It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World

Donny Deutsch has sold everything from Ikea to gin. Now he's pushing a new product--himself

It takes about 10 minutes to walk from the front door of Deutsch Inc. to the office of Donny Deutsch, the ad agency's chairman and chief executive. This is a pleasant walk, especially when you're escorted by one of his four young, lively assistants. The company's stark, modern industrial offices occupy 155,000 square feet, a full city block on the 14th floor of a downtown Manhattan building--taking in the view is like being in a helicopter. Some staffers travel from desk to desk on Razor scooters.

With Deutsch everything is oversize. At the age of 47 he's intense and stocky, the walking archetype of a fast-talking, confident native New Yorker. He was "known for years as Madison Avenue's egomaniac," as Forbes once wrote, a guy so fond of the spotlight that his own staff nicknamed him Madonny.

In 2003 he began hosting a Sunday-night talk show on CNBC, The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch, featuring a cavalcade of politicians and porn stars, and in January the network decided the show would go nightly. But before The Big Idea Deutsch was on television via his memorable ad campaigns.

He took over his dad's modest, serious agency in 1984 and soon "skyrocketed to fame," as a New York Times advertising columnist wrote, using "hip, aggressive ads that draw attention with cheeky, occasionally outlandish humor."

Deutsch Inc.'s campaigns have included the bright "Mr. Jenkins" collage ads for Tanqueray, which brought younger drinkers to the gin; Mitsubishi spots that turned Dirty Vegas's unknown electronica track "Days Go By" into a worldwide hit; work for giant brands such as Snapple, Domino's, Tommy Hilfiger and Coors Light; and an Ikea campaign that made a Swedish chain with unpronounceable products a household name and also broke taboos by depicting two gay men shopping for furniture together.

Deutsch has made a lot of money for his clients, and in 2000 he made a lot of money for himself, selling his agency to the Interpublic Group for nearly $300 million--he had owned 87 percent of his agency and stashed away the kind of payout that would make even sports superstars jealous.

The brand he's peddling hardest now is himself. Over late-afternoon tea, occasionally interrupted by one of his flirty, attentive helpers, Playboy sat down with the man who has been called--and no, not by himself--"the Elvis of advertising."

[Q] Playboy: From an advertising standpoint, why did George W. Bush win the election?

[A] Deutsch: I don't think advertising decides national elections anymore. In 1960 you saw the candidates in a couple of debates, on the evening news, in ads and that was it. Well, now it's 24/7 on the Internet, so the 30-second commercial is not a big piece of the impression. Bush had a clear message that was simple and rang more true to a few more percentage points of the population. The irony is, Bush ran on antiterrorism, but the states most directly affected by 9/11, the areas that continue to be targets--New York, D.C., California, Pennsylvania--voted the other way. We're sitting here doing this interview 20 blocks from the World Trade Center site, so we've got fucking targets on our heads. I'd actually feel safer with John Kerry in office.

[Q] Playboy: Did Kerry do a bad job of advertising himself?

[A] Deutsch: His message wasn't clear, so obviously a better job could have been done. But it's kind of insane--you have to give the Bush people credit, disgustingly so. George W. was a reservist who allegedly did not serve, and the whole campaign was about this other guy who volunteered and went to Vietnam. He got in the fucking game, and he had to defend himself about that? The fucking world is upside-down. But somehow those Bushians did it.

[Q] Playboy: Here's a quote we'd like you to comment on, from David Ogilvy in his book Confessions of an Advertising Man. "There is one category of advertising which is totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest: the television commercials for candidates in presidential elections."

[A] Deutsch: He's 100 percent right, and he wrote that 42 years ago. Today it's the most important product sold on television, and it's the least regulated. It's absolutely fucking absurd. Political ads are manipulated to the point where they become lies, whereas you could never sell a car and say it goes from zero to 60 in 4.6 seconds if it takes 4.7 seconds.

