I was pretty fed up with the problems inherent in working for a company that had no marketing strategy and way too much process. I’d applied for an internal position as a product manager and been turned down because I didn’t wear make-up. I’m not kidding. I met Ed, a former colleague and refugee from big consulting, who was now managing a small advertising firm, for lunch at the Saltgrass Steakhouse on I-10. Between the bread and the entrée I vented a bit. By the time desert came, he’d offered me a job. Yes, it really worked that way back then, sometimes.
It was a nice little company. The guy who founded it had the
office down the hall, across from the room full of artists, one of who was his
brother. “Creatives” as we call them in the advertising world, were allowed to
wear jeans and long hair and pretty much do what they liked. In the next office
the account managers, in tidy suits or skirts or khaki, handled all the project
management and put on the respectable face for the clients.
I was the odd one in this crew, neither a creative nor an
account manager, but an “expert” on this thing that advertising firms in those
days called “new media,” aka the internet. Ed didn’t really get the internet
thing, but he knew that times were changing, and he hoped I could help drag the
agency into the next decade.
I helped out with some interesting client projects, and I
did research and wrote a plan for transforming the agency into a digitally
savvy organization, with proposed partnerships with key service providers. I
had a couple of smart MBA-student interns working for me who handled the
financial modeling. I spent hours reading about internet and marketing trends,
chasing down rabbit holes following the visionaries and authors and rebels
who were surfing this new technology wave. It seemed like this agency could be a good
place to stay, expand on the internet skills and knowledge I’d painfully
acquired at my last job, perhaps help guide this little company and its clients
into the future while creating a team and a role for myself that would elevate
my career.
It was the last time I had that dream about an employer, by the way.
The founder of the company decided to retire and go fishing and
sold us off. At first it seemed nothing much would change. We were designing a trendy new office space, a little larger and on another floor of the same building. The
rest of the company just kept on keeping on with existing projects and clients.
But slowly things started to change. The founder had been the face of the
company to the clients, and they didn’t have the same loyalty once he was gone.
Finding new clients got harder. The parent company was concerned about the cost
of the new office space we were building out. Then one day, a new president
showed up to take charge. He was retired from Madison Avenue and looking for a nice little vanity job to keep him busy.
One of my projects was the redesign of our own website. I’d
had the fun of walking the line between the artists and the account managers,
trying to find just edgy enough to be hip without being completely ridiculous.
Website performance be damned, we were going to have half-page portraits with bright red backgrounds on our team bio pages. Twenty years later, I cringe at the thought. I was working with the account managers to
solicit quotes from our clients about what it was like to work with us to round
out the copy, and the new president thought the process was taking too long.
“Just make up something,” he told me.
“That doesn’t seem like it would be entirely ethical,” I
protested.
“Just add something in small print like ‘what our clients
would say about us,’” he retorted.
“Every day we advise our clients to be authentic and honest
with their customers and their market,” I returned, getting a little hot under
the collar. “We should model the same behavior.”
Later, Ed took me aside and said “You can’t talk to him like
that. He’s the president of the company.”
“He’s still wrong,” I responded. “And I’m not comfortable
just making stuff up and attributing it to our clients.”
“You need to just do what he asked,” Ed replied.
“Well, I won’t,” I answered. “You can if you want, but I’ll
have no part of it.”
And that was the end of that. I packed up my stuff and never
looked back. The company didn’t last much longer. The parent company just didn’t
see much point to keeping them around and shut them down. I detoxed with a few
short months of unemployment and daily trips to the gym before calling my favorite recruiter and getting back into the arena.
