A Great American Copywriter Who Wasn't A "Mad Man".
Oh, if you showed him bad creative, he'd maybe get a bit miffed.
He never threatened to jump out of an office window when a client wouldn’t buy his ad, like George Lois, or famously suggested the headline “From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor” for a Panasonic campaign, like Jerry Della Femina.
He is the son of a preacher. As an adman he was shy, not boastful. He vomited before client presentations—not from liquor like that hack, Don Draper, but from fear. Fear that this new client wouldn’t have the balls to buy his ballsy ads. Because for him, advertising was always about one thing only: The Work. Nothing else mattered. Which is how it should be in advertising.
Dave Dye described him thusly:
“He ushered in a new, sassier way of talking. His work felt like it was written by a very smart lawyer with a wicked sense of humour. He influenced a generation”.
You won’t find much information about Tom McElligott online. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. He hasn’t written any books about advertising. His Minneapolis start-up agency, Fallon McElligott Rice, made its mark in the pre-internet years of 1981–1988. This was smack in the middle of the greedy mega-merger phenomenon of big Madison Avenue agencies swallowing other big Madison Avenue agencies—a development that forever destroyed a lot of the creativity and spirit of the advertising industry, and continues to destroy it today See: Omnicom swalowing Interpublic. This is not a good development for ad creativity, believe me.
I was attending advertising concept courses at the School of Visual Arts in the late-1980s, so I had access to the annual One Show Awards annuals. The One Show was—and maybe still is—the highest quality American advertising awards show. At the time, the annuals were essentially yearbooks for Fallon McElligott Rice. McElligott was that good.
I plastered the felt-covered cubicle walls at my first ad-agency copywriting job with those McElligott ads (see some of them below), carefully, selfishly X-Acto’d out of the annuals. Another thing on my wall was this quote by McElligott:
“I’d much rather overestimate the intelligence of the consumer than underestimate it.”
Today’s creative chiefs should also tape that quote up in their offices/on their fucking foreheads.
McElligott was always the smartest man in the presentation room, and an unrelenting bear when it came to selling his work. Some of that tenacity comes through in this 1986 interview in Inc. magazine (where the vomiting stories I had heard at SVA are confirmed). The reporter kept trying—and failing—to poke holes in McElligott’s philosophy.
McElligott left his own agency in 1988, apparently unhappy with its creative direction. (Today, the agency he started with account guy Pat Fallon is owned by Publicis and doesn’t even have his name on the door.) He retired from advertising in 1993, before the age of 50.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview he did for an ad student, after retiring:
“Don’t be distracted by anything. The work is what counts. There are a lot of things that can get in your way, that take up your time and your emotional and intellectual energy; none of them account for anything. They mean nothing. The only thing, in the final analysis, at this stage of the game, that really counts, is the work. The work is everything. The years that I spent in advertising I saw an awful lot of people who had the potential to be good lose a lot of their ability to distraction, to politics, to fear, and to who has the bigger office. You’ll get the bigger office; you’ll make the money. Anything you want will happen, but sometimes it’s hard for people to see that when they’re in the middle of it. It looks like it’s incredibly complicated. Well, it’s not complicated at all. In fact, it’s so uncomplicated it’s amazing. All it is about is the work. Finally, if you do the work people will notice and you will get what you want. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.”
This is applicable to much more than creating ads, obviously. But unfortunately, now, The Work is being put aside, replaced by the “process” and “data”.
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