Rehab: An Advertising Love Story

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).

"It was a big network agency that was slowly dying," says Andrew Jaffe, a former Adweek editor who now runs a management consultancy for the ad industry. (J. Walter Thompson's parent "network" is WPP.) "Eventually, these huge agencies get so weak and calcified that the brand has to be shut down, employees laid off, and, if the clients can be saved, the holding company moves them to another agency in their network."

On February 28, 2005, Ryan and Montague (now her copresident as well as chief creative officer) summoned the 600-odd employees of the New York office to inform them that J. Walter Thompson was being set afire, to rise again as JWT. The silos, the hierarchy, the funk of inertia--all were to be replaced with fast, flat, and fun. The aircraft carrier would become "a billion-dollar startup," they said, with creativity at its core. Worldwide, the agency's 300-plus offices celebrated the shift as only advertising types could: In Mexico, they marked the rebirth with circus clowns and elephants; in Egypt, the staff symbolically planted the "seeds" of "passion, commitment, creativity" in the earth; London observed a minute's silence for founder Commodore Thompson, who built the agency from scratch 142 years ago.

But the next day, when the bells stopped ringing and Jeffrey's PR machine had ceased its grinding, there was nothing left to do back in New York but the deep gut-level rethinking and dirty spadework. It must have been a hell of a hangover.