TV

‘Who do you trust?’

Peter Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser)

First, Sterling Cooper’s abandoning Mohawk for a shot at AA suggests that agencies see clients (and their brands) merely as means to a pay check.

Second, Peter Campbell’s reprehensible use of personal tragedy as pitch-leverage suggests that ad people will stop at nothing for success.

Both were overstated in last night’s episode — the second wildly.

The truth is that most good agencies recognize the relationship between great work now and financial success in the future. They also realize that the biggest brands on the block won’t necessarily afford them the best opportunity for brilliant work.

Brilliant work requires a lot more than access to a Draper-like mind. Ideas are the currency of our business, but their value is quickly and easily diminished by process, dogma, and fear — hurdles which can be encountered when working with the biggest brands.

Think of the last ad you really loved; I’ll bet it was from a smaller brand with nothing to lose.

Instead of pitching everything in sight, smart agencies are increasingly asking themselves: Are these potential clients brave enough to let us do something different for them? Will they trust us and embrace the uncertainty that comes with producing nuanced work?

Just as agencies ask their clients to be patient (i.e., “let’s build a powerful brand for the long haul instead of only thinking about immediate results”), they themselves are trying to be patient too. The best are picking the right partners.

Not sure if this is a ’60s vs. ’00s thing. But I do know that even in the ’60s, agencies took great pride in the longevity of their client relationships — which suggests a longer view than the Mohawk vs. AA plot-point did in last night’s episode.

No matter, Peter’s soul-selling makes for riveting TV drama. Thankfully, I’m hard-pressed to think of a similar example in my agency experience.

Sure, there’s the occasional I-need-to-pretend-that-I-like-this-person-but-I-really-think-they-stink. But that happens to all of us.

“Mad” man Paul Kinsey’s selling out however (as in “I write copy for an agency but I’d really rather be writing the next great American novel”) feels closer to the kind of compromise you find when working at an ad agency.

But as an (actual) novelist friend once told me: “Art for art’s sake… money for God’s sake!”

Ed Castillo is VP, Director of Account Planning at PHD, part of the Omnicom Media Group. He helped create the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign for Las Vegas.