After my year of self-imposed exile in Los Angeles, I appreciated every moment of my second try at Harvard. I went to every one of my classes. I immersed myself in the library, wrote my papers, kept my head down. It helped that I was majoring in economics, a subject that fascinated me. Economics taught me about goods and services, production, distribution, and consumption, but it also taught me about human behavior and psychology, and what makes people behave the way they do. More importantly, it’s where I learned that there were ways to try to predict behavior, and then to tap into and even modify it.
I learned that everyone is motivated by incentives. You couldn’t just expect someone to act a certain way; you had to show them there was some kind of personal gain to be had if they did. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, expressed this idea best: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest.” In other words: no one gets out of bed in the morning without needing to pay the rent. My courses gave me a whole new understanding about people, how to connect with them and understand them, and this became fundamental to my thinking going forward.
Harvard helped me discover my love of advertising, too. Not long after I returned to Cambridge, I was walking through campus one day when I happened to notice that everywhere I looked there were flyers pinned to bulletin boards and lampposts. These were mostly handwritten or typed on scraps of paper—nothing fancy. Some of them were for student initiatives, like dances or other events, but many were for local businesses catering to students. What if I could make those business flyers look really nice, call them advertisements, and charge people money for that? Every week there were hundreds of new flyers posted all over campus. If I could get these people to pay me just $25 or $50 per flyer, I could make a lot of money. So I went to Harvard Student Agencies—which provides students with all kinds of opportunities for employment—and asked for permission to start a student-run ad agency. They loved the idea. I called this new agency HSA Advertising, for Harvard Student Agencies.
I threw myself totally into this new pursuit. I learned how to typeset. I bought a suit and started zipping around town in a rented car, drumming up accounts with local businesses. I wrote headlines, designed ads, produced brochures, created logos, and made posters. By the end of my first year, I was generating more than $100,000 a year in revenue. Not bad for a twenty-year-old college kid.
After that, my entire focus went to running my agency, keeping ahead in my studies, socializing, and dating—in that order. Despite my positive experience the year before as a volunteer at the suicide center in L.A., I wasn’t thinking about giving back or helping others. Unless something came with the incentive of earning money, getting me credit for classes, or helping with my social life, I confess, I wasn’t interested.
In all my time at Harvard, only once did anyone suggest to me that there might be more to life. It was in 1982, during the spring of my junior year. I happened to be walking through Harvard Yard as the commencement address to that year’s graduation class was about to begin, so I decided to stop and listen. That year, Mother Teresa was giving the address. At the time, I didn’t know who Mother Teresa was—even though she had just won the Nobel Peace Prize—but so many people were filing in to hear her that, on a whim, I thought I’d join them.
During her speech, I remember she told a story she told about seeing a man in London who was down and out, on the streets. She went over and shook this man’s hand. He said, “Thank you. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt the warmth of a human hand.” This warmth, Mother Teresa told us, should be something we seek to spread in our own country and in countries around the world. At the end of her speech, the crowd gave her a standing ovation.
After the applause died down, Mother Teresa got down from the podium and started to walk through the crowd, shaking hands as she went. She was so tiny, wearing her immaculate blue-and-white habit—this little nun in a crowd of students and faculty members. Everyone wanted to shake her hand, so I waited in line to do the same. When my turn came, she took my hand in two of hers. I noticed they were big, weathered hands with calloused skin, more like the hands of a farmer or laborer than a nun. I said something like, “Nice to meet you.” Mother Teresa stared at me with her deep brown eyes, the irises ringed with blue and green.
“Can you help?” she asked me.
I was twenty-two years old. I had no idea what she was asking of me or why she was asking it. But even so, the question stayed with me.
I graduated from Harvard in 1983. My peers were all going up for jobs on Wall Street, so I thought I’d try that, too. I interviewed with J. P. Morgan and McKinsey, but I came away feeling like the proverbial square peg. I realized didn’t want to be another guy in a gray suit going to work at a bank. Meanwhile, I’d really enjoyed running my student advertising agency. I loved coming up with ads, starting each day with a blank sheet of paper and a question: what are we going to create today? Advertising wasn’t a business of numbers like finance; it was a business of ideas. It was creative, challenging, and exciting—exactly the kind of career I wanted. And so I decided to try my luck on Madison Avenue.
