Rehab: An Advertising Love Story

They would be pulling off something almost unheard of in a new-business pitch: presenting finished work to a potential client. Still, Montague, who's known for merciless self-criticism, had a moment of despair. "I went back to our office and just sat by myself. Rose came in, and I remember saying to her, 'This is going to be a total unmitigated disaster,' " says Montague, who gets piercingly quiet when he's upset. "I was worried he was going to jump out the window," Ryan adds. But with some of the toughest months in their professional lives under their belts, they had learned to talk each other off the ledge: "Here's the thing," said Ryan, who considers Montague her business soul mate. "If [the pitch team] can't get up to do it, we'll just get up and do it for them."

"We expected a big agency to walk in the door, and instead, we found a group of people we immediately connected with," says Andrea Spiegel, JetBlue's vice president of sales and marketing. What's more, she says, her team fell in love with JWT's work. There was the stealth campaign to plant giant snack bins and leather-covered benches in cities where the airline was starting up service. There was the video booth at Rockefeller Center to collect testimonials from the airline's fans, and the silly postcards for passengers to mail in their JetBlue moments. "Testimonials can be so clichéd," Spiegel says, "but they made it fresh and forward-thinking." It also didn't hurt when JetBlue learned that the eight animated spots--which are now running nationwide--would cost less than a single, 30-second ad. Not only did JetBlue award JWT its business, it green-lighted almost all of the work the team presented.

"That has never happened in my career," says Ryan. Montague, clearly still thrilled, concurs: "Literally, it's a first," he says. "It's unprecedented."

Because of the sheer size and conservatism of JWT's client roster, Montague and Ryan's strategy so far has been to instigate change for those who most need it, or at least are most open to it. "If we try to fix everything at once, we'll die of exhaustion," says Montague. So where even dull TV and print spots are doing just fine, they're leaving well enough alone. But sometimes the desire for something new comes from the least likely source, catching even Montague and Ryan off guard.

Last summer, Esther Lem, a VP at Unilever, was assigned to take over Sunsilk, a major shampoo brand that will launch in the United States next month. She was coming off Unilever's successful Axe deodorant launch, which got tremendous applause in 2001 for work she had done with creative shop BBH. When she found out she'd be working with JWT, which had been gearing up for this $100 million launch for two years, she implored her boss: "Do we have to keep this agency?"

For JWT, losing another Unilever account would have been an unsustainable blow. Not only was Unilever its oldest client--dating back to 1902--but in the past year, the company had already shifted roughly $100 million in billings away from JWT Worldwide.

The New York team presented its work to Lem in nearly completed form. "It wasn't good enough," says Lem. "It was a very tough conversation, because they thought they were ready to launch." Lem, who had taken over from a previous client contact, wanted nontraditional work, something gutsy and impious to make competitors like Procter & Gamble and L'Oréal look outdated. And she wanted to be the first to crack an online viral campaign for women.

This was the unshackled permission JWT had been waiting for. Ryan and Montague switched up some members of the team and, over an intense eight-week span, redid the print and TV spots with a completely new voice and flavor. They also concocted eight viral ideas smutty enough to make Paris Hilton blush, from online video spoofs and Web sites to a video game (sorry, we can't give you any more dirt until the ads break next month). They flew to Chicago, plastered the walls with their ideas, and presented them to Lem. "Some of the ideas made my hands sweat, which is a very good thing," she remembers, noting that they're pursuing four of the viral campaigns. "The entire team did a 180. It feels like a whole new agency did the work."

JWT's entertainment division also contributed an idea that flipped product placement on its head. Lem explains that JWT purchased the U.S. rights to a European sex sitcom, then got actor Paul Reiser's production company to write Sunsilk-sponsored scripts. Once taping is complete, she says, TBS will run the two-and-a-half-minute micro-sitcoms between Sex and the City reruns starting in September. They'll also be distributed to mobile devices. "JWT is liberated to be creative," says Lem. "We're a boring, old packaged-goods company, so we rely on them for that."