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President of the agency was gay, open secret to everyone but the President who believed he was safely closeted.
Drunk computer graphics guy, loudly and in front of half the agency, tells said President how much he’s respected and that we all know he’s gay, it’s not a secret. That it’s okay, and how he really needs to be comfortable with himself. “We love you, man!” Stunned silence from the President, gaping horror from us witnesses.
Dude was gone before the new year.
In the late 1990s our agency had a holiday party in the office with plenty of alcohol (the organizers also supplied hookahs and an ice luge for vodka shots). I had a few drinks - nothing crazy - and somehow I happened to be the first person at work the next morning except for a couple of hired cleaners picking up a massive mess. But the most notable evidence was the fact that unbeknownst to everyone someone had stayed very late and changed everyone’s monitor background to one photo: a shadow figure silhouetted against a sunset of a horse-human beastiality act.
Rising Star
This sounds fake but I got stuck in a conversation with the president who was livid that the brand new, limited edition BMW he ordered wasn’t going to be in by Christmas and how he was at war with the dealership and was switching to Audi. We had just had the biggest layoff I had ever seen like three months prior and weren’t receiving a Christmas bonus for the first time ever.
It actually doesn’t sound fake at all.
A creative lead was drunk and thought he was picking up at the bar, when it was really a lady of the night. He took her back to the agency. Didn’t have enough cash to pay. She started taking laptops off desks as payment, running off to the emergency stairwell. He gave chase. Ground floor led straight to security who held them both until the CFO came in to solve. Horror for him. Legend for everyone else.
No, not FCB
A freelancer called our head of HR a see you next Tuesday
A rather inebriated Frank Lowe calling for Lee Garfunkel, then CEO and CCO of the newly merged Lowe Lintas, to join him in the stage: “Where’s Lee, my little mouse?”
I do remember one nice gesture from Frank to Lee… it was between 93-95 and Frank comes walking down the hall with an incredible gift for Lee. He’d bought him the drum from the Beatles Seargeant Peppers album cover. To see that thing in person was cool.
Happened a year before I joined the agency but it was part of the lore. A mid level producer (man) got drunk and started telling one of the account heads (a straight, married man) that he wanted to blow him. He politely declined at first but the guy kept at it. Yeah, said producer started the new year by looking for a new job.
Nope. He went from politely declining to emphatically declining.
At a Boston agency a creative got a little too drunk at an agency party, came back to the office, passed out in a conference room and somehow shit all over the place… when he and the scene were discovered the next day it took leadership a couple hours longer than you’d think to make the call to fire him. Guy nearly got away with it
It wasn’t a holiday party, it was a summer party. It was around 2013. Yes, it actually happened. And since that time, “taking a dump in a conference room,” has been known to be the only surefire way to get fired from a Boston ad agency.
F