I applied and was accepted for a job as a copywriter trainee at the Young & Rubicam agency. My parents weren’t exactly thrilled about my career choice; they would have been much happier if I’d gone into law like my father. But despite their reservations, they loaned me $500 to buy one suit and a couple of pairs of pants and shirts to wear to my new job and sent me on my way.
It was 1983 and I was twenty-four years old. I got myself a roommate and a tiny rented studio on the edge of Harlem; on my starter salary of $15,000 a year, it was the most I could afford. The apartment was so small that we didn’t have enough space for proper beds; instead, we slept on mattresses on the floor that we lifted up and leaned against the wall during the day. Back then, Harlem wasn’t the gentrified neighborhood it is today, and in my first four months of living in New York, our apartment was broken into three times. To add insult to injury, the robbers had the audacity to drink our beer—Black Label, the cheapest beer in the world—while they were robbing us!
Meanwhile, my junior copywriting job was the lowliest position in the company. I was basically writing text for the back of Jell-O boxes, but I knew it was a start. The other perk of the job was that if you worked past 7 P.M., you were entitled to dinner on the company expense account. I was young and ambitious and ready to do whatever it took to get ahead, so I worked a lot of late nights (and earned a lot of free dinners). All in all, I probably went overboard in my ambition to stand out from the pack. When the other juniors were given assignments, they’d usually put together three to five ad concepts. I’d walk into the meeting brandishing twenty-five.
Everything about advertising fascinated me. A lot of my peers in the copywriting department were frustrated literature majors biding their time until they wrote the next great American novel. But I didn’t have a plan B. Advertising was it for me. After studying economics I was obsessed with ideas and how to reach people. What I loved about advertising was how it made you think about and better understand human behavior. Advertising was all about connecting with consumers, uncovering what makes them happy.
Before long, the late nights of work and overenthusiasm paid off and I got a promotion. My salary increased and I started to get noticed by headhunters. I took the opportunity to jump over to another agency, J. Walter Thompson—and to double my salary.
Over the next couple of years, I kept moving up the ladder, and the size of the accounts I was working on got bigger and bigger. The first ad I ever did was a radio spot for Jell-O that reached about two million people. Then it was a television commercial for Birds Eye vegetables that reached about ten million people. Before long, I was working on Miller Beer and Burger King, some of the biggest accounts in America, reaching hundreds of millions of people through TV, newspaper, and magazines. Now I was flying all around the country to shoot commercials, staying in great hotels, casting Miss Universe, and writing jingles that would be sung by Michael Bolton. Every bar I walked into seemed to be playing my Miller Beer commercials on TV. My salary went up and up and up.
They say money can’t buy happiness, but the day I could afford to put a down payment on my very own apartment, I was certainly a whole lot happier than I had been getting robbed in a rented studio apartment in Harlem. In those early days in advertising, every raise and promotion felt like validation, like I was getting somewhere. Like I was somebody.
INSERT PHOTO: BrianYuppie
Then, in 1988, not long after I joined J. Walter Thompson, a mainframe software company invited our agency to pitch their account and I volunteered, even though I had never used a computer in my life. This was before PCs took off, before email was widely used and right before Windows and the internet took the world by storm. Back then, I still wrote all my copy on an electric typewriter, but I sensed that computers were the future, and I saw this as an opportunity to get up to speed.
My agency won the software account, so I let my office manager know that I was working on the account, and please could she order a computer for me as I didn’t want to write copy for high-tech clients on a typewriter. She told me that our office had a six- to twelve-month wait for a personal computer. I told her that was just unacceptable and I went stomping in to see my boss—James Patterson, the future bestselling author, who at the time was the chairman of J. Walter Thompson. I told him I was running a computer account now, and I couldn’t very well show our clients copy I’d written on my IBM Selectric!
“You want a computer?” he asked. “Take mine. They suck.”
So I walked over to his desk, unplugged his IBM XT computer, and carried it to my office.
