MADNESS ON MADISON AVENUE

By John Greenwald

Many of the nation's biggest advertisers have a new slogan for their advertising agencies: Get Lost! Consider United Airlines, which dumped Leo Burnett, the giant Chicago agency that created one of the most memorable ad campaigns in aviation history, "Fly the friendly skies." Now it's bye-bye, friendliness--hello, hostility. United hired Minneapolis, Minn., maverick Fallon McElligott to handle the carrier's $60 million U.S. account. Fallon's in-your-face ads trash air travel, playing up canceled flights, lousy food and surly personnel. The punch line, "Rising," implies that compared with the rest of the airline industry, United is heading in another direction.

A lot of heavyweight advertisers are headed in different directions, including Domino's Pizza, Delta Air Lines, Reebok and the ABC television network. Account changes are rippling at a record pace through the U.S. advertising industry, which handled $52 billion in domestic media billings last year. (Billings measure clients' ad spending, on which agencies take a cut as fees; 15% used to be standard, although the rate varies.) The U.S. Army, beset by sex scandals and an increasingly hard time recruiting new soldiers, is putting its $80 million account--now held by Young & Rubicam--up for review. That couldn't be more fitting, because the ad wars are turning Madison Avenue into a shelled-out battleground where huge chunks of business are blasted loose and flying around, creating career casualties when they land. At Burnett, a boardroom coup in March toppled CEO Bill Lynch and his protege, Jim Jenness, and restored chairman Rick Fizdale to the CEO job.

Burnett's troubles reflect the industry's turmoil. Certainly there's plenty of business available. Ad billings have been rising at an average rate of about 6% a year. But given the plethora of media outlets--print, radio, TV, cable, satellite and now the Internet--competing for consumers' attention, it's easier than ever for messages to get lost or ignored. So even though his airline was enjoying a record year financially, United chairman Gerald Greenwald sacked Burnett in October, noting that today's hate-to-fly passengers hardly regard the skies as friendly.

While Burnett was still reeling, its $100 million Miller Lite account was also heading for Fallon (which does work for TIME as well) in a stealth campaign launched by Philip Morris CEO Geoffrey Bible, whose company owns Miller. Bible had earlier warned Burnett's Fizdale that he was "lighting a blowtorch" under the agency to get it to create sharper and more youth-oriented ads for the flagging Lite brand. In the meantime, he also asked Fallon to work on Lite, in secrecy. In late December, Miller Brewing CEO Jack MacDonough paid a surprise visit to Fizdale with a Merry Christmas, you're fired. "We were blindsided," Fizdale says.

All this agency hopping is testing the long-held view that a brand can't be built overnight, and needs to be cultivated and nurtured systematically. "A successful brand has a personality and a conversation with consumers," says Steve Goldstein, vice president of marketing for Levi Strauss, which has used Foote, Cone & Belding and a predecessor agency for 65 years. "But if you keep changing the voice of the person talking, it's very hard for consumers to trust a brand."

Yet long-term client-agency marriages are becoming as rare in the ad business as lasting marriages in real life. United jettisoned Burnett after 31 years, while Delta ended a 51-year relationship with BBDO South in March and took up with Saatchi & Saatchi. Overall, the tenure of the average ad account has dwindled from seven years to five since 1984. "The big change is that things are increasingly competitive, and it's getting tougher and more meanspirited," says Peter Georgescu, president of Young & Rubicam, which has $7.4 billion in worldwide billings. Of course, Georgescu has also been in there pitching. Y&R snatched United's $60 million overseas account and media buying from Burnett last year and grabbed $100 million worth of AT&T business away from N.W. Ayer, the phone company's admaker for 88 years.

One of the fiercest debates in the industry today is over what, exactly, constitutes good advertising in an era when "any focus group of 15-year-olds can play back to you your marketing strategies," according to Bob Kuperman, CEO of TBWA Chiat/Day (billings: $3 billion), which took away a $200 million Taco Bell account from Bozell in March. He adds, "In reality, 95% of advertising is a waste of money that isn't listened to or believed."

Kuperman's shop, the home of the Energizer Bunny, is big on ads that create a buzz. Chiat's celebrated "Toys" commercial for Nissan generated plenty of that last year by never showing a car. Whether the tactic encouraged buyers is unclear. Sales of Nissans are up 7.9% so far this year, but factors like lower prices helped. Says Alan Gottesman, managing director of West End Communications/Consulting in New York City: "You can't tell what an ad means for sales because there are too many other contaminants."

Many advertisers aren't buying that explanation, and they're booting out agencies right and left. Sales down this quarter? Can the agency. "Advertising is a significant budget item and a discretionary one," observes O. Burtch Drake, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which represents 580 shops. "It's not like a factory, which you can't just up and move. You can pick up and move to a new agency on 90 days' notice."

Adding to the churn is the game of musical marketing chairs that is a constant occurrence amid today's mergers, downsizings and restructurings. "Look at the velocity of people changing jobs," says Richard Kirshenbaum, co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, a New York boutique with $250 million in billings. "It's hard to develop loyalty when so many people are leaving." Says Keith Reinhard, chairman and CEO of DDB Needham Worldwide (billings: $9.6 billion): "If you counted the number of changes among marketing executives, you would see a [concomitantly] high number of clients putting their accounts in review."

With so much business up for grabs, hard-hit Burnett (billings: $5.82 billion) has won some battles too. The agency pulled a $250 million Procter & Gamble account away from Saatchi & Saatchi in January and brags about its quirky campaign for Altoids ("The curiously strong peppermints"), a 200-year-old brand of British breath mints. Burnett says the ads have brought Altoids from nowhere to a 10% share of the $235 million U.S. market for breath mints in just three years. Says Linda Wolf, Burnett's group president for North America: "When it comes to being edgy and offbeat and getting our point across, we do it well."

Getting the point across has never been more difficult, but that is what agencies are paid to do. "What it comes down to is positioning a product in the mind of consumers so that it's relevant to them," says Bobby Calder, a marketing professor at Northwestern. "When that's been done, it's mission accomplished." And until that's been done, expect more ad campaigns to change their tune as more clients send their agencies packing.

--Reported by Stacy Perman/New York and Ron Stodghill II/Chicago

With reporting by STACY PERMAN/NEW YORK AND RON STODGHILL II/CHICAGO