Subject: No Country for Old Mensch January 1, 2012

Friends, colleagues et al.:

As I sit down to write this, it is New Year’s Day in Chicago. But more importantly, it is the day when I realized that this is also Steve Hayden is Gone From Ogilvy & Mather Day. Proprius absentis. Adios, monsieur. Steve Hayden, as of this moment in time, is officially ex-parrot as far as the advertising business goes.

That, for me, is a milestone. I knew it was coming – but still, I find that it is hitting me hard.

When I got my very first job in advertising, writing mailers at a dinky agency in Orange County, California, for DEC ad-on boards, Steve Hayden was creative directing Mazda at FCB/Honig LA– in what was then a very good agency (the agency where Terry Gilliam once worked briefly as an art director).

When I got my second job writing retail advertising for women’s lingerie at The Broadway Department Stores (now Macy’s), Steve Hayden was making a tiny little company called Apple Computer famous with Dick Cavett as its spokesperson.

When I got my third job, at my first real agency, in Los Angeles, Steve was sweeping Best of Show awards at The Beldings, the Clios, The One Show and Cannes.

Tuesday will be the first day that I’m working in this business that Steve Hayden isn’t.

So far as I know, nobody has said anything about this except Steve to a few of his close colleagues and associates on the qt. But now it is real and Verified by Steve.

I find myself thinking of the coin toss scene at the Texaco Station in No Country for Old Men. This coin has spent its whole life traveling to get here and now it’s here.

Call it.

The community of Friends of Steve is large, emotional, talented and diverse. So it seems to me that this occasion should be marked by writers using their best skills in service of this man and his profound accomplishments on behalf of our Fair and Noble Industry.

(Okay, so it’s neither fair nor noble, but what the hell.)

I’ll start.

First, the serious and personal stuff.

Steve Hayden changed my life.

I can’t say that about many people in my life and I’m sure you can’t either. We don’t get many Life-Changers along the way – and I feel lucky to have met him.

He is one of only four profound mentors in my life and a profound mentor is one of the least appreciated and most powerful things that you can have.

I’ve thought about this a great deal over the years (there having been many of them at this point) and I think that he changed my life in two separate and very distinct ways:

#1: Steve wrote the commercial “1984” for Apple Computer. It is the most famous single piece of marketing communications ever created in the history of our business, bar none.

For both young and not so young writers in this business, “1984” defined and continues to define the height of what creative people aspire to do. It also defined the specialness of choosing a life in this business – using creativity to sell things and communicate things and move people – and why we are so fortunate to be doing this for a living instead of digging graves or selling life insurance.

Now, David Ogilvy’s well-known “At 60 mph, the loudest thing in a Rolls Royce is the electric clock” headline is a wonderful demonstration of writing and intellect – but it ran in the New Yorker and was written for a car that virtually none of us will ever own. Not many people saw it. It spoke to an elite few.

But everybody saw 1984. It ran on the Super Bowl. And on news reports after the Super Bowl. And on news reports before the Super Bowl in every Super Bowl since then.

It is what made the Super Bowl into the Super Bowl, at least as far advertising agencies are concerned – proving that what had been a middling curiosity of a football game into the most spectacular showcase of modern marketing that brings in record audiences virtually every year.

But more than that, “1984” was the first salvo in the launch of “the computer for the rest of us,” a great big populist kick in the teeth of the elitist and monolithic computer companies of that era.

Those of us in the long-forgotten little agency in Los Angeles where I worked back then – a collection of has-beens and hopefuls – we watched that particular commercial and Chiat/Day (the agency that produced it) like a junior high basketball player watches the local high school team go on to regional and national championships.

It was inspiring in a way that lasts a lifetime. A defining moment. An epiphany.

You have to understand: Chiat/Day in Los Angeles in the early 1980s defined what a creative agency is supposed to be.

If you were in the business or aspired to be in the business back then, Clow, Hayden, Boyko, Hamilton, Johns & Gorman and the rest of them were more than just creative people – they were heroic figures. Chiat/Day was a special company and the people who worked there were special people.

And “1984” was the absolute height of that ethos on behalf of Apple Computer. Not wild and crazy egotistical nonsense – but genuine passion for a company and a brand that changed the world.

