Offices Open & Closed

I started my advertising career in 1968 at MacManus, John & Adams in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb of Detroit.  I was hired as a “trainee copywriter”, which was a step below “junior copywriter”, and given an office in the basement of the building right next to Art Buying.  I had a battleship grey steel desk and a manual typewriter, and no door.  People would come and go all day looking for files, so it took quite a bit of concentration to actually write anything.  Not to mention tremendous hand strength.  After a few months, I was given a windowless interior office on the creative floor. Actually, it did have a window facing the hallway, so my boss could make sure I was writing and not goofing off.

As we prepare to move to 46th & 11th, I’ve been thinking a lot about my 40 years in ad agency offices, both the open kind and the closed kind.  I’ve spent half those years in each.

After my first decade in this business, I was lucky enough to get a job at Chiat/Day.  Jay Chiat was an early believer in the open office scheme.  He took over the entire second floor of the massive Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA, and tore out all the walls.  Each creative had a built-in desk and a tiny bit of floor space.  Jay felt it increased the energy of the place and enhanced communication, but we always suspected the real reason was to cram more people into a smaller space to pay less rent.

Since I’d had private offices for nearly ten years – albeit some of them windowless, airless holes in the basement – I had a pretty fair jolt of culture shock giving up doors and walls.  I experienced my partner’s entire messy divorce, and got way, way too much information.  Of course, we had tons of tiny conference rooms where he could have made those nasty calls, but he never used them.

After a while, I got pretty used to no privacy.  If you weren’t there, people knew.  If you weren’t working, people knew.  And to call a meeting or ask a question, all you had to do was stand up and yell.  It was an early, yet effective, form of instant messaging.

When BBDO won the Apple account from Chiat/Day, I was recruited away to run it on the west coast.  We were to form a special unit reporting directly to Phil Dusenberry and Allen Rosenshine in New York, rather than being folded into the LA office.  So we called it “BBDO New York, Slightly Further West.”  Our first space was Ronald Reagan’s former campaign headquarters in the Tishman Building in Westwood, and we pretty much had to make do with whatever was there, and crammed two to four people into every office.  I bought the furniture myself at a discount store on Pico.  But as the account grew, along with the employee population to service it, we were given an entire floor to build out on our own.

Among Steve’s many claims to fame is the Apple spot “1984,”

when they used to be a computer company.

We decided to go to an open office scheme because it’s more flexible, more energetic and, of course, it’s cheaper.  But we were careful about how we did it.  Again, I was shopping for discount stuff, but this time, it was computer flooring, so we could stack up the offices in three tiers from the windows to the building core.  That way, everyone got a view.  And, of course, we put in a lot of office-sized conference rooms, so people could have privacy and quiet when they really needed it.

Now BBDO West, the established LA office, had just built out another floor with traditional offices.  Their biggest account at the time was the Worldwide Church of God, which essentially was just a media account.  They bought $25-30 million in radio time around the world to broadcast Christian programming.  It was a full commission account, hence immensely profitable, and they ran it with just two account guys who wore black suits and skinny ties and never uttered a profane word.

WWCOG set the tone for the office design.  Everything was dark grey or black granite, and all the cabinetry was in dark mahogany.  The executive offices were huge.  The president’s office, the director of client services office and the main conference room took up wholly half a floor.

And it was a very quiet floor.  Silent as a tomb.  We came to call it “The Dead Zone”.

A fair amount of animosity developed between BBDO West and BBDO Slightly Further West, because the cultures were entirely different.  Suddenly, SFW was getting all the pitch invitations, and started winning new accounts.  And the creatives from the Dead Zone wanted to move to those open offices a couple of floors down.  Worst of all, once the Worldwide Church of God found out that I was the guy who did the Apple commercial with a scantily clad woman throwing a hammer at the face of authority, they moved their account elsewhere.

So management, in its wisdom, decided to give us control of the entire west coast operation, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland and Seattle.

The problem was, what do we do with all that wildly expensive dead space on the 17th floor?

We made plans to move to an open office scheme as soon as possible, but as with all agencies in all ages, money was a problem.  So I had a really swell idea to send a message that the culture of the agency was going to change a bit for the younger.

The reception area at BBDO West looked like the waiting room at Forest Lawn.  Funereal.  The receptionist was seated behind a dark granite semicircular barrier that looked for all the world like a gun emplacement on an aircraft carrier.  So I ordered up a .50 caliber machine gun from a prop house in Hollywood and mounted it on that semicircle.

It was extremely funny.  Especially considering what had gone before.  But guns, even if they’re non-functioning props, tend to upset people.  And the number of people who found this sight gag upsetting and offensive was greater than those who found it as hysterically funny as I did.

Now I suppose I could have said, “The gun stays!  This agency has been asleep and I’m going to wake it up, and if you’re going to whine about a fake machine gun, then you’re a whiner and maybe you don’t belong here.”  But we need all kinds of people to make an ad agency work, from the young and the restless to the old and reliable.  So the fake machine gun came down promptly.  

One of the odd things about open office plans is that people impose status on their office space even if there’s none there.  At BBDO, the offices furthest from the windows became the status offices simply because I’d gotten the senior people to give up the windows for more democratic seating.  Strange.

We acquired a Hispanic agency during my tenure, and I remember the president of said agency sitting in my tiny cubicle telling me that he needed the status of an office with a door, or what would clients think?  Hmmm.  His biggest account was about a million bucks, and he’s sitting in my tiny cubicle complaining.

While all this was happening at BBDO, Jay Chiat had another brainstorm: hoteling.  Hoteling means you have NO office at all anymore.  You come in in the morning and grab whatever workspace is available.  You have a locker, just like high school. People absolutely hated that, because there was no there there.  No place to keep even a little bit of stuff.  We humans don’t need a whole lot of room, but apparently, it’s our nature to want some space to call our own.  As soon as Jay retired, hoteling was dead.

Noise is a huge problem with open offices.  That’s legitimate.  Sometimes when a client calls, especially an upset client, you don’t have time to put them on hold and run to a conference room to take the call in private.  That’s when someone throwing a football over your head while screaming in delight becomes a candidate for strangulation.

Media people need quiet places to meet with reps and hear pitches.  Finance people need privacy and quiet because we prefer not to circulate everyone’s salary on AdScam.  Art buyers need privacy to negotiate buying art.  And so on and on and on.

But, as Jay Chiat used to point out, if the New York Times can put out that much great copy and art on a daily basis from an open office, there’s no reason we can’t.

We’re entering the most interesting period in our industry since the advent of television right after World War II.  There will be winners and losers.  Fortunes made and lost.  All that.  A large part of surviving (and eventually thriving) in this new world is flexibility – how fast and how effectively can an agency re-shape itself to provide what clients need.  An open office scheme gives us our best shot at creating effective adhocracies.  We can literally reinvent ourselves overnight.

Which we doubtless will be required to do.

-Steve Hayden

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