[Q] Playboy: We pay less attention to how we sell politicians than to how we sell cars?

[A] Deutsch: Or feminine-hygiene products. So something's upside-down.

[Q] Playboy: You worked on Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992. Were any lies involved there?

[A] Deutsch: No. The campaign was driven by James Carville, George Stephanopoulos and Mandy Grunwald, and they were brilliant. They would have us cut a spot, and then they'd say, "Okay, we're saying this on health care, and then the Bush response is gonna be this, so we want you to do the response-to-response ad before this one's even out there." It's like daily-communications guerrilla warfare.

[Q] Playboy: In the past few years the advertising buzzword has been clutter. Explain what that means.

[A] Deutsch:Clutter is the buzzword of the whole world. When I was a kid we had six TV stations, some radio stations, some newspapers and billboards. Now you've got your cell phone, the Internet, 8,000 channels. There used to be 15 stops where a consumer would interact with ads during a day, and now there are thousands.

The cell phone is the next big one. Basically people are going to be living through their cell phone. How will advertisers get their messages across? There is so much clutter, and now people can zap through an ad with TiVo, so there damn well better be something entertaining or informative in your ad. It's interesting that the two types of ads least zapped on TiVo are beer and pharmaceuticals. Why? People expect to laugh at beer commercials, so they'll watch those. And they might learn something from a pharmaceutical ad, like how to have a four-hour erection. So the lesson there is to give people new information or entertain them--or else you're in trouble.

[Q] Playboy: So before long you and your clients are going to send ads to our cell phones?

[A] Deutsch: Yeah, but if we do it, we'd better be saying, "Okay, if you watch this ad for the next 60 seconds, we'll give you a free minute on your phone," because people will have control over it. It's going to be more of a partnership between the advertiser and the advertisee.

[Q] Playboy: Okay, but nobody starts out by saying, "Hey, let's do a really stupid campaign with some crappy advertising that no one wants to watch."

[A] Deutsch: The majority of ads suck for several reasons. Number one, people assume the audience isn't smart. Number two, so much advertising is cooked up in committee, and I've always found that the fewer people involved, the better the stuff is.

[Q] Playboy: One of your big clients is Coors. Can you explain why beer ads are always predicated on the idea that men are stupid?

[A] Deutsch: [Laughs] Clearly young men are the big beer drinkers, and they don't take themselves too seriously. I don't think the ads are predicated on men being stupid--the audience wants to laugh, and one way you laugh is by making fun of yourself.

[Q] Playboy: Is it a bad thing that bright 25-year-olds coming out of college become advertising copywriters instead of novelists?

[A] Deutsch: Look, everything wonderful and horrible about our society is tied into advertising. To me it mirrors who we are. Advertising sells stuff to people. Some of it they need, some of it they don't. One could argue that 30-second ads are a more important part of our culture than novels.

[Q] Playboy: Deutsch represented Ikea for 11 years. You coined the diversity campaign and made a lot of money for the company.

[A] Deutsch: Ikea was a wonderful, progressive company, and we did some great work together.

[Q] Playboy: So now are you willing to acknowledge that its furniture is crap?

[A] Deutsch: Yes, it's total crap. I'll say that on record. It is crapola. That's what you get for firing our ass, Ikea! I was always astounded at the shit people had to do to put that furniture together. So that just shows our great selling ability.

[Q] Playboy: There's a legend that you smashed a VW Beetle when you didn't get a Volkswagen account. True?

[A] Deutsch: No. That was 10 years ago. We had pitched Volkswagen, and we really wanted the account. When you're pitching a car company, you buy or rent its cars because you want to get to know them. We didn't get the account, and USA Today said, "Well, what are you going to do with the car now?" I said, "I'll smash it into a wall." In my less than perfectly cogent moments I say things like that. But I didn't harm it. I sold it.

