Angels & Demons | A Tale of Two Agencies
By Lesly Pyle
_____
Cut to 2000.
I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in
June and moved to San Francisco shortly after. You could say I was a Sooner
fresh off the Schooner.
My first post-collegiate job was at an
incredible ad agency called Foote, Cone & Belding. FCB for short. FCB was
known for its creative work — and its equally creative pranks.
This story is about the latter.
I was only a month old at FCB when my fellow
creative assistant, the mysterious Michael Burbo, approached my desk with a
mischievous grin on his face. This was not rare. Michael Burbo was always up to
something. He spoke from a 3/4 angle, never quite making full eye contact. This
kept him in a stance poised for a quick escape should the need arise.
“Look,
kid, Bacino called,” Burbo said.
Oh boy.
Any sentence with the words “Bacino
called” was worth leaning in for. Brian Bacino was our boss. He was a Group
Creative Director who was kinda like a don. But the fun kind. If Burbo was
scheming, Bacino was likely behind it.
“Bacino’s at a
Giants’ game
with the Top Brass,” Burbo said. “They’ve
ordered ‘Black Ops’.”
Burbo and Bacino spoke in code. It was a great
education for this small-town Okie to learn how to decode their cryptic
language. But, by four weeks into my four-year tenure at FCB, I had figured out
some basics. If the Top Brass were at a baseball game during the workday, this
meant two things:
They were drinking.
And they were thinking.
A few days before this fateful phone call, the
ad agency across the street from us, GMO Hill Holiday, put up a little sign in
their window facing our building. It had basic black letters on a white sheet
of copier paper. The lack of visual panache plus its punchy tone made us
suspect that it was designed by a Copywriter. It had only two words:
“FCB SUCKS.”
“FCB SUCKS.” We got a big laugh about our
little brother from another mother calling us out. Both agencies were owned by
Interpublic Group — a giant holding company that got gianter recently when it
merged with the mothership, Omnicom.
FCB was the big kid on the block and felt no
guilt about humiliating our brethren publicly. In fact, the command to do so
had come from FCB’s
executive leadership at the last game of the Giants’ regular season. They were masterminding a
sinister plan between overflowing cups of overpriced beer, whilst cheering
their hearts out to send the Giants to the post.
Bacino gave Burbo a
budget.
Burbo gave us the green light.
The FCB Fox Force Five was led by Michael
Burbo. He recruited the rest of us. Brian Tocco, a fellow creative assistant,
who was Burbo’s best
friend and best pranking accomplice since childhood. Ward Evans and John
Benson, a creative director team, who played in a band with Burbo. And the Okie
who nobody really knew but trusted with Top Secret intel anyway. I wondered if
it was my Gomer Pyle naïveté that got me the nod. My band of brothers
shouted my last name like Sergeant Carter repeatedly:
“Pyle!” “Pyle!” “Pyle!” That
joke never got old. For them, anyway. But if that’s what it took to be part of the hijinks, I was
happy to fall in line.
FCB’s and GMO’s buildings were smack dab in the middle of the
San Francisco “Ad Ghetto.” Yes, that’s really what it’s called. The Ad Ghetto. Our office was seven
stories tall with a modest roof deck. GMO’s was only three stories but they had a much
larger rooftop. The kind where you could throw all-staff parties. In three
days, the Blue Angels would perform their annual Fleet Week Flyover. Ad
agencies were always looking for excuses to party. Fancy flying was more than
reason enough.
The FCB Fox Force Five had little time to
prepare our disproportionate response to the 8.5 x 11-inch “FCB
SUCKS” sign taunting us from across Pacific Ave.
Cut to October 5, 2000.
At 0900, we enlisted the FCB championship
softball team. We drafted the players with the strongest arms and the tightest
lips. Until our strike, you could count the number of people who knew about our
secret mission on two hands.
At 16:00 hours, from our lookout atop FCB’s building, we saw trays of charcuterie and
tables of booze being carefully arranged on GMO’s roof deck. Perfect. It would soon be full of
unsuspecting victims.
We waited for the right moment. The GMO crowd
was at a quorum. The Blue Angels’ aeronautical acrobatics appeared overhead.
Ward Evans was a creative by day and a musician
by night. He played a few instruments but on tap for this day was one in
particular. His trumpet. He tooted the iconic “Attention” bugle call. Everyone across the street turned
their awe from amazing circles in the sky over to us. We stole the Blue Angels’
thunder. Our plan was working already.
Ward’s bugle call was our team’s cue too. John Benson and I unraveled the
first of two king-sized sheets which cascaded down the side of our building. It
held our giant two-word retort:
“HEY GMO.”
Ward trumpeted again. Burbo and Tocco released
our second sheet to reveal the ultimate call to action:
“SUCK THIS.”
It might not have won a Titanium Lion for
copywriting excellence but it got the point across.
For the next several minutes, the FCB
bombardiers pelted GMO over and over and over again with water balloons. We had
buckets of balloons in our armory. Allegedly, our assault was all caught on
tape. The softball team’s
captain also ran the in-house A/V Studio.
With the help of long-range slingshots and
throwing arms like cannons, we targeted GMO’s trays. Splash! Food went flying. We targeted
their booze. Splash! Bottles went flying. We expected all of this.
But what we didn’t expect was their reaction. Or lack thereof.
We thought our sibling rivalry would just keep
escalating into an “Ad-nerd War for the Ages” with antics
press-worthy enough for the front page of trade magazines like Ad Age. First things first. We
needed GMO’s
counterattack. Aside from a half-hearted attempt to dump buckets of water on
our heads during a Pacific Avenue block party, it never came.
A different headline made the news instead. GMO
had just laid off much of their San Francisco staff. Many of the people we had
just soaked from head to toe had just lost their jobs. We literally rained on a
parade that had already been deluged.
We eventually got ours.
A few months later, FCB went through a large
layoff of its own. It rendered our big seven-story building that housed 500
people unnecessary. And we had to move.
Our office was converted into luxury condos. We
watched this sad transition take place from FCB’s new home, across the street, in none other
than GMO Hill Holiday’s
recently vacated space. FCB continued to shrink and had to move again in a few
years. “600 Battery” has since been known as a
doomed address for ad agencies. Commercial real estate seekers beware.
Cut to 2022.
I moved again. This time, to an agency far, far
away: The Richards Group (TRG) in Dallas, Texas. On my first day, I met one of
TRG’s group
creative directors and fellow copywriters. He’s a neighborly fella named Mike Bales. He told
me he had also moved to Dallas from San Francisco.
“Where
did you work in 2000?” Bales asked.
“FCB,” I
said. “You?”
“GMO
Hill Holiday,” he said.
Mischievous grins appeared on both of our
faces.
“And to answer
your next question,” he said, “Yes, I was there.”
But he’s yet to admit if his was the infamous window
that faced FCB.
Cut to 2025.
In another twist of fate, the author of this
story, Lesly Pyle, was laid off from TRG and she’s now looking for a job.
Contact her for creative positions and/or creative shenanigans. She’d like to
thank George Tannenbaum for giving her this space so this story would finally
see the light of day in an official advertising trade magazine: Ad Aged, not
to be confused with Ad Age.
