The Credit Thief

A week after my partner and I sold the breakthrough campaign of our careers, one of the old veterans at DDB called me into her office. First she congratulated me on the work, said that if the finished product looked anything like the boards and layouts she’d seen it would rank right up there with some of the agency’s best work. High praise from a legend who’d produced some of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s most famous advertising. Then she got up from her desk, walked across the room, and shut the door.

“A word of advice,” she said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Don’t give any of it away.”

When I asked her what she meant by that she said, “Not a radio spot, not a line of copy, not a logo treatment, not a layout. Nothing. I don’t care how little the assignment is or how busy you are doing the big stuff. Don’t let anyone touch even one piece of it or I guarantee they will rob you blind.”

Anyone who’s ever spent time in the creative department of an advertising agency (or, I assume, at a magazine, a design firm, a production company, an architects office, a film studio—who knows, maybe even an accounting firm) is probably familiar with that slippery creature known as “The Credit Thief.” He’s the one who tries to lay claim to your best ideas. Like his cousin the weasel, whom it is said can slip into a chicken coop through a hole no larger than a quarter, he is forever on the prowl for the opportunity to feast on someone else’s labor.

The Credit Thief comes in many varieties. One common type is “The Greedy Boss.” It’s not enough for him to be credited as creative director, the first person you presented the idea to and who, if he was doing his job, offered feedback and suggested ways you could improve upon it. No, he wants the world to think the idea was his and the best you can hope for—if he’s feeling generous—is to allow you to have your name buried somewhere in the credits. At award shows, he’s the first one bounding onto the stage, his hand outstretched. In the press, he’s the one with all the quotes. This type of credit thief used to be fairly rare, probably because if he did it more than once or twice (and they always do it more than once or twice) nobody would want to work for him again. (BBDO used to be an exception, it was filled with Greedy Bosses, all of whom stole with impunity. Mercifully, they were all coaxed into early retirement, either with generous severance packages or large knives thrust between their shoulder blades.) But now that jobs are scarce bosses can be as greedy as they want to be. They’ll milk you like an ant milks a herd of captive aphids and you’ll be grateful goddammit.

I had a Greedy Boss early in my career. I was working at a sleepy little shop in Tribeca when, with great fanfare, they brought him in from Chiat Day. He’d been credited with creating a funny campaign there that got lots of attention and won all kinds of awards. The whole agency, but especially those of us in the creative department, was thrilled that we’d finally be lead by a creative superstar. The thrill was gone a couple weeks later when it became clear to all of us the guy had nothing in his creative cupboard. The few ideas he threw out there were bad, scary bad. He seemed to take particular interest in other people’s ideas though (he had a way of looking at you like he was sizing you up for his next meal). Pretty soon we noticed him getting lots of pats on the back by the top brass for all the great ideas he was coming up with, none of which were his of course. It was around this time that the rumors started trickling in from his previous places of employment, including the nickname he’d earned: The Thief of Baghdad (TOB).

Mercifully, this painful chapter of my professional education ended abruptly when our sleepy little shop imploded and all of us, the TOB included, were scattered to the winds.

A few years later, I encountered a variation of The Greedy Boss—though thankfully he wasn’t my boss—that I call “The Black Hole Boss.” This type of credit thief doesn’t bother with little shit like getting his name on the credits or cutting in front of you on the way to accept the award. Indeed, he doesn’t care about specific ads or even ad campaigns, he’s after whole categories. Like his cosmological namesake, he sucks up all the light around him, other stars simply vanish in his presence. I will dub this Black Hole Boss “Dickie” (an alias so loaded with clever obfuscation not even his former wives or girlfriends will guess his identity). If Dickie were to reduce his philosophy of life to two words (tattooed upon his left forearm perhaps?) they would be “Steal Big.” As big as you can get in fact, unless you know of a bigger boast than “I put that man in the White House.”

It was the summer of 1992 and my partner and I were two of six creatives who’d been chosen to do the advertising for a certain governor of Arkansas’ presidential bid (more obfuscation). I won’t go into all the details—that will be another story, count on it—other than to say that on the very first day of the project, after we’d met with the governor and his wife and were on our way from Little Rock to Hope, the small town where the soon-to-be President had grown up, Dickie, in the midst of a discussion about what might be the best strategy for selling this particular product, jokingly announced “You know if he gets elected I’m going to take all the credit, right?”

