C O R P O R AT E P O L I T I C S 1 0 1
MY FIRST
staff design job out of art school was in the advertising and promotion department of CBS Records. I held the lowest possible position: I reported to the assistant art director, who reported to the art director, who reported to the creative director, who reported to the vice president of merchandising, who reported to the vice president of sales, who reported to the president of CBS Records. I was teamed with a copywriter, and we created ads that promoted albums in trade publications like Cashbox and Billboard. We would be given a work order, which contained a job number and stated the name of the album and the band to be promoted, the publication in which the ad would appear, the size of the ad, and some other basic content requirements. This information came from the product manager of the band, who was typically the author of the marketing plan for a given album. The copywriter and I would collaborate on a concept and headline. Then the copywriter would craft the body copy while I designed the ad. The finished layout would be attached to a routing slip, and a “traffic manager” would carry the ad from office to
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office to obtain the necessary approvals from various people within the corporation. The necessary signatures were as follows: the assistant art director of the advertising department, the art director of the advertising department, the creative director of the advertising department, the product manager of the band, the director of product management, the vice president of A&R (artist and repertoire), the vice president of the record label (Columbia or Epic), and in the case of important recording artists, the president of CBS Records, who at that time was Clive Davis. The average amount of time allowed for a given ad to be conceived, written, designed, approved, typeset, and mechanicalized (this was before the computer) was about three days. Trade ads (Cashbox, Billboard, et al.) were printed on Wednesdays, which often meant that ads for those magazines had to be completed and approved in less than a day to make the publications’ closings. The first ad I laid out was a trade ad. It was routed to the assistant art director and promptly came back to me for all kinds of revisions. I responded to the comments, and the ad was rerouted to the assistant art director. Again it returned. In both instances, I was instructed to make the headline and the name of the album bigger. On the third submission, the headline and album title were huge. The ad was returned with a memo to make “on Columbia Records and Tapes” larger. The fourth submission came back with the notation that there was not sufficient room for the body copy. I decided to talk to the assistant art director because I had only half a day left to produce the ad. I waited outside his office for twenty minutes while he finished a phone call. He held one