It had to be WU

During my years at BBDO, I had the good fortune to work with two renowned, older Art Directors who both had flourished under the strange, insular creative system that demanded that copy concepts always preceded art direction. Each was unique and legendary in their own way. The first was named Kong Wu. Kong was Mandarin Chinese and stood over six feet tall.

In some ways, working with him was a reward for the torture of getting a script approved. After days of rewrites and copy tweaks, I would cross over to the 385 side of the building and triumphantly show up at his door, yellow copy sheet in hand, and he always seemed genuinely pleased to see me. His face would light up and he would proclaim …

”Ahhh, Mark Itkowitz, hot shot young writer. Come in! Come in!”

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Career Continuity.

In 1975, my wife Sandy gave birth to our first child – a boy. When it came time to choose a name, we both wanted one that not only connoted strength and decisiveness, but sounded okay with the last name of Itkowitz. Not an easy task. Now by this time, I had already been at BBDO for two years. Every day, our conversations were peppered with the name Jordan and the underlying power that the name represented was never lost on me.

"Jordan wants this."

“Jordan killed that."

"You take it down and show Jordan.”

Not surprisingly, I suggested Jordan to my wife, and Sandy also liked the sound of it. But it clearly didn't carry the same weight as it did with me.

When Jim got word that our firstborn carried his name, he responded with great warmth and pride. The rest of the agency thought it was hilarious. They couldn't believe the lengths I'd go for career continuity. Even Allen Rosenshine, soon to be our Creative Director, President and ultimately the CEO of Omnicom, made me promise to name my next child Rosenshine. 

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Meeting Jim Jordan.

During my first few months there, I never met or even saw Jim Jordan, though his presence loomed over the creative department. With posters on the agency's walls proclaiming,  "He who crosses the Jordan will surely sink,” his fearsome temperament was continually reinforced. He was, however, aware of me. During my first month, there was an agency-wide assignment to create a campaign line for Liberty Mutual Life Insurance. The goal was to define the concept that Liberty Mutual deals direct. Hundreds of submissions came in from the entire creative department. But he chose a line that I had written:

Liberty Mutual deals direct. 
It's the shortest distance between two people.

So I was, at least, on his radar as the guy who had written that line. Before long, I was working on a number of accounts, including Campbell's Soup and Dodge Cars and Trucks. Jim had recently written a new song for the national Dodge campaign. It was called:  Number One for the money is Dodge.

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Life in the ad world.

What else rings true about MAD MEN? Well, certainly the drinking and the smoking and to a large part, the way everyone dressed, acted and looked. Even though the British Invasion swept ashore in 1964, long hair and bell bottoms never made it to our halls in 1973. Most creatives, in fact, wore ties and jackets. Combine that with the row upon row of cubicles, wavy glass shower-stall inside offices plus box- like window offices and the total effect was much like that of a semi-art deco insurance company.

Making it to New York.
Getting into advertising has never been easy. Even though I had cut my creative teeth at a small agency in Philadelphia, it carried little weight when it came to landing a real job on Madison Ave. No one I knew had ever attempted it. Although Manhattan was only about two hours away, it could have been on the other side of the world. Everything up there was bigger, better and certainly much more expensive. I was just recently married at the time and I wound up spending so much money just taking the train up for interviews that it put a serious strain on our fragile finances.

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Since the rise of MAD MEN as a TV phenomenon, there’s been a groundswell of curiosity about the way the business used to be when Madison Ave. really was the center of the advertising universe.  I’ve been asked repeatedly whether what we’ve all seen unfold week after week is close to what I remember from living and working in that time and place. How much of that advertising world is the same, where does it differ and if I ever knew anyone like Don Draper?

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