Thinking Small by Andrea Hiott

Author:Andrea Hiott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345521446
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile, back in the Grey Advertising offices in New York, there had been little response to the memo Bill had sent, his version of The Things We Think and Do Not Say. Bill was realizing that there were simply a lot of people in the advertising business who were not ready for his ideas, and there was a reason that people think things they are afraid to say: Taking such a risk can be potentially alienating. After the memo he sent about “blazing new trails,” there was no outpouring of agreement, no collective sigh of relief; if he’d thought his memo was going to change anything at Grey, he was wrong. Nevertheless, there were a few who understood what he wrote. They came to him quietly over the next few months, and they came up with a plan. If they couldn’t change things at Grey, they probably wouldn’t have much luck anywhere else: It was doubtful any big agency would have given Bill’s memo a serious look. The more they talked about it, the more they realized that if they really wanted to change things, they’d have to strike out on their own.

One of the first people to express solidarity with Bill was the calm and cool Phyllis Robinson.1 She’d originally been in the fashion promotion section, but Bill had noticed her creative work and brought her into copywriting with him. Robinson was talented, young, and confident; she didn’t have to search for ideas, they just came. She’d graduated from Barnard College in 1942 and began her career writing plays and musicals around Broadway. She had poise, a no-nonsense but elegant approach, evident in the colorful silk scarves she would wear to complement a simple gray dress, evident in the way she listened neutrally but completely and then gave an honest opinion of what she’d heard. Advertising felt simple to her. She was just good at it. Becoming part of the senior management at DDB seemed a natural step: The fact that she was a woman didn’t matter at all. It might have been unusual at the time, but it didn’t feel unusual to the unique team that was slowly forming.

Robert Gage was a warm exceptionally talented young man who also strongly identified with what Bill had written, and he too had found great inspiration in the work of Paul Rand. If Rand had introduced Bill to the idea of collaboration and given him the desire to write copy in a way that could aspire to be artistic, then it was Gage, in his white shirts and simple ties, his hair neatly parted and combed but still unable to resist a curl, often taking pensive drags of a cigarette, that made Bill’s ideas come to life. It’s likely that Bill knew Gage would agree with the memo before he even sent it: His respect for Gage, and the interaction the two had at Grey, was one of the things that had given Bill his confidence in the first place.

Phyllis could write.

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