Hope & Glory for DDB

A week after winning Subaru early this month, DDB’s Lee Garfinkel sat in his Madison Avenue office-bare white walls, an acoustic guitar sitting nearby-and contemplated the significance of the victory. The big picture was obvious: It meant a return to the automobile category for the agency that changed the ad business with its Volkswagen work in the 1960s. But Garfinkel, who began his career on Subaru as a young copywriter in the ’80s, briefly allowed himself to consider what it meant on a personal level, too. When Subaru vp of marketing Rick Crosson called, “he said the nicest thing,” Garfinkel recalls. “He said, ‘Welcome back to Subaru.’ That really touched me. I got choked up at that point.”

Garfinkel, 49, joined DDB as New York chairman and chief creative officer in March 2003. He has helped the shop win the $20 million Cotton account and more business from existing clients, including Unilever’s Lipton iced teas ($10 million) and Anheuser-Busch’s Michelob Amber Bock ($30 million). But the $165 million Subaru account, snared after a five-month review, is his first big catch-and a sweet one at that. He worked on Subaru for more than a decade at Levine, Huntley, Schmidt & Beaver, where he began as a junior copywriter and left as executive creative director, and he still drives a Subaru today.

But Garfinkel, a low-key leader-“I’m in between a pessimist and a realist” is how he describes it-isn’t getting carried away. “It is just the beginning,” he says of the revamp at the estimated $800 million shop. “We’ve definitely made progress, but we’re far from where I want us to be.”

Garfinkel was recruited to the Omnicom Group agency by DDB worldwide CEO Ken Kaess and Chicago chairman and U.S. chief creative officer Bob Scarpelli. (He arrived after three months off due to a contractual obligation to his former employer, D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, and its parent, Publicis Groupe.) At DDB, his mission was to ignite a spark at an agency that had largely grown cold creatively. The lackluster New York office had suffered chronic management changes on the business and creative sides and continued to live in the shadow of DDB Chicago, long celebrated for its creative achievements on A-B.

TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Bob Kuperman had arrived as New York president and CEO in 2001. “Kupe had done a good job of stabilizing things from the standpoint of improving morale, the creative product and from a financial standpoint,” says Kaess. “Lee added rocket fuel to the recovery.”

The man Kaess calls a “creative superstar” had built a reputation for squeezing standout creative out of shops-Lowe in New York and D’Arcy-built on process and packaged-goods clients. (Earlier he had worked at BBDO, where he did the famous Cindy Crawford Super Bowl Pepsi spot.) “Wherever he’s been, he’s made the work and the agency better,” says Scarpelli. “We were thinking about going in a different direction in New York, and he became available.”

For Keith Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide, that direction means nothing less than having New York reclaim its leadership position in the network and the city. “This is the flagship office,” Reinhard says. “It needs to be seen by the New York community as [it was] in the heyday-as one after which there is no other. It’s something to shoot for in an entirely different world, competitive set and media context.”
When D’Arcy was absorbed by Publicis, Garfinkel, who had been at D’Arcy for a year and a half, cut his ties rather than take a worldwide role at the merged shop. Still, he says his time at D’Arcy was productive. He produced enviable work for Heineken, arguably helped improve the work for Cadillac and Crest and helped win Cadbury’s $30-50 million chocolate business, among other strides. Before D’Arcy, as chairman, CEO and chief creative officer of Lowe, Garfinkel produced award-winning work for Mercedes-Benz, Sprite and Diet Coke and Sony, among other clients.

Upon joining DDB, the onetime aspiring comedian took the agency’s legacy-and its attendant expectations-seriously. “My mission here is to make DDB New York as relevant as it was in the ’60s and ’70s,” he says. “Not only was the creative great, but what they were doing was revolutionary in terms of how they thought about businesses. And that’s what I’m asking people to do for me here.”

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