We did. And he did.

The craftiest credit thief I ever encountered though was “Mr. S,” who was exactly the type the old copywriter had warned me against. Looking back, he was probably exactly who she was talking about, and perhaps the reason she whispered her warning was that his office was just a few doors down from hers. Mr. S could pick your pocket in broad daylight, smiling the whole time and joking about how much the Knicks stunk up the Garden the night before. Next thing you knew, he was the guy who came up with that great idea you’d tossed out at the big meeting last week, even though, to the best of your recollection, he hadn’t done more than crack a few jokes. No doubt about it, Mr. S gave good meeting. He was smooth and funny and one measure of how good he was was that not only were the clients charmed by him, so were his coworkers, the very people he stole from. He just had that power to make you feel good, to make you smile and shake your head and say to yourself “You know, he’s really not such a bad guy.” Right up until you reached into your jacket and found your wallet missing. After that you at least knew to keep your eye on him.

It’s hard to keep your eye on someone when you’re no longer working at the same company though and it was after I’d moved on to greener pastures that Mr. S’s campaign to rewrite history went into high gear. Circumstances helped him in this because he’d had the good fortune of having sat in on that original meeting where the big idea my partner and I presented was bought. At that meeting he was given the responsibility of producing a little promo spot (the equivalent of the car dealer commercial that says “Now through Presidents Day, get 0% with $5,000 down at signing”) that would be folded into the larger campaign and tagged with my tagline. As the old copywriter had warned, it was just large enough an opening for Mr. S to slither through and, once the original creatives were no longer around to set the record straight, to proclaim the campaign as his own. (A side note: Mr. S had a partner who was his partner in crime throughout all this, a certain Mr. R, but Mr. S was always the thief-in-chief and Mr. R was little more than his wheelman.)

Of course, by then I’d long since left the agency and was completely unaware of the myths Mr. S was busily spinning. It wasn’t until I saw his face on the covers of Adweek and Backstage Shoot, and read him refer to the campaign my partner and I had presented that day in Albany as “The work I’m proudest of” that I realized we’d been fleeced.

To someone outside the business this may all seem like pretty petty stuff. Really, if some weasel wants to take credit for a few ads you did who really gives a shit? But, aside from pride of ownership, there are some very practical reasons for discouraging this kind of poaching, not least of which that it threatens your livelihood. I get hired and paid the rate I do based on the work in my portfolio. Naturally, having a funny, well known campaign in it affects that number. Further, if the creative director who’s thinking of hiring me has doubts about whether the work on my reel is actually mine, if he thinks to himself, “Hey, didn’t I read somewhere that Mr. S came up with that campaign?” I’m fucked.

So the first thing I did was send a letter to Mr. S (there are times when the best way to deliver a message is with a good old fashioned letter, something solid, something held in the hand, something that can’t be deleted with a keystroke). It said simply, “Stop taking credit for work you didn’t do.” It didn’t stop him of course but it clearly rattled him because a couple weeks later I got a rambling, defensive response from him in an angry scrawl in which he swore he’d never actually said he’d come up with the campaign, that the reporters had mistakenly inferred it (I was instantly reminded of the tortured statement that president I helped get elected made when, testifying at his own perjury trial, he said “It depends of what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”). Obviously Mr. S wasn’t used to being called out for the embezzler he was, most of his victims were simply too polite for that sort of thing.

Once I’d dealt with Mr. S I called the offending magazines to set the record straight. The editor at Backstage Shoot was horrified. He apologized and promised to print a correction in the next issue. But when I called the reporter at Adweek the response I got showed how effectively Mr. S’s strategy had worked. “Oh Paul,” she said. “You know as well as I do there are always a lot of people in on the creation of a big, iconic campaign like that. At the end of the day it’s really hard to say exactly who did what.”

