CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS: The Creation and Crash of the Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Empire - Hardcover

Goldman, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684815710 ISBN 13: 9780684815718

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

On December 16, 1994, a bloodletting took place in the stylish sixth-floor boardroom at Saatchi & Saatchi Company PLC, once the world's largest advertising agency holding company. Maurice Saatchi, the forty-eight-year-old chairman who co-founded the company in 1970 with his older brother Charles, was fired by the board of directors under threat by the firm's largest shareholders. Less than a month later, Maurice started a rival ad agency and quickly snapped up former Saatchi & Saatchi clients, most importantly British Airways.
Kevin Goldman traces every step the Saatchi brothers took, from their youth as Iraqi Jewish immigrants in North London to their business merger in 1970, when, with little more than sheer audacity, they opened an ad agency with a full-page announcement ad in the London Sunday Times. Through bold and brash actions, the agency began an acquisition binge, taking over many of the ad industry's giants, including Ted Bates, Backer & Spielvogel, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, and Garland-Compton, to become the number one ad company in the world. However, once they acquired a company, the brothers lost interest, often refusing to meet with its executives again. This disdain would come back to haunt them.
Built into the Saatchi story is the bigger picture of the dramatic changes in advertising in the 1980s, such as the merger mania and ad agency consolidations that swept Madison Avenue, including the British takeover of major agencies.
The story of the decline and crash of Saatchi & Saatchi is a universal tale of corporate greed and ineffective management. It is the story of an ugly, publicly fought civil war in an industry that is supposed to know the steep price paid for an image run amok.

About this title

Reviews

Wall Street Journal advertising columnist Goldman's gossipy account of the rise and crash of Saatchi & Saatchi, the world's largest ad agency at its peak in 1987, unfolds as a Shakespearean drama full of greed, revenge, ambition and civil war. Charles Saatchi, wizard copywriter and art collector, and his mercurial brother, Maurice-both Iraqi Jews who emigrated to London in 1947-founded the agency in 1970 when Charles was 27 and Maurice 25. Their free-spending acquisitions binge, fueled by Maurice's obsessive quest to be the number-one agency, was undermined by expensive buyouts, client defections and a slowdown in ad spending in the U.S. Goldman offers a more critical, American-based view of the brothers and their wheeling and dealing than does British media journalist Alison Fendley in Saatchi & Saatchi: The Inside Story (Forecasts, Sept. 30). He also gives much more inside detail on Maurice's 1994 ouster as chairman in a shareholder mutiny spearheaded by no-nonsense Chicago fund manager David Herro, as well as on the ensuing internecine battle that erupted between M&C Saatchi, the brothers' new agency, and their former shop, renamed Cordiant. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A revelatory briefing on how, in less than 25 years, Charles and Maurice Saatchi managed to build and then nearly destroy the Western world's largest advertising agency. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Wall Street Journal correspondent Goldman recounts how the brothers, born to Jewish parents in Baghdad during the 1940s but brought to England as infants, set up shop in 1970 London with a handful of associates. Charles, the elder by three years, provided the creative drive while urbane Maurice served as the rainmaking front man. The fledgling firm attracted useful attention with imaginative campaigns, e.g., a birth-control promotion for Great Britain's Health Education Council that featured the picture of a pregnant man. A flair for takeovers helped keep the agency growing through the mid-1980s, when Saatchi & Saatchi launched a successful invasion of Madison Avenue and claimed the top spot in the global ad industry. Thereafter, the installment payments due on past acquisitions, a slump in demand for advertising, and ill-advised forays into consulting services caused a severe liquidity squeeze and the stock market's subsequent markdown of Saatchi & Saatchi securities; and institutional investors began focusing on the willful, spendthrift ways of the founders. After a series of unseemly battles fought in the press and boardroom, Maurice was ousted at the start of 1994. Charles followed him out the door and became an equal partner in a start-up agency operating under the M&C Saatchi banner. Despite account defections, legal strife, and staffing problems, their old firm (renamed Cordiant) weathered all storms and remains a force to be reckoned with. A vivid, tellingly detailed reconstruction of the birth and near-death experience of a consequential multinational enterprise, which ranges widely among such variant milieus as art, commerce, fashion, the media, politics, and show-biz. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In 1989, as their company tottered on the brink of collapse, the brothers Saatchi, Charles and Maurice, and their advertising kingdom were profiled in two books, The Brothers: Saatchi and Saatchi by Ivan Fallon and Saatchi and Saatchi: The Inside Story by Philip Kleinman. Much has happened to the two brothers since then, and Goldman brings us up to date. (See also Alison Fendley's Saatchi & Saatchi: The Inside Story.) The brothers had built the largest advertising firm in the world in less than 25 years, changing advertising from a creative enterprise into a big business; however, they also overextended themselves and mismanaged operations badly. Goldman covered the Saatchis' fall at the end of the 1980s in his Wall Street Journal advertising column and has since logged more than 100 articles on them. Although one needs a scorecard to keep up with the corporate intrigue and machinations involving Charles and Maurice, Goldman does an excellent job of reporting, while at the same time portraying the massive changes in the world of advertising. David Rouse

Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Iraqi-born Jews whose family emigrated to Great Britain, established an advertising agency in 1970 and made it the largest in the world by 1987. Their financially questionable consolidations and mergers, as well as a general slowdown in the advertising business, created a crisis that resulted in their being forced out of their agency in 1994 by outside directors. The Saatchi brothers went on to form a new agency that captured many former clients and may eventually surpass the old firm. Goldman, advertising columnist for the Wall Street Journal, knows advertising; he describes some of the changes taking place in the business over the last 30 years. A good writer, he has an excellent eye for detail and tells many interesting stories. This is a much more insightful and critical work than Allison Fendley's recent Saatchi & Saatchi: The Inside Story (LJ 11/15/96). A business book that reads like a novel; highly recommended for all libraries.?William W. Sannwald, San Diego P.L.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684815710
• ISBN 13: 9780684815718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384