Richard Kirshenbaum - Madboy: My Journey from Adboy to Adman

To Lucas,

From one madboy to another.

Do what you love and love what you do.

love,

Daddy

To Alterna-Dad,

To the original Mad Man.

A son could not have been luckier

to have a man like you as a father.

RICHARD KIRSHENBAUM ALMOST KILLED ME.

I was driving my car on New Yorks Henry Hudson Parkway on a rainy October morning in 1988 when I looked up and saw an outdoor billboard for Kenneth Cole shoes.

The headline, to get people to take part in the upcoming election, was just three letters: VOT.

The picture above it was George H.W. Bushs spelling-challenged Vice President, Dan Quayle.

The billboard was so funny, so fast, so perfect, I kept staring at it while I was driving 70 miles an hour, and I drifted into the next lane.

The driver whose car I had turned toward frantically honked his horn. I jammed on the brakes and my car skidded around and was now facing ongoing traffic.

Two cars driving behind me came within a whisker of slamming into me. I remember screaming out for my mother. When I finally turned the car in the right direction, I thought to myself, Ive got to meet the guy who wrote that poster.

Meeting Richie Kirshenbaum was love at first sight. He has the exuberance and the please love me energy of a puppy in a pet-shop window.

I once took Richie to the Four Seasons restaurant. It was his first time there. I gave him some big-brother advice.

This is where you must come for lunch when you get a new account and it has been announced that morning in the New York Times, so all the important people in The Grill Room can see and celebrate with you.

Then I added, This is where you must come on the day it is announced in the New York Times that you lost an account. Thats to show the bastards you dont care.

During the course of our lunch, Richie told me the size of his new agencys billings three times.

Each time he told me a different number. Each number was lower than the last.

Hes starting to trust me, I thought.

* * * *

I would like to think Richie and I are very similar as advertising writers. We have humor and a bad boy shtick, and a were going to make you smile and charm you and all you have to do is look at our ad mentality.

Once, many years ago, I went for a job at an agency called DeGarmo. The older man who was creative director called a friend of mine and screamed, I will never hire himhe writes like an Italian street-corner wise guy.

He was right. My street corner was Avenue U and West 7th Street in Brooklyn.

Im sure that if that same gentleman had seen Richie Kirshenbaums copy portfolio 25 years later, he would have said, I will never hire that guyhe writes like a Five Towns Jewish Long Island wise guy.

* * * *

The top three best-selling books on advertising can be summed up thusly:

In 1961, Rosser Reeves wrote a great book called Reality in Advertising. This was your basic how advertising should be done book.

In 1963, the great David Ogilvy wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man, which was basically a how I did it book.

In 1969, I wrote From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor. Since I hadnt yet done it and I didnt really know how to do it, my book was a isnt advertising a fun thing to do for a living book.

In 2011, with Madboy, Richie Kirshenbaum puts it all together in one great book on advertising. How it should be done. How he did it. And isnt it great fun.

Madboy is a terrific book, and Im sure it will make an outstanding movie or television series.

Heres what I love about this book: If youre the parent of a teenager whos having problems at school and hints that he or she wants to do something creative, buy him or her a copy of Madboy and I guarantee this book will teach more about life and business than four years at any Ivy League college.

This is not just another and then I wrote advertising book by another agency chairman. Richie writes about what it takes to lead and motivate people. He writes about dealing with clients, dealing with parents, dealing with marriage, dealing with life.

Want to know the horrors of a Hennessy Cognac shoot with a model who refuses to come out of her trailer because she has to be photographed wearing nothing but a wispy piece of silk and shes cold? What do you do after three hours when she says she wont come out of the trailer unless all the participants in the commercialclient, agency personnel, photographerstrip down naked, too?

Wondering what its like to direct Andy Warhol in a commercial for a client who had never heard of Andy Warhol?

What happens when Richie tries to talk Miss America Phyllis George into starting a commercial with the words, Im here to show America something theyve never seen beforemy breasts?

Then read on.

* * * *

It wasnt all just fun and games, though. There was great work for Kenneth Cole, Snapple, Target, Hennessy, and so many others. Some great products succeeded because Richie is so much more than just an advertising writer.

He has the eye of an art director, the ear of a musician, an uncanny fashion sense, and no one in the history of the advertising business has ever had a keener awareness of pop culture. All this from a sweet Jewish prince from Long Island. Go figure.

If my advertising generation owned the 1960s and 1970s and early 1980s, Richie Kirshenbaum owns the late 80s, the 90s, right on to tomorrow.

Imagine Mad Men with computers and the Internet.

OK, Richie is no Don Draper in looks, but hes a helluva lot better creative guy.

* * * *

When I finished Madboy I thought of Murray.

Murray was a grizzled old art director who got into the advertising business pre-Mad Men in the 1940s.

He was a good old days guy.

Here we were in 1961, a creative department filled with young kids a generation removed from the original Mad Men, enjoying our role in the new advertising creative revolution.

And Murray would shout, You guys missed the good old days!

I guess doing ads with doctors selling Camel cigarettes must have been loads of fun for Murray.

Its clear that Richie had his own good old days to write about.

But I dont want to be like Murray.

OK, Richie, I admit it. Your good old days sound like a lot more fun and make for better reading than my good old days.

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about being in the ad business is no two days are alike. Thats because no two clients are the same, nor are the problems and the solutions. Which means that you can always wake up and expect the unexpected and, as I like to say, get to be a jack of all trades, master of some. That said, there is the unexpected and the unbelievable. And there have been a number of days since founding our advertising agency, Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners (kbp), twenty-four years ago that I can honestly say have fallen into the latter category.

I mean, how many people can say that theyve gone to the office and have had Paris Hilton as their secretary (during The Simple Life) and had to ask Nicole Richie to make room at the Xerox machine when she was xeroxing her brassiere? Who else can say they appeared on the cover of