“1984” is our industry equivalent of Babe Ruth’s Called Shot or Christian Laettner’s last-second shot in the ncca finals or Robert Redford blowing up the light towers at the end of The Natural.

Cue the French horns.

It is Truth as Myth. An enduring thing that grows over time.

The single greatest achievement ever in our business.

Steve Hayden did that.

I mean the spot ran one time.

Who talks about the teams that played in that game? Nobody.

Who remembers the stars or the heroes of that game? Nobody.

But every year, every frigging year, the media talks about Apple’s “1984” commercial.

Steve Hayden wrote it. Brent Thomas art directed it. Lee Clow creative directed it. Ridley Scott shot it. Steve Jobs and John Sculley ponied up the dough to pay for it. And Lee Clow and Jay Chiat created an agency in which somebody could come up with a wild idea like that and it actually got produced.

Do you remember the funeral commercial? (Probably not.) Do you remember the speecy spicy meatball commercial? (I doubt it.) Do you remember the fast talker spot? (Only if you’re geriatric like me.)

But you probably remember “1984” even if you were born after it ran.

It is notable for being a creative tour de force, for its daring and boldness, for the fact that the corporate chickens at Apple all wanted to kill it, for the fact that young Steve Jobs wanted to run it, for the fact that Chiat lied in the client’s best interest and said “we can’t sell off the time,” and for the fact that it is still remembered and talked about 28 years later.

Dollar for dollar, it is arguably the single most effective piece of creative work ever created.

Steve Hayden did that for you, for me, for everyone who ever entered this business with the romantic notion that creativity counts, imagination matters and that advertising does not have to be a blot on the Accomplishments of All Mankind.

(Steve Jobs thanked Hayden and Clow, by name, from the stage at the internal launch of the Macintosh – it is there on film for you to see on YouTube. And let’s face it—Steve Jobs was not famous for his outpouring of gratitude to the help.)

We should all line up to kiss Steve’s ass for doing this remarkable piece of work.

For giving us a bullet point to every rational client, good or bad, brilliant or idiotic, that allows us to point with passion and pride to even the most far-fetched idea and say: “Give this idea a chance.”

When David Ogilvy wrote about Big Ideas he was talking about “1984.” Even though he said it before.

Hayden wrote it.

But that’s just the start of it. Steve was also the writer/creative director force behind an extraordinary body of Apple work starting with “Baked Apple” and the Dick Cavett series up through the launch of the Apple PowerBook and the many, many other post-Jobs successes.

Walter Isaacson, in his recent best-selling bio of Steve Jobs, ran on at length about Jobs creative genius and Hayden got a mere tick of a mention.

But you have to remember, when Jobs was a young whippersnapper and Atari was more famous than Apple, it was Hayden who gave voice to The Apple Brand. It was a writer’s brand and Steve was the Head Writer. Jobs was a kid, Hayden was a pro.

When nobody had heard of it and nobody thought anybody would ever use a personal computer, it was Hayden who stepped up and said, “I’ll work on that small, obscure account that nobody has ever heard of selling a product nobody will probably ever want.”

When Steve Hayden agreed to become the creative director on Apple, who among us had heard of a personal computer? Would you have that courage? Hayden did. That was a gutsy call. Perhaps even more gutsy than 1984.

Just the sort of call you would expect from a cello player who went to USC. OJ Simpson or Shostakovich…Hayden made the righteous choice.

But there was more to the Mac launch than that one iconic, famous, kiss my ass commercial.

Read the writing on the 32-page insert that launched the Macintosh and tell me if the writing in the much fawned over VW campaign of the 1960s is as good.

Show me anybody in this business today that can write with that kind of wit, authority and precision to the point that “this is a better product and you should buy it.”

And the thing is, I actually did buy it, in fact, at a time when a 128K mac ran about two thousand dollars and I was taking home maybe 15K a year. I’ve spent my career writing about technology and the implications of technology, and it all started with a one page Apple print ad that I stumbled across in Time magazine. It was a life-changing moment for me. I knew I wanted to be part of that, and from the fingers of Steve Hayden came the words that defined what that was.

I read those words and I believed.

I followed them and it all proved true.

