Rick Padulo - I Can Get It for You Retail: Down and Dirty Tales from a Canadian Ad Man

Down and Dirty Tales
from a Canadian Ad Man

Rick Padulo

DUNDURN

TOTONTO

Copyright Rick Padulo, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Donald G. Bastian, Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.

Interior design: Tony Bove; Daniel Crack, Kinetics Design Cover design: Pat Lore; Daniel Crack, Kinetics Design, www.kdbooks.ca Illustrations on page 54 and 59: Tony Bove Printer: Transcontinental

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Padulo, Rick

I can get it for you retail : down and dirty tales from a Canadian ad man / Rick Padulo.

Includes index.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4597-0500-5

1. Padulo, Rick. 2. Advertising executives Canada Biography. I. Title.

HF5810.P33A3 2012 659.1092 C2012-900072-8

1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

www.dundurn.com

In Loving Memory of

Charles Alexander Padulo.

ALEX

November 14, 1982 April 6, 2006

Not a day goes by that we dont think of you.

Love, Dad

My Human Resources
philosophy can best be
summed up in a phrase
that I coined ... it relates
to the fact that Im always
looking for people who can
think for themselves and also
operate as part of a team.

Dad Frank, Mother Norma, and me. Theyre gone now but I know theyre watching over me.

Big brother Jos (pronounced Joe) with me in front of the Padulo Building.

L IFE is good and then you go to heaven and even though there have been some very dark days in my life thats pretty much the attitude Ive carried throughout my career.

My parents Norma and Frank taught me so much but most of all they loved me unconditionally. Their love shaped my life. That was my normal and I was so blessed to have them and my big brother Jos always looking out for me.

I love people and for the most part people love me. Ive lived a life filled with laughter, joy, and celebration.

Through it all Ive spent my business life always trying to do the right thing and I have always placed each clients best interest ahead of my own.

Ive found that I can always find something that will give my clients an edge. The relentless pursuit to uncover that edge for them is what keeps me up at night but its also what excites and drives me.

The edge can manifest itself in different ways but when you hit on it (and you always know when you have) you must leverage the hell out of it with fanatical zeal and with retail, instant gratification just isnt fast enough.

Good retail and good retailers move quickly they have a sense of urgency. I remember working as a baby account guy with a client in the retail shmata business. We were working on a particularly aggressive campaign and I said, perhaps a tad sarcastically, I suppose you want to see the campaign tomorrow.

No, smart guy, if I wanted it tomorrow I would have asked for it tomorrow, he snapped.

It was one of the most teachable moments in my life: In true retail style, he wanted me to get everything done that very day.

I think most people will find I Can Get It for You Retail a quirky read. Its part personal memoir, part chronicle of survival, and part a how-to of retail marketing based on Ricks Nine Commandments.

One thing this book is not, is airy-fairy. I started in the business four decades ago and as Al Pacino says in Scent of a Woman, Ive seen some things, you know.

So Im not going to talk theory. Im going to talk about real people, real-life events, and real-life adventures and misadventures. Im going to use actual campaign case studies like Blacks Is Photography; Leons Dont Pay a Cent Event; Zellers Because ... the Lowest Price Is the Law; CIBC Seeing Beyond; and Rexall A Pharmacy First. However, Im going to talk about the case studies in an unconventional manner. Im going to talk about them in a profoundly personal way because in the end it was the people coupled with the methodology that created the success.

So this book is very personal to me, but as the King of Jingle Syd Kessler said to me, Rick, your public persona is not who you are; your book has got to, among other things, show who you are.

My old boss, mentor, and dear friend Morris Saffer said in an article in Marketing magazine, Padulos earnestness is unfairly mistaken for swagger. Retail and advertising is a relentless taskmaster, and if you cant maintain that enthusiasm, day in and day out, regardless of all the elements conspiring to defeat you, you cant survive. And Rick is, above all else, a great survivor.