My first job when I came to the U.S. in 1987 was for a medical advertising agency in L.A. It was a good place to work and my bosses had a unique principle; they closed the doors at 6 p.m. No one was allowed to work late, they adjusted the work load accordingly and that system worked just fine.
I was 28 and my boss who owned the agency was about 55. The employees used to call him "Stormin' Norman," because of his temper. He took a liking to me and often took me to lunch in his silver Jaguar. He was funny and I really enjoyed his company. He was also a great copywriter, and you could tell, because he was good at telling colorful stories.
He also had his mind made up about advertising agencies, after thirty years in that business. "They're all whores," he used to say. "They'd do anything get a new client, even prostitute themselves."
I was thinking of Stormin' Norman when I saw an ad for an advertising agency in the most recent issue of Pharmaceutical Executive. As you can tell it looks like a rather boring magazine for pharmaceutical executives, and it is.
But what caught my attention was the full-page ad for one of the largest medical advertising agencies in New York, and the message they had to the executives they hoped would hired their agency to do advertising for their drugs.
The headline is, "Making science sexy."
The end of the ad spells out what this advertising agency is really about, "we specialize in knowing the minds and hearts of medical specialists. If their names end in 'ologist,' we know how to seduce them."
They're all whores as Stormin' Norman used to say, and now the advertising agencies are going so far as to advertise this fact.
Seriously, I do realize they tried to be funny and to play with words. But what they write is still very telling.
To make matters worse, many advertising agencies treat women like shit. (Legal note, I have no information that the agency that created the ad above treats their women like shit.)
One of my wife's best friends is a Creative Director at a medical advertising agency in New York. She makes a lot of money but she always works and lives alone with her cat. She used to have men in her life, but none of them wanted a wife working that hard; never home before nine P.M. And now, after she's turned fifty, suddenly those suitors have all but vanished.
Every few years, right before she is about to vest in the company pension plan she gets fired. This has happened about ten times now. One time, after an unusually sexist Texan appeared as the new boss of an agency she worked for the women almost banded together and talked about filing a class action suit. The Texan declared that all the women were just "tits and pussies." A month later he fired many women over the age of forty, including my wife's friend. None of them filed that class action suit. They were all too afraid of what it would do to their future careers. So they kept silent.
And of course, my wife's friend is not the only one with this experience.
The New York Times recently told the story about a well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director at the WPP Group who resigned his position amid an uproar over remarks he made at an industry event about female creative executives.
"The comments, by Neil French, 61, drew attention to the absence of women at the highest levels of the creative side of the ad industry. Mr. French told an audience in Toronto on Oct. 6 that women ''don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to,'' saying their roles as caregivers and childbearers prevented them from succeeding in top positions."
The New York Times in a second article wrote, "Some women, frustrated by their experiences in traditional firms, have defected to start their own shops."
''I started my own shop because I wanted to rewrite my own rules about how business was run,'' Ms. Kaplan Thaler said. ''The policy of 'you need to work till 12 o'clock at night or you're not doing your job' is going by the wayside.
The Times continues, "Others have opted out because of what they call veiled sexism at firms dominated by men. Marcia Stone, who runs her own creative agency in Indianapolis, said her previous work at firms like Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis was overshadowed by an ''old boys' club'' mentality. ''The whole culture was about going to ride Harleys together and go golfing,'' Ms. Stone said. ''They'd go to biker bars and go fishing in Canada together. I wasn't invited in that clique. If you're a woman, it's very hard to be accepted.''
That's the glamorous advertising business in New York. Do women have to accept this? Yes they do if they want to keep their jobs. It is very hard to change the old boys' club. And as long as women keep bending over when their bosses ask them to do so, they'll continue to get fucked while they produce "sexy advertising" together.
IMPORTANT LEGAL DISCLAIMER HERE