So, that’s the first way that Steve Hayden changed my life.

Here is the second:

#2: In 1987, Steve hired me to be a writer on Apple at BBDO. At the time, I was a nobody.

Not that I purport to be a somebody now, but at the time the most impressive thing I had in my book was a trade brochure for mini-blinds, a jingle for a supermarket and some sale ads for the department store.

I had no Lions, no Clios, no Beldings, no Effies – zippo. I was a plebe, a nobody, a dork.

I sure as heck wouldn’t have hired me.

But Steve saw promise in the meager body of work I had done and he gave me a chance. Steve listened respectfully and patiently to a sub-nobody trying to explain why a sell-in brochure for a mini-blind display rack entitled me to work on Apple Computer, the coolest and most important company in the history of civilization.

I cannot emphasize enough that at this point in the pecking order I was a wad of gum on the mailroom floor and Steve was the man who wrote “1984.”

And, I think, that says something about Steve that those of us who know him love him for even more than the fact that he wrote the most famous piece of advertising ever.

He is the kind of person who gives people a chance, who sees the possibility in you when everybody else looks at you as “who?”

He is the kind of guy who listens to clients who seem dimwitted and lost, and somehow out of it comes something honest and compelling.

He would never say any of the things about himself that I’ve just written. It’s not in his nature. That’s why Steve is Steve.

My God I am so grateful for the shot he gave me.

At the time he hired me he was the Big Kahuna at The Apple Group at BBDO and it was the hot shop in LA. It was called with typical Haydonian wit: BBDO Slightly Further West.

I was working at a very small, forgotten, pointless agency, and he hired away our traffic manager, Anna Jew. And Anna, God bless her forever, was naïve enough to throw my name into the ring.

Normally, a hot shot creative director who has swept Cannes and won pretty much every award that isn’t glued down not long after having written The Most Famous And Successful Piece of Advertising that will ever be written wouldn’t listen to the staffing suggestions of a newly hired traffic manager from an obscure and long since forgotten agency.

But…Steve is Steve.

And from that introduction came a viewing of my miserable and wretched portfolio and an audience that allowed me to prove that I actually understood Apple as a brand and had some communication skills that might be useful.

You have to understand that Steve in those days had arrived at BBDO from Chiat/Day when Chiat/Day was at the very height of their creative prowess. Chiat/Day in the 1980s was the equal of DDB in the 1960s and maybe better.

I mean, they did work that had style, wit, taste, ambition – all the things you want to do when you make the choice to become an advertising creative person and then give up because you’ve got mortgages and car payments.

Wieden & Kennedy is famous for their Nike work but you have to remember that it was Chiat/Day that put Nike on the big-time map for their 1984 Olympics campaign. And that was a great campaign.

I lived in LA at the time, and it was one of those rare things, like “1984,” that transcended advertising and became a part of art and culture. It was absolutely spectacular.

These guys were astonishing. They believed that great work was good for clients. They cared about clients. They did work that succeeded brilliantly or failed with class and style.

Anyway.

Hayden wound up at BBDO like this:

Jobs left for Next. John Sculley, his successor, fired Chiat and hired BBDO.

BBDO did a bunch of very nicely produced big production bits for Apple – but they couldn’t drive it down into the details. And print carefully written, intelligent, Ogilvyesque print was part of the success of Apple as much as the spectacle of “1984.”

So Sculley went to Phil Dusenberry and said, “You have to hire Steve Hayden.”

Phil was no dummy. So he hired Steve Hayden. (When Phil died a few years ago, in the last interview he did with the ad trades he said that his greatest regreat was “losing Steve Hayden.”)

I remember Hayden telling me not long after he’d hired me, “Sculley loved the advertising and he hated Jay Chiat.” So he moved the business to BBDO, and Steve wound up running it and hiring most of the creative group from Chiat, including people like Ken Segal, and giving Rob Siltanen his first job (they went on to do the “Think Different” campaign that saved Apple in the 90s).

Steve always had great affection for the various creative people who worked for him – even the ones he couldn’t stand personally. He tried to assess the strengths of everybody and figure what he or she were good at and not good at. Not that he ever told me this, mind you – but if you know him, you know what I mean. I figured this out by observation.

