Larry Ellison: “Fire the F—ing Creative Agency”

Larry Ellison, long-time Oracle CEO and now Chairman, is famously hands-on with advertising. And for 12+ years of my career, I was tasked with writing copy and driving design for every print ad that went up for his review and approval/rejection.

This is the story of one ad review that went completely off the rails. A day where one wrong comment likely would have resulted in me being fired. The experience hammered home a failure in leadership that I tried my best to avoid going forward.

It began the usual way. On Tuesday morning, I received a call saying, “Larry wants to work on a new ad for Product X”. I would then have 48 hours to:

• Track down the product marketing leads for  ‘X’ (who might be on a roadshow in India)
• Get educated on the benefits of ‘X’ to the buying audience
• Identify what made our product uniquely different from our competitors
• Produce three to five Wall Street Journal front page ad concepts (the most difficult format)
• Fend off development executives who demanded that the top 57 new features be listed
• Review with legal to ensure that our claims were factual and adjust or kill as needed

Thursday at 2pm, a graphics designer and I would be standing by to enter the boardroom for the review with Larry. Of course, there was always a full afternoon agenda and we were always the last item on the agenda (cause advertising is fun!). Oh, and Larry never actually arrived at 2pm. So our review might be at 4pm or it might be at 7pm.

On this particular day, we entered the boardroom and our audience included Larry Ellison, one of the two co-presidents (this was prior to the Mark Hurd / Safra Catz era) and assorted SVPs left over from the prior meeting. Entering the room, a couple of the executives silently signaled that the product development meetings had gone badly and that Larry was in a less-than-patient mood.

As usual, I laid out hard copies of each of the ad concepts while the designer linked her laptop to the boardroom screen.

Finishing a side conversation, Larry focused on the ad concepts. 

On a normal day, Larry would choose one concept that was closest to what he had in his head, the designer would pull it up on screen, and then Larry would dictate the changes he wanted. 

Today, he frowned at the first one, scowled at the second one, sneered at the third, and so on through the set. 

Returning to the first printed concept, he looked up, and barked, “You should fire the f’ing creative agency”. 

Collecting the printed pages one by one, wadding them together into a larger and larger ball, he threw them into the middle of the table and ranted, “I can’t believe we pay a f’ing fortune to these f’ing creative agencies to produce f’ing useless crap like this.”

Call me a coward… but I did NOT point out that there was no “f’ing creative agency” that was receiving “a f’ing fortune”. 

Nor did I loudly explain that I personally had written 95% of the ads that had been delivered for over ten years.

You might be thinking that Larry’s rant was the “failure in leadership” that I referenced in the opening. Surprisingly, it was not. Stick with me…

Only later did I learn that, on the initial Tuesday morning, Larry had asked for concepts around “Product X” but changed his mind a few hours later and told the then co-president that, instead, he wanted to focus on “Product Y”. 

Unfortunately, the co-president never told anyone in marketing about the change of focus. As a result, I showed up on Thursday — when Larry was ready to focus on “X” — with completely inappropriate ad creative.

Managing large teams of people with not enough hours in the day, I have myself been frustrated when I was ready to work on a project but my colleagues arrived ill-prepared. I don’t think I ever tossed around f-bombs (and apologize profusely if I have ever have) but I’m sure I showed irritation.

The leadership lesson for me was the importance of stepping up and owning mistakes — especially when it protects your team. Don’t expect your staff to take the heat for a situation that was not of their making.

In this case, the co-president was fully aware of what triggered the rant. The co-president was the only one who knew that Larry had shifted focus and this was the cause of the blow-up.

He didn’t even have to literally “own” it. He could simply have said, “Larry, it’s clear that the ad folks never got the redirect and therefore they focused on the wrong product. Let’s shut this down before we waste any more of your time. I’ll have them come back Tuesday with the corrected concepts.”

Instead, he sat there silently as Larry continued his litany of complaints.

THAT was the day’s lesson:  Own Your Mistakes

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a leadership position, always remember that one of your most important jobs is providing air cover to your staff when the shit hits the fan.