David Martin's Gold
Trouble? We’re not even talking about the layoffs, the salary cuts, the management hassles or the merger that would subsequently see the ad agency’s name change three times in the next two years. Trouble? It is October 2001 and the Vancouver advertising agency Lanyon Phillips is in it – deep.
David Martin, the new hot-shot creative director – brought in from Toronto when the agency was soaring – is now scrambling. Morale is low, the ship is under weather, yet Martin still believes. Why not? Believing is pretty much what he does for a living.
Like every other agency in the city, Martin has a Request For A Proposal (RFP) from the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation on his computer screen. The difference is that Martin believes he knows how to get the business.
But just as he is about to seize the prize, David Martin will face the one moment that tests everything he truly believes. This is how it happens.
The thing about agency people – at least in this market – is that they are
positive and affable. Yes, some may appear a little facile but, as a profession, they are
uncommonly good at conversation and have come to terms with what Leo Burnett or some other famously wealthy adman once said about the vagaries of truth: nothing is true unless someone believes you.
Chuck Phillips, founding partner of Lanyon Phillips, is trying to be just that kind of guy the morning Martin, art director Olaf Strassner, and account manager Michelle Whelan sit in his office at the World Trade Centre overlooking the Vancouver harbor trying to persuade him they should answer the Bid’s RFP.
Martin, Strassner and Whelan want to go for it, but Phillips is unconvinced. He has been in the business long enough to remember when agencies demanded 15 per cent commissions on media
placement and clients didn’t produce their own in-house creative. The business has changed. Agencies now bargain for media commission ‘points’. The client’s brother-in-law gets the website design business because he can do it in his basement for 500 bucks less.
Phillips’s agency is faltering. He is looking at his own future, and it isn’t pretty. He says later, “I thought I’d end up as one of those guys looking for clients in the local mall.”
As for winning the RFP, realistically he doesn’t think Lanyon Phillips can overcome the voracious presence of Palmer Jarvis DDB – the ad agency that ate Vancouver. In addition to a solid gold client list, Palmer Jarvis has experience with Expo. It is also connected to the Wasserman Group, which is connected to Whistler/Blackcomb. Then there’s Cossette, the city’s second-largest agency, which
handles McDonald’s, certain to be a major Winter Olympics sponsor. As far as Phillips is concerned, the deck is stacked.
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