One direct marketing ad executive was so fed up with the way some clients treat agencies that he risked a heart attack to draw attention to their misbehavior.
Robert Rosenthal, who heads a small agency in Maynard, MA called Mothers of Invention, declared a “reverse hunger strike” during which he vowed to eat “anything and everything that's bad for you” in order to draw attention to how poorly some clients behave. The 48-year-old, 177-pound executive is a strict dieter and exerciser.
What's his beef, pardon the pun? That some clients show a lack of respect, little understanding of what an agency contributes and a lack of loyalty.
“We've got a lot of people who encountered snake-oil salesmen during the dot-com days,” he says. “They think everybody is like that. [But] use a romance analogy. So you go on a date with a loser. Will you go through the rest of your life thinking everybody's a loser?”
One of Rosenthal's top complaints: spec creative, where companies ask multiple agencies to compete for an account by creating ad campaigns with no promise of being paid.
“It really ought to be called free creative,” he says. “In order to have the privilege of potentially winning the client's business, you participate in this mini-lottery. Everyone has to solve the client's marketing problems for free. Might be a one-in-five chance. But that's how the game goes.”
Among Rosenthal's top bad-behavior anecdotes is a client who declared his control package off-limits for testing. “This thing was drawing a one-in-1,000 response rate,” he says.
Rosenthal's publicity stunt also was aimed at getting press coverage of the changing of his agency's name from Passaic Parc to Mothers of Invention (among other things, the name is a reference to the band behind late rock legend Frank Zappa). The agency's new URL is TheMothersOfInvention.com.
Meanwhile, Rosenthal's doctor wrote him a letter imploring him to abandon his plan: “I'm sure you can find another way to call attention to problems that presently exist in the advertising industry without putting your health at risk.”
How did Rosenthal fare in his plan to eat “the worst possible shit imaginable”? Well, after gaining almost four pounds in less than a week, he got nervous and abandoned the idea.
“I did the math and realized at that rate, in under a year I'd weigh over 500 pounds,” he says. “I was uncomfortable, my 8-year-old daughter didn't understand what the hell I was doing, and my wife was growing increasingly pissed about it because I was on my own for every meal.” He adds that the story was picked up all over the Internet, so he believes he made his point.
Rosenthal received about three-dozen e-mails from supportive ad executives. One reader even sent him a box of candy. “It was very good, gourmet-quality candy,” he says.