[Q] Playboy: You have a nightly show on CNBC. Why does an advertising executive need a TV talk show when perfectly qualified guys like John Davidson and Merv Griffin (continued on page 164)Ad World(continued from page 114) are looking for work?

[A] Deutsch: Actually, my CNBC show came down to a choice between me and Merv Griffin. They even thought about a Merv and Donny show, but Merv was caught up in his Vegas stuff. The answer is that nobody needs to have a talk show. But to have an hour of prime-time television every night to use as a platform, to talk to interesting guests, to stimulate and provoke people--what could be better than that?

There were only two long-format interview shows in prime time: Larry King and Charlie Rose. The idea was, what if you just did a younger, more contemporary version of that? And you go, "Duh!" Even though my show has gravitas, it's a little looser. If Bill Clinton came on, he'd still be Bill Clinton, but he might have a bit more fun than he has on Larry King.

[Q] Playboy: But why you? How does doing the Ikea campaign qualify you to host a TV show?

[A] Deutsch: If you think about it, the people who have talk shows are either journalists or entertainers. To me, an ad guy who's spent the past 20 years trying to figure out what's on people's minds, what the trends are, how to connect with people, that's the best training in the world. People have been shocked: "Wow, you seem so natural and relaxed. And your questions are the kind I would ask." It's because of where I come from. So I think my training was perfect.

[Q] Playboy: And you're a bit of a ham, too.

[A] Deutsch: I never run from the spotlight. [laughs] I'm hard-driving, and I speak my mind. Look, not many CEOs are shy. I like being the center of things, and I'm unabashed. People always say, "You have a big ego." Yeah! Egos are good. You show me a successful person, and I'll show you a guy who has some sense of ego.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about you as though you were a product. What are your brand attributes?

[A] Deutsch: I'm very direct, honest, engaging, high-energy, smart, funny and self-deprecating. I'm a guy's guy, and I love to flirt with women. I'm a fun populist with a bit of an edge.

[Q] Playboy: Were you being direct and honest on The Big Idea when you thanked Christie Brinkley "for making the Hamptons and the world a better place"?

[A] Deutsch: [Laughs] Let's think about this for a second. Let's line up the 6.4 billion people in the world. I don't think Christie Brinkley is curing cancer, but she's a beautiful, nice person who is politically active, so I think she's made it a bit of a better place. Not in the sense of Winston Churchill or Jonas Salk. But if the whole world were full of Christie Brinkleys, it might be a better place.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever done a show and had a hard time pretending to be interested in the guest?

[A] Deutsch: Yeah, actually, I was interviewing Jesse James. We taped it, and it didn't make it to the air. The guy was such an asshole. He didn't seem to want to be there, and I felt like saying, "Look, dick-head, you have a 15-minute reality show. You don't have the right to carry on with this attitude." He was a terrible interview. If I were at a different stage in my career, I might have really gone at him on the air and said, "You're too fucking cool to be here. Get out of here."

[Q] Playboy: Was Jenna Jameson flirting with you on the show?

[A] Deutsch: I hope so. Jenna Jameson has made her livelihood by engaging with men, so it would be surprising if she wasn't flirting. I was certainly flirting with her, as hard as I could. And let's emphasize the word hard there.

I gotta add one thing about porn stars. People always say, "Oh, you have lots of porn stars on." In our first 20 shows we had three porn stars. But porn stars rate. Every time you have a porn star, ratings go up. I once interviewed the CEO of Vivid Entertainment, and he said, "Last year 800 million porn movies were bought or rented. And you know what? It's not 800 guys renting a million of them apiece." Which is a smart way to lead into my favorite fact: In the hotel business, when people rent a movie in their room, what's the average time they spend watching the movie?

[Q] Playboy: We don't know.

[A] Deutsch: Seven minutes! And that's everything from Gladiator to Debbie Does Dallas. They ain't watching Tolstoy. TV tends to be compartmentalized: news over here, entertainment over there. Yet if you and I, two smart guys, go out for dinner, our conversation would not be compartmentalized. We'd talk about the election and then Desperate Housewives and then what Alan Greenspan might do with interest rates. Why shouldn't that all be in a talk show? That's the way we live our lives.

