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When the phone rang one fall night in 2004, Rosemarie Ryan knew she was about to get dumped. She hadn't heard from him all week, and this was the call she had feared. "I thought, 'I'm just going to keep talking,' " the auburn-haired Brit recalls, with her signature rapid-fire energy. "So I just kept talking for a half an hour and didn't stop."

It would have been fair enough for Ty Montague to turn Ryan down. Then co-creative director of Wieden+Kennedy New York, he was at the height of his career, a household name in boutique ad agencies for his visionary Sega "Beta-7" campaign, which had blown the doors off every previous one built for the Web. In fact, he had already set plans in motion to leave Wieden to start his own shop. Now here was Ryan, offering him a place as cocaptain of what was being derisively referred to as the aircraft carrier of Madison Avenue.

Ryan, now 43, had rationalized the risk herself a year earlier, abandoning her post as president of Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, an agency she considered family, to take the same (though higher-stakes) role at J. Walter Thompson's New York office. That night, she deployed her most effective weapons--brutal honesty, realism, and laughter--to get Montague to the same place. "Rose started talking, and I don't know what happened," he says now, running his hand through his overgrown brown hair and thinking back to that Sunday night a year and a half ago. When he picked up the phone he had every intention of "breaking up," of setting out on his own. By the time he hung up, he was J. Walter Thompson's newest employee. "I think she hypnotized me," he says. He admits a grin, she a proud smirk. Their soft blue eyes meet.

Ryan's charms played no small part in Montague's conversion. But then, it's not in his nature to shrink from a challenge, even a hopeless one. (His now wife, Dany Lennon, was 29, married, and pregnant when he arrived in New York in 1984 as a 21-year-old New Mexican in cowboy boots; he waited seven years--until she was divorced--to tell her he loved her. "When he sets his sights on something," says Lennon, "his patience is extraordinary.") Besides, what Montague, now 43, wanted more than anything was to shake up the entire industry, to lead marketers to an experimental new frontier. As much as he wanted his own cozy gig, he knew the only way to really upend the business was from within a huge company with huge clients. And with U.S. billings topping $3 billion and clients such as Unilever, Kraft Foods, and Pfizer, you couldn't find a bigger stage than the aircraft carrier.

Bigger, or more dilapidated. At a time of industrywide identity crisis, the oldest and one of the largest agencies in the country--the pioneer of the full-service-agency concept, brand-sponsored shows (soap operas), and account planning--was foundering. In 2002 and 2003, J. Walter Thompson's flagship operation in New York had competed in 20 new business pitches without a single win. It had lost cornerstone accounts such as Kellogg's; others (Merrill Lynch, for one) were hemorrhaging. Year-over-year revenue growth was stalled at 5%, and employee morale was at an all-time low. Until Ryan arrived, the New York office hadn't even had a president since 2001, when Bob Jeffrey was promoted to president, North America (he's now global chair and CEO).