PhillyDeals: Recalling the mad advertising days at Ayer

The old bronze-doored art deco headquarters building on Philadelphia's Washington Square is condos now.

But the words, wrought by copywriters and blazoned on TV and magazines by art directors at the pioneering ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son (1869-2002) still echo:

A diamond is forever

Be all you can be

Never underestimate the power of a woman

Half a century and more after they were hired at Ayer, a generation after the last of its local staff moved to New York (the name vanished later, in a merger), a graybeard rearguard of former Ayer Philadelphia art directors still gathers to stretch tales and pick apart the Mad Men of TV fame.

The rules, recalled Dick Yeager in conclave at the Black Bass Inn near New Hope last week, defied Ayer's blue-chip clientele:

"No air conditioning," though Carrier was a client. "No coffee," though Ayer puffed Hills Bros. and Folgers.

"Why would an art director need a phone?" boss Harry Batten liked to ask - though Ayer represented AT&T for a century, nudging America to "reach out and touch someone."

Booze was off-site, couches too: Offices were too small. Recreation was in quaint apartments, crowded bars, bookstores, at Freeman's Auction.

Every so often, Conrad Vogel said, someone would cackle like a chicken, and soon the art department was a circus of animal noises. They'd float parachutes up from the windows, once annoying the boss in his 12th-floor office, Bill Oliver added.

Pay started low for recent art-school grads: "Ayer was a great place, if your parents could afford to send you there," cracked Roger Cook.

Vogel remembered print-nerdy kerning and font arguments, and a late-night vigilante shaving type so it could be set closer, the new way. And deadline overtime: "I bought my house that way."

"That was the golden time," said Barrie Maguire. "You didn't have focus groups. You sat with an ad copy writer, you just came up with an idea. You got excited. You took it to the supervisor. If the client liked it, you produced it. It was pure fun. Before it got scientific."

Glittery Mad Men, stylish exaggeration aside, catches "the spirit of what it was like," Bob Phillips said. Sell the big idea, "and millions of dollars would be spent. It was a pure, creative, fun exercise."

"Then the MBAs got into the advertising business," said buzz-cut Peter Curry, whose clean-shaven chin stood out among the others' whiskered faces.

Ayer had been known as the premier creative agency, said Yeager. "But over the years, we got plans-oriented. It got to where [a prospect like] Johnson & Johnson would say, 'If only we could combine Ayer's planning with Young & Rubicam's creative.' "

Slow to keep up? Like Philly, maybe. "The art department didn't meet with clients in those days. That was for the business people, they told me," Cook said. He left for his own design partnership, dealing directly with clients. "And Ayer went down the tubes."

Bearded chins nodding. Smiles.