Jeff Brooks

“TBWA had everything going for it. Absolut Vodka’s importer had increased its ad spending twentyfold in a decade, to $25 million a year. The agency was making its way into pitches for airline accounts, camera accounts, cigarette accounts. It had awards, prestige, profits. It lacked only one thing. Fame. The fame a car account could bestow. Dick Costello, the session’s narrator, turned from the screen to face Chris, Mark and Gene. He vowed to take a six-month leave of absence from his administrative responsibilities as president of TBWA to devote himself fully to Subaru. His face red with passion and the veins in his bald head popping, Costello concluded his presentation by thumping his fist on the table. “It drives me absolutely nuts that an agency of our quality does not have a car!” he thundered. “It is a personal crusade.” Later, squeezed into the backseat of a taxi carrying him to another meeting downtown, Chris Wackman recalled that final thump as the moment TBWA lost its chance for the Subaru account. “When Costello said, ‘I won’t rest until I get a car account!’ ” Chris said, halting slightly between words, “I don’t know what that does for me.”
― Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign