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to SF's ad club
Just shy of 100 years, victim of the hard economy
By Gabriel Spitzer
When the history of San Francisco’s advertising industry is written, many of the names of the city’s recently departed will be erased from memory.
Layoffs and closings have become routine over the past two years, as one fledgling company after another has gone under in the dot.com bust.
But not all the shutterings will be quickly forgotten.
One closing in particular is bringing a catch in the throat for many in San Francisco’s ad community.
It’s the San Francisco Advertising Club, which effectively ceased operations last week, just two years shy of its one-hundredth birthday.
"It has served the local advertising community very well, and it is the only organization that really has the support of the whole industry, in terms of agencies, clients, media and suppliers," says Jerry Gibbons, a past president of the club and currently executive vice president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies on the West Coast.
The club was the second oldest of its kind in the country, formed in 1903. Originally meeting in donated space at a local agency, the club over the years came to reflect the general well-being of the city's ad industry, growing and waning in membership as the industry prospered and faltered.
It reached a new high in the late 1990s, when San Francisco was dizzy with cash. Two years ago the club’s membership peaked at about 1,200 members, with five full-time staff members.
But by last week, the club’s rolls were down to 800 members, perhaps half of whom actually paid dues.
Membership had gone from a necessity for many to a luxury that fewer and fewer could afford.
"You can’t expect an assistant account exec who’s making $30,000 a year to come up with $170 for dues," says Michael McNamara, principal of notCOM advertising in San Francisco and vice president of the Advertising Club until last June.
The Club’s decline has brought into stark relief many of the peculiarities of San Francisco’s advertising community, in what may be the epicenter of the industry’s vicissitudes.
"I don’t think the rest of the country experienced the slowdown the way we did. We had this huge feast right before the recession, and we got really fat," says McNamara.
As one internet company after the other blew into town, pledging immense ad campaigns, San Francisco agencies quickly went on a hiring binge.
"So they hired and hired until basically there was zero unemployment. There was stealing going on, there was overpaying, and it got to the point where you were paying a college grad 50 grand to be an account coordinator," says McNamara.
"Agencies really overextended themselves in terms of overhead. They had these huge mortgages, monthly rents and salaries, and these $50 million accounts just weren’t paying off. And it just killed the agencies."
In the process, many agencies, drunk on dot.com bucks, managed to alienate many of their long-time, stable accounts.
"Classic clients that we’ve spent years attracting here were very angry that we could toss aside their $10 million campaigns for somebody else’s $50 million campaign," says Jim Magill, president of the San Francisco-based Corsi Group. Magill served as president of the Advertising Club 10 years ago, following in the footsteps of his father, who presided over the Club in the mid-1960s.
Magill says that another of San Francisco’s quirks ended up hurting the Ad Club: the increasing role of creative directors in the running of agencies here.
"Over the last 10 or 15 years, what has developed here in particular has been a large number of agencies run by creative directors, which has diminished the role that traditionally was a general manager, business manager or president, which, in most other markets, still is a strong role," he says.
"The growth of the creative-dominated agency in this town in some ways got rid of our leadership.
"Then you’ve got the branch offices being filled with people from New York or Boston, not local San Francisco people. So I’m saying, whoa, what happened to the community aspect of this thing?"
Still, the ad club may not be dead for good.
A number of people are already working to resurrect the club in some form.
If for no other reason, San Francisco’s ad community will miss the Club’s annual SF Show, an awards gala in which local creative teams would showcase their work.
But even the popular awards ceremony had been showing signs of dysfunction lately.
"It’s sort of had a cloud over it," says McNamara.
"Goodby has dominated for the last eight years, then there was Foote Cone back in the days of Levi’s and the 501 Blues, when they did an awesome job taking every award. Other agencies kind of got disgusted. But still, right up to last year we got a record number of entries—probably better than 1,500."
Magill, along with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners boss Jeff Goodby and others, is preparing to revamp and relaunch the Club. They point out that the Club provided plenty of benefits, such as philanthropic work and training, to the ad community.
"It’s always been a training ground. The agencies have less and less training, less and less money to do that. We’ve also done a lot of career placement over the years. And we’ve worked with the [American Advertising Federation], trying to get more minority kids into the business, because even in San Francisco, our numbers are very, very low," says Magill.
The club’s supporters say they are confident that it will reemerge some time this year, perhaps soon enough to pull off the 2002 SF Show this spring.
But beyond that, no one knows how much the new club will resemble the old one.
"We really have to analyze what will best meet the needs of the community," says Gibbons. "We don’t need another Christmas party. The club should be about celebrating the work in the marketplace. San Francisco is an important ad market, and it has been for decades."
January 9, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.
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