The Beverly Hills Hotel has a special place in my heart. It was the hotel that Carol and I stayed at in the early days of our courtship.  In 1971, she accompanied me to LA for a TV commercial shoot.  That trip was particularly memorable because at 6:01 a.m. while we were fast asleep, the [...]

In a previous post, I shared the thrilling story of our mad dash to produce 20 commercials for Chrsyler Corporation to be launched on the ’75 SuperBowl (see Superbaby and the Superbowl.)  It took some amazingly talented people with strong constitutions to get it done.  Barney Melsky was one of them. With his years of [...]

In late ’78, I started to get calls from Charlie Moss.  “What’s going on?” he asked.  “I heard you guys have problems.  Look, it’s none of my business, but if Cohen, Pasqualina, Timberman is in trouble, I wanted you to know about some opportunities here.” I didn’t want to hear it.  Yes, we had problems.  [...]

The first time I met Jack Nicholson, he was an unknown starving actor sleeping on the floor of Harry Gittes’s apartment in New York.  Harry was a talented copywriter at Wells, Rich, Greene and Jack was his best friend in the world. When Jack’s star started to rise, Harry decided to join him in Hollywood [...]

In the Spring of 1970, Bob Pasqualina and I got a shot at the big time.  We produced an inexpensive TV spot for one Diet Rite Cola bottler and it was a big hit. Now, all the bottlers wanted to run our campaign featuring the theme line, “I don’t need it, but I like it.” [...]

Imagine if you were a little agency of just 7 people and the fifth largest industrial corporation in America said, “Hey guys, here’s a million dollars, go shoot a TV package and launch it on the Superbowl.”  It couldn’t happen in a million years, right?  Wrong. In 1974, our one-year-old agency Cohen Pasqualina Timberman wangled [...]

What would you call a close client-agency relationship?  When you take the marketing director out for drinks?  Invite them to the country club for 18 holes of golf?  Maybe get together with them and their wives for a fancy dinner and a show? Nah, that’s all so 1960’s. Let me tell you what a close [...]

One of our first big TV spots for Petco was a story about a bunch of pets driving full speed down to Petco.  In the driver’s seat was a big dog with his paws on the wheel doing his best imitation of Mario Andretti.  Next to him, riding shotgun, was a wide-eyed tabby cat. A [...]

At Cohen, Pasqualina, Timberman, things weren’t going well. Our first year in business had been a comedy of errors and we were down to our last $25,000 in the bank.  We had been humiliated by a series of foolish new business pitches to carpet people, sausage people, crazy people. But if there was one good [...]

1994 was a terrible year for Cohen/Johnson.   Our strategy of working with only big accounts, and giving them only the best, most experienced talent, had worked great for nine years bringing our billings close to $90 million. But after the tragic e-coli event at Jack in the Box and our subsequent loss of the [...]