“Really?” I said. “Do you have any award show books there?” Yes, she said. “Take a look at the year the campaign was launched. Do you see his name anywhere?” I could hear her flipping through the pages (the campaign won dozens of awards when it broke so she had a lot of flipping to do).

“No,” she said with a sigh.

“Now take a look at the following two years.” More page flipping. “Do you see his name anywhere?”

“No,” she said, very quietly. “Look, I’m really sorry. He told me it was his and, well, I should have checked.”

She too printed a correction. Not that anyone reads corrections.

It’s striking how often—and how easily—the press is made an unwitting accomplice to the credit thief. Mr. S wasn’t the only person I saw on the cover of a magazine claiming credit for work that wasn’t his. A month or two after the election I saw a photo of Dickie on the cover of Adweek doing a victory dance atop his desk under the headline: “The Man Who Put Bill Clinton in the White House.” In the accompanying article, Dickie did exactly what he said he would do on that ride from Little Rock to Hope. What annoyed me most though was not that this bad boy blowhard was taking credit for something that didn’t belong to him but that a “respected industry publication” had handed him the perfect mouthpiece with which to do it.

So the person I called after reading the article wasn’t Dickie but the reporter who’d written the article. When I informed her that there were actually six creatives working on the campaign and that Dickie had played a relatively small role in the whole thing (let’s face it, a couple of guys named Carville and Stephanopoulos had a somewhat larger hand in the victory than any of us) she seemed genuinely shocked.

“Oh my God, I feel awful!” she said. “I’m so sorry! He lied to me and I believed him!”

Apparently my response was not as sympathetic as she’d have liked because she added—with great sincerity— “I said I was sorry, what was I supposed to do?”

“Check your sources?” I said. “Isn’t that your job?”

So why was I a lot more pissed off by Mr. S’s thievery than I was by Dickie’s? First, because Dickie had made it plain from the beginning that he planned to rob us, so none of us was particularly surprised when he made good on that threat. Second, Dickie wasn’t a creative, he was a glorified account guy. So it wasn’t like we were stabbed in the back by one of our own. (Dickie was a big picture guy, he couldn’t have cared less who got credit for having written this script or dreamed up that headline—the kinds of things creatives tend to be very possessive of—as long as he got credit for landing the big account. Or, in this case, for putting the guy in the White House.)

Finally, none of us working on the campaign had any illusions about the type of advertising we were producing. It was clear early on that the political consultants—the people we answered to—were the ones running the show and they weren’t going to go for any of that award-worthy horseshit we creatives like to put on our reels. They had a time-tested formula (“the Dallas Morning News called the President ‘out of touch’…”) and they weren’t about to let some Madison Avenue sharpies stray from it. By the time the Democratic Convention was a wrap and the governor had set off from Madison Square Garden on his now famous (and soon to be imitated ad nauseam) bus tour, we had long since set aside our dreams of golden Lions and One Show Pencils, and happily accept ed our role as “wrists” for the evil political consultants (and man, those guys are evil) in exchange for bragging rights and a seat on this historic ride (and a few tickets to the inaugural ball of course). After all, how many people get to say they got a shot at the world’s biggest brass ring and grabbed it?

There is one other kind of credit thief I’ve encountered, and it is perhaps the saddest creature of them all, for it is the creative who steals from his own partner. For the benefit of those of you outside the business, let me start by describing how the relationship works. The copywriter and art director form the basic unit of the creative department, indeed the entire advertising business is built upon this relationship, for they are the ones who create the actual ads. Like beat cops, they often spend most of their waking hours together. And though the unspoken rule is your loyalty is first and foremost to your partner, the relationship can often be a bit of a rollercoaster ride. One of DDB’s old art directors once put it this way to me: “You’ve got two people locked in a room, eating crappy food together, feeling hungover from all the beer they drank together the night before. They’ve been throwing lame ideas back and forth for over a week now—one says ‘Hey, how about this?’ and the other says ‘Nah, that sucks,’ then that one says ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea’ and the other one says ‘Fuck no, not credible.’ And now they’ve got a meeting with the boss in an hour and they haven’t got jack shit. No big idea, not even a little one. Nothing. And now they’re staring at each other and each of them is thinking ‘Man, this guy sucks, I need a new partner.’ And just when they’ve given up and they’re starting to formulate the lies and excuses they’re going to tell the boss, BANG, it comes to them. The Big Idea! And suddenly there’s a million of them pouring out of both of them so fast they can’t even write them all down. And they’re thinking ‘I love this guy! We are so simpatico! We are FUCKING GENIUSES!’”

