Michael Ovitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…What did your staff think? Did you tell them, hey, we're going to go do an ad pitch to Coca-Cola? I'll tell you what they thought. Most of them thought I'd taken leave of my senses. How could we be in the advertising business? A couple of them looked at me and said, wow, we can do this. Why can't we do it? My point of view, 80% of our company thought there was something wrong with me, that I probably had food poisoning or something that went in my head because it just didn't seem to equate to them. To me, it did because what do we do? We read the material and try to tell a client like Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, do you make a movie about dinosaurs? Can we recommend that to Dustin Hoffman? Can you make a movie? We think you should make a movie about an autistic guy and Tom Cruise should be your brother. We took the same positions that a buyer took. No one owns creative thought or opinion. You two guys look at something on TV tonight. You have an opinion about it. When you're right more than you're wrong, that opinion is a trusted opinion, and we were right more than we were wrong collectively as a group. We flew to Atlanta, we sat, we looked at every single commercial they'd ever done. We listened to the complaints of the department heads, geographically. I said to them, give us 90 days and we'll be back here. I knew it would take us two weeks because I already had the idea that I thought was going to work, but I never like to over promise and under-deliver. I like to under-promise and over-deliver. About two weeks later, I called Don Keough. I said, we're coming back to Atlanta and I'm going to pitch your idea. He said, you said you needed three months. I said, well, we kind of accelerated, we got so excited, and we drank a lot of Coca-Cola, which cracked him up. We flew in three weeks to the day after we met the first time and we pitched a simple idea. We said, look, for the same money you're spending, we're going to do 30–40 commercials a year. They're all going to be for different demographics. It'll cost you the same as your seven commercials. We're going to do a mascot for you, which turned out to be the polar bears, still running 25 years later. We are going to run your commercials like a relay race. First of the year, we're going to be hopeful. February, we're going to go into Valentine's Day and love. Easter, family. Summer, refreshment. Fall, back to school. Thanksgiving, family again. Christmas, polar bears. They said, how do we know that's going to work? I said you don't because we didn't, they didn't. We just said we believe it. Let us try one flight of commercials, and they said, how many do you want to do? I said 40 and they said you're crazy, but if you want to do 40 for the seven, the budget for seven, you got it. They asked us then they called back and backtracked because McCann had been their agency for 40 years. They said, will you come do what's called a shootout? A shootout is where you come in and all the ad agencies pitch to the executives. nd backtracked because McCann had been their agency for 40 years. They said, will you come do what's called a shootout? A shootout is where you come in and all the ad agencies pitch to the executives. I said, we will do a shootout if Don and Roberto attend, the CFO, Doug Ivester, attends because he is the keeper of the money, your Head of Marketing, Peter Sealey, attends, and three or four of your other key executives attend and we'll do it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.