[Q] Playboy: Let's turn from Greenspan back to Jameson.

[A] Deutsch: I'd much rather talk about Greenspan, but okay, I'll indulge you and talk about Jenna Jameson.

[Q] Playboy: Thanks for being a good sport. At the end of the interview she made a joke about tongue kissing you. If she'd wanted to, would you have given her the tongue?

[A] Deutsch: In a heartbeat. I'm married, and my wife, who's a beautiful woman, has nudged me about the flirting I do on my show. I hide behind the Howard Stern defense: "It's just a character I play on TV." I did have friends bust my balls. They said, "It looked like Jenna Jameson was going to give you a little tongue, and you pulled away." I would have been in there, slipping and sliding, but it didn't play out that way.

[Q] Playboy: You seemed a little nervous interviewing her. Were you?

[A] Deutsch: No. The only time I got nervous was with Yoko Ono. To me I was interviewing the Beatles. Of course, some people would rage and say, "No you weren't." But in my childhood nothing touched the Beatles. So I showed some reserve--I didn't call her a babe. Actually, she has a really nice rack. She's 72 and her skin is beautiful, but I held back.

[Q] Playboy: And what if she had wanted the tongue?

[A] Deutsch: No, no tongue for Yoko, out of respect to the late and great John. That would not have been appropriate. You've got to know when to tongue and when not to.

[Q] Playboy: Which Big Idea guest would you most want to change places with?

[A] Deutsch: Interesting. I could become Jenna Jameson and have sex with other hot lesbians. Let's think this through for a second. If I traded places with Jenna, I'd turn to my husband and say, "I can't fuck you anymore." But he'd say, "You have to fuck me, you're my wife." But I'd go, "No, I'm just Donny Deutsch, who's become Jenna Jameson just so I can be with other hot lesbian women." See, now we're talking. That would be interesting.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of kinky sex, you have a segment on the show called "O'Reilly Sucks." What's your grudge against Bill O'Reilly?

[A] Deutsch: He's a bully and a dick. I find it rather comical that a guy accused of sexual harassment is telling people about morals. I'm not judging you, Bill. Knock yourself out. Pull on your pud as much as you want. But who the fuck are you to tell people what they should and shouldn't do? There's a lot of mean-spiritedness there, and I've got a problem with that.

I'm going to go at him. "O'Reilly Sucks" is a little like what David Letterman does with Dr. Phil--we take tape from the night before and go, "I can't believe he fucking said this. He's full of shit." I'm a liberal guy. If you look at television, the liberal voices have been Janeane Garofalo, Al Franken, Michael Moore. Fox clearly has right-wing underpinnings, but the genius of what it has done with O'Reilly is taken a guy who seems like he could live next door to you. You've got to cloak it a certain way. I'm from Queens, New York. I'm a little rough, a guy you can relate to, so if I get up there and say, "Why shouldn't there be gay marriages?" I might be more effective at delivering the message.

[Q] Playboy: You once estimated that you'd had 100 girlfriends.

[A] Deutsch: I'm 47, so if I started fooling around when I was 18, and I've been married for seven years, that's 20 years of bopping around. Even if you're doing only five or six girls a year, which doesn't sound like a lot, you get into triple figures. I don't know the number, but I think I would have had a lot more than that if I were into one-nighters.

[Q] Playboy: What was your type when you were single?

[A] Deutsch: Dark and voluptuous. I'm a boob man. I'm an unabashed tit man. My friends make fun of me for it.

[Q] Playboy: And when you finally married one of those women, she was a lot younger than you.