But what happens sometimes, usually after the partnership has ended (though some partnerships never end—like swans, they mate for life—most eventually go their separate ways as they’re promoted to new positions or move on to different agencies) is one of them, maybe even both of them, starts to think “You know, that spot we did that won all the big awards? That was really more my idea than his.” Or “Come to think of it, that tagline? that now famous tagline? I seem to recall that I came up with that the day he was out sick.”

Make no mistake, it is a mortal sin to think such thoughts (or to allow yourself to believe them anyway). It violates a sacred trust. But it happens. I had a partner like that, one who I did some of my best work with. And when it happened it really hurt. It still hurts.

I don’t know why or how it happened. I imagine his theft started small, a little intellectual shoplifting at first, some minor shading of the truth here and there. But pretty soon he started stealing more and stealing bigger. After a while everything he’d ever worked on was his and his alone. Which is why I’ve taken to calling him “The One and Only.”

The odd thing is, unlike Mr. S, whose only real talent was thievery, and unlike Dickie, who couldn’t have cared less who got credit for doing the actual work but merely wanted every ounce of limelight surrounding it, The One and Only was genuinely talented. Exceptionally talented. He had no need to steal more than what he’d actually earned, which was considerable. But behind that talent lurked an insecurity so profound he willingly turned against his own colleagues, apparently not realizing that by stealing even a small part of the credit (let alone the lion’s share of it) he needlessly called into question his own role in any of it (I know people who to this day assume—wrongly—that The One and Only stole everything he’s ever been credited for).

I’ve often wondered what factors—whether nature, nurture, or some combination of the two—compelled my old partner to behave the way he did (and, I’m told, still does). What mutation within made him long so to be an only child in a profession that surrounds you with siblings? A longing so powerful it caused him to rewrite his own history? I’ve spent enough time on the couch to have a whole host of theories (my shrink happened to specialize in advertising creatives so when the topic came up, and it came up often, he was in familiar territory) but that’s another essay, my focus here is not on causes but effects. I know for a fact he believed the lies he told (and everyone knows the most effective liars are the ones who believe their own lies) because years later, when The One and Only and I had a brief reunion, he tried to convince me that he had written the famous tagline that served as the punch line to our award winning campaign. Me, the guy who’d written it. His certainty seemed to falter momentarily when I reminded him that not only had I written the line, but that he’d actually rejected it when I first presented it to him. I have no doubt he was quickly able to put this little brush with the truth behind him and move on though.

Anyway, we never spoke again after that.

The ad community is relatively small, the creative community within it even smaller. If you steal, even just a little, it doesn’t take long before you’re branded a thief. We ad people should know better than anyone the power of branding. And yet every shop has a credit thief of some kind and everyone of us has had a run in with at least one of them, probably several over the course of a career.

Have the ones I’ve encountered been drummed out of the business? Have they been made to wander the wilderness wearing a scarlet T? On the contrary, a Google search will rank most of them far ahead of me. Mr. S is now Chief Creative Officer of a global agency (where he no doubt steals on a global scale). The One and Only has his own shop, with his name on the door, and continues to win awards by the bucketful. Dickie, to no one’s surprise, is the host of a syndicated talk show and frequent pundit on the news shows. Only the TOB has sunk into obscurity (last I heard he was writing coupon copy on the West Coast somewhere), not because he’s a thief, but because he’s an untalented thief, as untalented at thieving as he is at copywriting (poor fellow, he never learned how to steal without setting off the alarm bells).

I’ve been searching—not very successfully—for a good ending to this story, something funny perhaps? (The last thing I want to do is leave the impression that I’m a bitter old writer who feels the world has done him an injustice.) So, if not a joke, how about a moral? You know like, “Crime doesn’t pay?”

Fuck no, not credible.