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-	Confessions of an Ad-man XII: Consumers in Search of Service
-	Confessions of an Ad-man XI: More Dueling With Mother Nature
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man X
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man IX
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man VII: Commercial ends up in the air instead of on the air

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The Day of the Chicken

The agency I worked for had a chicken account. Well, that’s actually an understatement. We had, as a client, one of the largest fried chicken producers in the country.

The CEO, Hans Wende, was a tough guy. He was an excellent businessman and had grown the company from a couple of fast food take-out stores to a large, international corporation. He was a man of definite ideas and had a deep-seated I-don’t-know-what’s-right-but-I-know-what-I-like philosophy. He was also a very “hands-on” top executive.

The suit on the account was Ken Williams, a totally off the wall, wild and crazy ad-guy, and he enjoyed the role immensely. For obvious reasons though, he played this account straight. It was kind of funny, seeing Ken file normal contact reports and fight with the art department to keep the creative “down the middle.” We were all waiting for the inevitable conflict between Hans, a man who took his business very seriously and Ken, who didn’t really take anything seriously.

We were almost a year into the account, and we knew, as the great advertising guru Pete Wolfe often said in his newsletter, Blood and Guts, “As soon as you acquire a client, you begin to lose him. Your goal is to prolong the process as much as possible.” We also knew that it was impossible for Ken to play it straight for much longer. You could almost see the transformation taking place. He was becoming quiet, reserved, almost morose. He was becoming someone else.

There were a few instances when the old Ken would rise from the rapidly growing pile of ashes. Like the time he had a print ad done for a small family owned ladies clothing shop. The headline read, “Save One Million Dollars this Weekend.” In very small type beneath it was the line, “just buy 100,000 of our dresses.”

What became known in the agency as “The Day of the Chicken,” was the day that Ken couldn’t handle it any longer. The final ad proofs were going to Hans. They were just for his files because he had already approved them and they had been sent to the newspaper. They were promoting the Company’s new, “Family Meal Box.”

After the ads had been picked up by the courier, Ken and Scott, our artist, breathlessly summoned us all into the boardroom. The ad mats, all three of them, were on the wall.

There was a major and immediately discernable difference between the ads on the wall and the ones which had gone to the newspaper. The ads on the wall, which were exact duplicates of the ones that had just been sent to Hans had, emblazoned across the bottom in boldfaced type, “Guaranteed No Beaks Or Claws.”