Goodbye Fred/Alan.

The early 1990s made us face the limits of the business we’d built.

Starting as a production company in 1983, we made a TV series for the Playboy Channel and promos for TV networks and record companies. Soon we’d evolved into the only company branded cable channels; we’d introduced the idea to our former employers and clients at MTV and Nickelodeon. In 1988, Nickelodeon asked us to become their advertising agency. MTV and other clients soon followed.

At first we loved it. After a couple of years, we came to loath it.

The creative and strategy work was fabulous, when we could actually do it. Our lives had become the grind of supporting the overhead of over 40 people, constantly defending ourselves to clients who’s businesses we’d built from scratch, and constantly looking for new business.

Worst of all, Alan and I had stopped actually working together, the reason we started the agency in the first place. We were managing teams and arguing, not about the work (which would have been fine), but about the guarding of some real or imagined disputes between the members of our respective charges.

And the business of advertising agencies was getting stupid. Clients were coming to the conclusion that they could do much of the marketing strategy themselves, sometimes even the creative. There was constant downward pressure on fees, with the standard —15% of the media spend— coming down more than a point a year. The agency reaction was basically to combine in gigantic roll ups to protect themselves. Fred/Alan itself had buyout offers coming more rapidly every year.

I called Alan one night in February 1992 and before our conversation was over we’d agreed to announce the closing of Fred/Alan the next morning. We had a party for all our current and former colleagues at our offices on lower Broadway, a lot of laughs and tears were had, and locked the doors for good in May.

—Fred