Avis believes everybody should try harder. When it decided earlier this year that it might want to hire a new advertising firm to handle its $35 million account, the company considered virtually every major agency in the phone book -- 100 of them -- for the job. Once Avis chose six finalists, the agencies poured their energy into the project. Researchers made studies of consumer driving trends. Copywriters crafted catchy new slogans. Creative teams worked up lavish demonstrations of their talent with music, art, sample ads and commercials. Last week Avis announced that after examining the industry's best efforts, it had chosen the work of New York City's Backer Spielvogel Bates -- the very agency it had been thinking of dumping. Why go to all the trouble? Said a disappointed Bill Tragos, chief executive of TBWA Advertising, which competed for the account: "Maybe they were looking for a way to wake Backer up. Sometimes clients do those horrible things and make the rest of us jump through hoops."
Like Broadway dancers and Hollywood hopefuls, even the largest advertising agencies these days are submitting to the grueling and humiliating auditions known in the industry as account reviews. Backer, the longtime imagemaker for Campbell Soups and other major brands, beat long odds: 85% to 90% of agencies called on the carpet for their work in such reviews lose the account.
At a time when advertising firms are struggling through the third year of the worst slump to hit the industry in more than a decade, account reviews have become a harrowing aspect of business as usual, one that some agency people call the "dance of death." Observes Frank Stanton, the former chairman of Simmons Market Research Bureau: "Pandemonium is a good word to describe the business now." Shaken by the instability in the industry, many agencies are only making the problem worse by retreating to ideas that seem safe -- but that may bore consumers and further alienate clients.
Since last July, more than $800 million worth of advertising work has moved from one agency to another. (The size of an account is measured by the client's annual ad spending, on which the agency earns a percentage commission.) A few days before the Avis decision, Eastman Kodak shifted the lucrative media-buying responsibility for placing some $55 million worth of its ads to the Lintas agency, a contract probably worth at least $1 million in fees. The loser: J. Walter Thompson, which has been creating Kodak's advertising for 61 years, most recently its "True Colors" campaign. "It came as a complete surprise to us," said the sobered JWT chairman, Burt Manning. "I still don't know what happened." Among the advertisers currently working the crowd for a possible new image: American Express (billings at stake: $60 million), Michelob ($35 to $40 million), Weight Watchers ($30 million) and -- appropriately enough -- Maalox ($15 million).