in a couple of meetings. He was thorough and he was efficient. There were no aspects of the job which weren’t dealt with in depth. It was a matter of note that no client ever had a complaint about the work. Others in the agency, perhaps, but by this stage Al was a category-killer. His accounts stayed with the firm, paid well, and that really said all anyone was interested in hearing about. He sold well and consistently. The management had good reason to have faith in his work.
Having established things with the client Al then made a beeline straight to David. David and Al would rough a pitch, and hustle the hooks, visuals and graphics. Sometimes there were alternate ads, or a series of ads, in a campaign. The roughs were sent to the client. The reaction, inevitably, would be essentially yes/no. Thanks to email and good visual technologies, a lot could be done and sent to those that needed to see it, very quickly, and the agency wasn’t cluttered with in-house bureaucratic processes.
This worked because it cut out the visualize/drivel/mockup/proof/edit/bitch-about-it-all ritual process which is supposed to happen. A campaign is mapped out, research is done, meetings are held, months are spent, money is thrown about. Then someone higher up the food chain doesn’t like the color. Al and David were much quicker and far cheaper. Agency production costs dropped dramatically. The production department came to work one day to find David running it.