He understood that even though he was “the guy who wrote “1984,’” he didn’t know everything. He tried to figure out what you were good at and put you in a position to succeed, which he generally did with me, in spite of my somewhat frequent efforts to get myself shit-canned. Forgiveness is one of his great strengths.

But this is the sort of wisdom you picked up from Steve pretty regularly. Not just big bland hyperbole of “do great work” or “win awards” (he considered them a byproduct of great creative, not a goal) but an understanding of how great work got made, the personalities and the ideas, who’s good at what, where some element of genius might be lurking. And equally important, a moral obligation to clients to try to use your skills to help them succeed.

I came into BBDO enormously intimidated by Steve, seeing as he was the man who wrote you know what. But also, because Apple was big, complicated and an emotional roller coaster. It seemed that every other week somebody important at Apple was about to fire us. We were sitting in the post mortem of some client meeting that had gone dreadfully. The work had missed. We didn’t get it anymore. And Steve suddenly chirped out in a crisp falsetto: “We’re not quite dead yet.”

I was just another young moron in the room but i knew what he was talking about.

I knew that he was mimicking a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

And I knew that if Steve Hayden, TMWW 1984, the man who had swept every award show known to man when it counted most and was thanked from the stage by Steve Jobs for his role in the successful launch of Macintosh – well, if he in this moment of dire peril could quote from Monty Python – well, then the problem could be solved, couldn’t it? We’d done it before and would do it again.

And we did. In fact, we hung onto the Apple business for more than a decade, through one crisis after another. We won dozens of Lions and Beldings and Effies and other recognition along the way. And we did it without Steve ever saying, “Oh, we must win more Lions this year!” Not once.

I knew then that no matter how piercing and unforgiving he could be with his analytical Aryan blue eyes – that he was a troublemaker who realized that this business is all in one way or another absurd. And your responsibility as a creative person is to “sort it out.”

As the New Kid, I got assignments to do all sorts of obscure and nonglamorous stuff. But Steve would sit and look at my work with respect and consideration and listen to what I had to say. Often, it would end with, “Well, let’s write it together.”

And I would look over his shoulder as he banged out paragraph after paragraph of sharp prose about Why Apple For Ornithologists or whatever.

That’s how I learned how to write, really.

And also, to really write.

To see how it is done in real time. By witnessing a master at work.

I don’t know anybody who can write like that anymore. I sure as hell can’t. Poetry as exposition, metaphor as selling tool.

Let me emphasize this in contemporary terms: Steve is a fuck all great writer. The best I’ve ever seen. Economical, witty, to the point. With a grace and elegance that is mostly lost in today’s digital dotage. He is simultaneously statesmanlike and irreverent. He is a gifted orator who can also invoke the high falsetto of the Church of Python and the historical importance of Odo of Cluny in the same paragraph in the interest of getting somebody to buy something or do something.

After managing to keep Apple at BBDO for more than a decade, he came in one day and announced he’d taken a job as President of Brand Services on the IBM business at Ogilvy. (A typical Steve title designed to sound impressive while not offending anyone because they didn’t understand exactly what it meant.)

Ogilvy. The quintessential New York Agency.

It was a risky move to say the least.

For those of you too young – or too old – to remember, you have to understand how dire the situation was when IBM arrived at Ogilvy.

Steve Jobs and most of Silicon Valley had been thumbing their noses at IBM for a decade. But when the business came to Ogilvy, it was really a mess.

There is a priceless Fortune cover from 1994 – around the time we got the business – in which they write about the dinosaurs of American business and IBM was dinosaur #1. Something that should be broken up and sold for scrap.

Interbrand, which does this survey of Brand Value, had IBM as something like 286th on their annual survey. Worse, the actual value they assigned the IBM brand was minus $50 million…that meant a product with the IBM logo was worth less than a product with no value at all.

The whole industry was ready to do a River Dance on IBM’s grave.

But Steve came in and – gadzooks – things changed.

He will be the first to tell you about how Bill Hamilton made a major breakthrough with the subtitles campaign and give credit where credit is due. But the big turnaround was brought about by Steve.