For the next two years, I immersed myself in the nascent software industry. I learned about mainframe and midrange computers. I got to know the different kinds of applications involved. I educated myself about financial manufacturing, project management, data center, and security software. I met with all kinds of software engineers who taught me how software was developed, tested, and deployed. I felt like I was getting a PhD in high tech and I loved every minute of it. I went to Las Vegas for Comdex, the world’s biggest computer convention, where I met Bill Gates and Michael Dell back when they were still unknowns. Clearly these guys had seen the future, and more than anything, I wanted to be part of their revolution.
So in 1990, after five years at J. Walter Thompson, I made a very big decision. I was going to leave my job as senior vice president and creative director and throw my life savings into starting a high-tech ad agency with my design partner, Mike Schell. My parents thought I was crazy to leave my nice, stable, six-figure advertising job, but I’d seen a niche: this new agency was going to specialize in helping tech clients sell their software, hardware, chips, services—you name it.
I had no idea how to start an ad agency, but you can make up for a lot of inexperience by working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For our first few months in business, our office was my one-bedroom apartment. Each morning I would put on my suit and go to work in my kitchen. We hired an account executive, and she worked in my living room. I couldn’t afford to pay my design partner, Mike, just yet so he kept working at his regular job while I tried to win us some clients and business. The first three months, I lay awake most nights, wondering if leaving J. Walter Thompson was going to turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life. To make matters worse, the stock market had tanked and we were headed into a recession.
But then something really incredible happened. We were invited to pitch the same software account I’d worked on at my old agency. Apparently, since I’d left, no one had paid much attention to the account and the clients were very unhappy. We got to work and over the next two weeks, we created all kinds of campaigns, new ideas, and promotions. On the day of the pitch, I papered the clients’ boardroom with ads, ideas, and logos. The clients seemed impressed, but there wasn’t much precedent for an account of this stature leaving a major agency to work with an unknown, so we knew we couldn’t get our hopes up.
Then, the next morning, I was sitting at my desk in my pajamas when the clients called. They wanted to know if we really wanted the account because they were about to fire J. Walter Thompson and give us all the business. “Are you kidding me?” I asked. This was a ten-million-dollar account! I called my partner Mike to share the good news. I also told him I could afford to pay him now, so please could he resign from his day job effective immediately? The following morning, we were written up in the New York Times, in article with the headline “New Agency Wins Big Software Account.” It ended with a quote from me saying that this was “one of those fairy tale stories.” And it was.
Winning the account was one thing. As any ad man worth his salt will tell you, the only real measure of success is the client’s bottom line. Thankfully, after only a few months of running our ads and promotions, the client started to see results. And the more money the client made, the more campaigns they wanted to run. By the end of the first year, our new agency’s revenue had soared to two million dollars a year.
Such breakneck success took my breath away. Six years ago, I’d been sleeping on the floor in a rented studio in Harlem. Now, I had climbed the advertising ladder to the top rung. I had everything I’d always wanted. But it was only as I started to look around and take in the view that I began to wonder if something was missing from my life. That question of Mother Teresa’s returned to me: “Can you help?” My mother’s admonishments to be kind and generous were always in the back of my mind. I thought about my time in L.A. at the suicide center. It had been an incredibly fulfilling experience.
Maybe I could do some volunteer work again.
It was this impetus to give back that led me to start the school program in New York City, helping disadvantaged children receive reconstructive surgeries. We called our little charity Operation Smile, and the pilot program was so successful that after six months in business, we rolled out the program in another 500 schools, then expanded it to every school in New York City—1,200 in all. I met with plastic surgeons at all the top hospitals in New York, enlisting their help in treating kids who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford or gain access to surgeries. By the end of the first year of running the program, we were helping dozens of children each month, working with surgeons and hospitals across the city, all of them donating their time and resources. We even started talking about expanding the program nationally.
I felt such a drive to help these kids. To me, it was a no-brainer. My sister Maura had been so desperately sick and no one could do anything to save her—my poor parents had tried everything. But these children had problems that were relatively easy to cure with surgeries. Even better, the results were immediate, transformative, and would last a lifetime. Seen in this light, why wouldn’t I want to help?
Good Reads: Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