[A] Deutsch: I'm 47, and my wife is 32. In their 40s men become who they're going to be. Women do the same thing in their early 30s. So I think a 10-year spread between a man and a woman is healthy because women are 10 years ahead of us. In their early 20s women are still girls. They're hot, and let's not knock hot women, but I find women in their 30s the sexiest.

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[Q] Playboy: You have four assistants. Each one is female; each one is hot. Does someone good-looking stand a better chance of getting a job at Deutsch?

[A] Deutsch: No. There are a lot of attractive people here. Most of our employees are young, and it's a stylish business. We're an image business, so if you walked through this place and it looked like a telemarketing firm or a Midwestern insurance company, we'd be sending the wrong signal to our clients. This is a cutting-edge place.

[Q] Playboy: Describe your high school back in Hollis Hills, Queens.

[A] Deutsch: I went to Martin Van Buren High. It was like 4,000 kids, a real city school, integrated, probably 50-50 black and white. It wasn't Happy Days or Saved by the Bell. From the outside it looked like a prison. You had to have your wits about you. You couldn't go to the bathroom unless you knew the right guys, or you'd get your ass kicked. I went through a real ugly adolescent stage, bad acne and braces, but I got through that. I was class president, a real bigmouth.

I had the best of both worlds: I was definitely from money, yet my high school was a tough environment. I remember getting to college--I went to Penn--and there were all these guys who had gone to suburban high schools. They were smart, but I couldn't wait to play cards with them and take their money and steal their girlfriends, because they just didn't have street smarts.

[Q] Playboy: You had Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction on The Big Idea, and when he talked about going on a cocaine binge you nodded sympathetically. Have you done coke?

[A] Deutsch: I experimented. Ninety-seven percent of the people I grew up with tried drugs. If you didn't, it was almost bizarre. In the 1980s quaaludes were a big drug, and I smoked pot. But I was never a big drug guy. So we'll leave it at that.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like a yes.

[A] Deutsch: We'll leave it at that. I'm part of NBC. I'm on the business network, and I don't want to get myself fired.

[Q] Playboy: You've been fired. In fact, you were fired by your own father. What was that like?

[A] Deutsch: It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I came out of school and went to work for Ogilvy & Mather, which was a large ad agency, and I was fucking around. I went out west to find myself for a year, fucked around out there, came back and said, "Let me try working for my dad." He had a boutique ad agency called David Deutsch Associates that did really high-end print work for the Louis Vuittons of the world. I wasn't wholeheartedly into it. I was an account executive, a really bad one. I was more into what I was doing at night. I was a fuckup, and my dad said, "Get the fuck out of here. You're clearly not committed to this, and I don't want you here if you're not." How could I be mad at him? He was right.

[Q] Playboy: A few years ago when your dog went missing in the Hamptons, you put up a $10,000 reward for her return. Did you ever get her back?

[A] Deutsch: No. When we did that, the obvious reaction was, "Look at these assholes." Now, my wife and I don't have children, and I'm not going to compare a dog to a child, because that would be absurd. But we were heartbroken. Anyone who has dogs knows you fall in love with them. And it was this adorable little Boston. If you can go out and spend $50,000 on a car, why can't you spend $10,000 to find something you love? To me spending $600 on a bottle of wine is retarded. So no, unfortunately we never found her. Hopefully she's in a good place.

[Q] Playboy: What do people who don't like you say about you?

[A] Deutsch: "He's an asshole. He's full of himself. He's a dick." But they can't say "He lies" or "He cheats," because I've never fucked anybody over. I can't tell you the number of times people have said, "Before I knew you I thought you were such an asshole."

It's interesting. I inspire a lot of dislike from people who don't know me. And I've always written it off as envy. Look, I've been very successful, I always speak my mind, I had the single largest payday in the history of the ad industry, I have a shop that's always done amazing work, the people are fiercely loyal, and now, guess what, I've got my own TV show. Promoting is part of my business.

To me, advertising mirrors who we are. One could argue that 30-second ads are a more important part of our culture than novels.