It remains perhaps the single greatest turnaround in the history of American Business. And from that turnaround came all kinds of growth and prosperity for Ogilvy.

Today, as Hayden leaves, according to the same Interbrand survey, IBM is the #2 most valuable brand in the world. That is not in any way, shape or form all attributable to advertising or to Ogilvy – and yet, perception is reality. People believe that IBM gets it.

In 1994, they thought IBM was washed up.

If you go back and look at all the IBM work over the last two decades, the best of it owes a tremendous debt to the techniques of Apple throughout the 80s just as it owes a debt to David Ogilvy of the 60s and 70s.

It is a billion-dollar change in real value to IBM employees, customers, shareholders and Ogilvy.
It is the absolute embodiment of all of the things David Ogilvy talked and wrote about.

Steve Hayden did that.

The single biggest turnaround in American Business History and the single most famous piece of advertising ever created. Not too shabby as careers go.

And he did it without becoming a raging asshole or an egomaniacal lunatic or worrying about whether his photograph was on the cover of Creativity every other week.

He helped Ogilvy grow and prosper for much of the 90s and helped hold the fort together through the upheaval of the 2000s. For that, all of us who attach the Ogilvy name to our personal brand should be eternally grateful.

But Steve is a modest person, so somebody else has to put this all down because he would never do it himself.

He gives fantastically entertaining and educational speeches, but he is generally uncomfortable with the limelight because he knows that the Crown of Genius comes with the Shoes of You Asshole.

And Steve is terribly worried that somebody will see his footprints in the mud when he goes to collect his Genius Accolades.

If it’s not evident by now, I love Steve.

We all love Steve.

He’s just a nice person. A kind person. He’s an empathetic and charitable person. He can laugh when things are at their darkest. He can laugh at himself. He is a lot of fun to sit around and laugh with.

His fan club is eclectic and includes Herta Ogilvy,

Shelly Lazarus, Joe Pytka, Nurse Penny and George Parker.

I had dinner on New Years Eve with Joel Raphaelson and his wife, Marikay, both writers at O&M in the heady years when David Ogilvy was running the place. Joel was one of the founders of Ogilvy Chicago (among other offices) and was arguably David Ogilvy’s favorite writer. (David actually let Joel edit his manuscript of Ogilvy on Advertising – the only writer so trusted in the history of David, or so I am told.)

Unprompted, Joel told me, “I went and sought out Steve Hayden as a fan. I was really impressed with the IBM work and the thinking behind it. And I found that he really embodied the best of what Ogilvy stands for as a culture: smart, gracious, intellectual, and modest. A class act.”

I have so many powerful memories of working with Steve, not all of them about the travails of making stuff up.

He still goes and marches for charity every year in Queens in the name of Donna, his longtime assistant who died tragically several years ago from a wretchedly unfair cancer.

He stood in the pouring rain with us at the funeral home where Malcolm X was laid to rest when Tony Arefin, our dear departed Muslim colleague and IBM creative director, passed away suddenly in 2000.

He trudged up to Hartford as a show of force in immigration court for Shona Seifert, a colleague whose innocence we all believed in with great passion but who the federal government of the United States of America had decided must be deported to England as a threat to society. He was the senior-most member of Ogilvy to show up on her behalf.

And on and on.

For some 25 years, I’ve leaned on Steve as a mentor, a teacher, an advisor, a role model, a protector and a friend. He is so humble in his demeanor that you can forget that he is one of the giants David Ogilvy said you should hire.

As I read this, it is hard to believe that I’m writing this. But it needed to be written.

I’m sorry if I’ve overwritten.

Personally, I think we all owe him. Each and every one of us who ever cared about the quality and literacy of our work, and wanted our mothers to see what we’d done and be proud of us for doing it.

Me, Ogilvy, BBDO, Chiat, the whole industry.

We love you, Steve.

We owe you.

But, as I write this, I still hear the chipper falsetto of Monty Python when Steve was “The Man Who Wrote “1984’” and I was a nobody with illusions of doing something of consequence and meaning some day.

“I’m not quite dead yet.” And in that knowledge is some comfort.

For all of us who benefitted from your talent, your passion, your patience, your ideas, your nerf-management, your kindness and your forgiveness.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Love always,

Chris