CD & Co-Chairman
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Okay, so Goodby didn’t come to Toronto for the 40th annual Bessies Awards. His video address to the crowd gathered at the Sheraton Centre attempted to convince us that relentless pressure from his family and nervous colleagues were responsible for the no-show.

Maybe it really was SARS, maybe he didn’t have his facts straight, but I don’t think it was Fox news that made him reconsider. One thing I learned from his apology and words of advice to the Bessies audience was this: “don’t do things that people won’t notice.”Which is why I was thrilled when he decided to talk to ihaveanidea.

Jeff Goodby is a longtime mentor for me, he was instrumental in bring account planning to North America in the form of a Jon Steel, and his work is one of a very short list of reasons I changed my career path more than two years ago.

ihaveanidea: Since ‘93 TV audiences everywhere have seen characters panic when they begin to eat baked goods or peanut butter, and then realize they have no milk to wash it down. And just recently you hooked up with Noam Murro, yet again, to continue on this theme of milk deprivation with your parody of The Omen in “Birthday.”Quite obviously this campaign has legs, but it must have been hard to sell to the newly created California Milk Processor Board back in ‘93. Did you promise Jeff Manning that it would last forever and guarantee that it would reverse a long decline in milk consumption or your money back? I mean, how can one recognize a Got Milk? or an Absolut?

Goodby: Yes I did. It’s always good to guarantee immediate and relentless results.

Okay, I didn’t.

I don’t think you recognize these things in the early stages, but it’s good to see them as soon as possible, to realize that people are watching you in the earliest going. There’s nothing like the feeling of people looking forward to your next message, your next installment, to focus your talent and attention. It galvanizes the group to do things they couldn’t do under any other circumstances. You’re out there. You’re performing.

Luckily, the milk work has created results. That’s what allows you to do this year after year. In fact, advertising people tend to underestimate the liberating power of success.

“I fuck up all the time. If you don’t, you’re not doing things that are hard.”

ihaveanidea: Only nine years after meeting Rich at Ogilvy you were named Advertising Age’s Agency of the Year with the new agency you formed together, then 6 years later Adweek chose Goodby, Silverstein & Partners as their National Agency of the Year, and if that wasn’t enough already, Advertising Age decided again to name you agency of the year for 2000. Sure you’ve got enough Lions to furnish a jungle, have been voted Creative Director of the year too many times to keep track of, and even acted as Jury President at Cannes last year, but when was the last time you really fucked up?

Goodby: I fuck up all the time. If you don’t, you’re not doing things that are hard. I do like to think my batting average in this regard is good, yes. But if you meet up with someone who doesn’t fuck up, I’d say they’re not trying things they’ve never done before.

On a smaller scale, I fuck up all the time in interpersonal office assignment and reward things. Just ask anyone around here.

ihaveanidea: In terms of advertising competitions, you once said in an interview that you believe it would help awards shows if they had one client, one account person, one planner, and one journalist on every jury. Would this help awards shows carry more weight with potential clients?

Goodby: Certainly, it would help awards shows gain credibility among clients, account people, planners, and journalists.

Creative people will always totally believe and not believe in awards shows, simultaneously. It’s how they are.

ihaveanidea: In your latest TV commercial for the Saturn L300 sedan, people are shown going about their daily routines in or around their cars, pictured as plain brown boxes on wheels. When suddenly everyone’s attention is drawn to a Saturn that has turned onto the neighborhood strip. As it passes by, the L300 sedan makes all the other cars in the neighborhood look so inadequate. Now obviously beside a brown box the L300 sedan is no doubt a stunning vehicle in comparison, but what about when it’s parked next to the Jone’s Accord or Passat. Does the new Saturn L300 sedan really separate itself from it’s pedigree of Saturn vehicles which are known for being understated and nondescript, or was this just a clever commercial?

Goodby: I think we were trying to make a big, blanket statement about the level of design you get at a certain price. Obviously, the design of a Saturn L300 is perhaps only slightly better than that of the Honda, Nissan, or Toyota it competes with. So we decided it would be clearer to compare it with a cardboard box. No chance of confusion there.

It’s kind of related to that lawyers’ dictum: “Don’t ask any question you don’t know the answer to.”

ihaveanidea: When working on the Hewlett-Packard brand campaign you suggested simply getting rid of the words Hewlett-Packard in the logo and just going with the letters “HP.”To which Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard’s CEO responded: “OK, done. What else?”Now do you have to see your name on the letterhead to be able to do that? I mean, what makes clients listen to you so easily?

Goodby: Actually, we first suggested this idea about four years before that, on the day we pitched the hp business – to the sound of massive crickets. Our names were on the letterhead that day too.

The key difference, in the end, wasn’t our names on the letterhead. It was the title “CEO”under Carly’s name.

“If you’ve ever gone fishing and had a really good guide, you know what the relationship between creatives and planners should be. The planner should know the river and what flies will work at what time of day. The creative people still have to make the cast and land the fish.”

ihaveanidea: In your new roll at GS&P you said that you’re able to encourage employees to take creative risks and help them sell their work to clients. For the rest of us that will never have the opportunity to work with you, how would you advise a creative to sell their work to clients?

Goodby: Try to see the work through the eyes of the client and yet still maintain your own faith in the stuff. If you can do this, you can sell it to them. If you can’t, then it’s probably not the right idea in the first place.

I also advise people — constantly — to start over rather than lopping edges off their ideas. Oftentimes, this results in clients asking you to go back to your original idea.

ihaveanidea: A few years ago I read somewhere that you believe that everything an agency does should be geared toward getting into people’s heads to figure out what they currently think and understand how best to influence them. Is that what prompted you to bring Jon Steele to GS&P?

Goodby: Totally. But it should be why everyone comes here. If we forget to look for that, we’re being lazy.

ihaveanidea: So what do strategic planners do at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners? And how does planning help a creative department do better work?

Goodby: Every planner is different. But their role is only important if the creatives trust them. The creatives don’t have to like them or hang out with the planners, but they do have to trust them. The equation goes in the other direction, too. Planners have to trust that creatives will listen to them. If they don’t, the planners tend to start doing less good work for them.

If you’ve ever gone fishing and had a really good guide, you know what the relationship between creatives and planners should be. The planner should know the river and what flies will work at what time of day. The creative people still have to make the cast and land the fish.

It feels good to both of them when this works.

ihaveanidea: Is it because planners on many occasions “have a black ball in the process, a right to veto”an idea when it’s not working, that insecure creative directors have rejected planning? Or is it because there’s a lack of true planners to be found in North America that other agencies haven’t embraced planning? For example, the Canadian advertising industry as a whole for the most part skirts account planning philosophy even though it’s proven to hone the advertising and increases its chances of effectiveness. Are we just insecure as an advertising industry?

Goodby: It’s hard to add planning into an already successful culture because, as I say, it relies heavily upon mutual trust. It can take years, in fact, to get to a point where planners can gently suggest that certain ideas should be shelved. And you have to insist that recalcitrant people go along with the program or else. Most agencies can’t or won’t make this commitment.

They’ll do it cosmetically, so they can tout it in new business meetings. But it won’t be part of their deeper culture.

Certainly, if a whole damn country is suspicious, it’s a tough aircraft carrier to turn. But then, you guys have only recently come around to liking baseball. Planning is much less vital.

ihaveanidea: If you could do it all over again what would you change?

Goodby: I would add 25 miles an hour to my fastball.

Other than that, I’ve been totally blessed.