Life, Death and Advertising

Anything can happen when you work in advertising - and it probably will. Pack your toothbrush and plan your life accordingly. One day you're on top and the next you're out the door. I've heard many stories while sharing a beer in the ad pubs of the world, about all the twists and turns and sunshine and lemons life might serve you - but nothing tops this one over at adverb: Killing Phil Schieber - "A true story of theft, suicide and the death of an agency."

Killing Phil Schieber
A true story of theft, suicide and the death of an agency.

I remember I was at home, sick in bed, on the day Terky called. Terky, Chris ter Kuile, was a talented art director who I’d hired straight out of college. She wore her heart on her sleeve.

It was the middle of October 2000, and she was calling to tell me Phil, the CFO of the agency where we worked, Dallas’ Berry-Brown Advertising, was dead.

I remember she was crying. I remember I felt numb.

I hung up and immediately dialed Jim’s line.

Jim was the agency’s President and the reason I had spent the previous six years toiling in the salt mine. Jim’s a great guy and a terrific ad monkey, and he’d always been straight with me.

His line rang. No answer. Voicemail.

I left a message asking that he call me back and went upstairs to my computer.

Terky told me Phil’s body had been discovered on his ranch in southern Oklahoma (a two-hour drive from our offices) and I wanted to check the news reports.

I quickly learned you should forget about finding live, updated news emanating from southern Oklahoma on the web.

Left in an information vacuum, various scenarios began playing themselves out in my head.

Phil was a pretty weird guy, and I’ll qualify that statement by noting I’ve spent eleven years in the ad jungle, so I know weird when I see it. My ‘weird’ credentials are many, varied and up to date, and if Phil was only one thing, he was weird.

He had a penchant for haberdashery ripped from the pages of Mary Shelley and a personality that ran alternately hot, cool, approachable and distant (often all within a single sentence).

He had his peccadilloes, too. Erotic art hung prominently in his home and he paid for (and attended) more than one lunch spent at local strip clubs.

Only a couple of days before he was found dead, he gave me a cigarette lighter in the shape of a naked woman whose right breast erupted in butane-blue flame after fondling her left.

It was the first and only thing he had ever given me.

He was known to have money (from sources unnamed and mysterious), horses, and an occasional altruistic streak that sometimes verged on being overly generous.

In the office, he was loved by a few, feared by some, liked by most and was just generally thought of as being… well, weird.

A mysteriously wealthy weird guy found dead on an isolated ranch in southern Oklahoma? The first thing my information-starved mind came up with was: drugs. Meth labs, pot farms, coke. Whatever. Phil must have been into it, I thought, and it didn’t work out very well for him.

The phone rang. It was Jim returning my call.

I remember him telling me that, to the person who had found him, it looked like Phil had died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, but that the police had yet to confirm it.

His body had been found under a tree that morning and he said Phil had missed an important meeting the previous day. I asked if it might have anything to do with his role as Chief Financial Officer at the agency. He said he didn’t know but that was the first thought that had crossed his mind, too.

I didn’t tell him that my first thought had actually been a meth lab/pot farm/coke smuggling landing strip gone awry.

It just didn’t seem appropriate.

I remember him telling me he’d call if he heard anything else, and then I spent the next several hours waiting for the news to break in the press.

It never did, so I went back to bed.

~

Friday dawned and, sick or not, I had to go in to work. Officially, there was much left to do in prepping for a big California shoot I had on my schedule the next week. Unofficially it was all about Phil, and to be in the loop you had to be in the office.

I had missed the group emotional bombshell, dropped when Jim called the agency together to share the news the day before, and I felt a little out-of-place because of it.

I’m an information junkie and I wanted news. Everyone else, it seemed, was already in mourning. The office was filled with zombies. People talked in whispers. Passing glances that simultaneously said “it’s so sad” and “what the fuck” were exchanged in the hallways. Upper management stayed behind closed doors.

‘Surreal’ is too easy of a description, but that’s exactly what it was. There was to be no new news, so all we could do was zombie-walk through our day.

The weekend came and I flew out to the sunny wine country of California for the shoot. The client, David (who owns Daisy Sour Cream), had seen to it that I was able make a speedy journey home after my mother fell seriously ill while I was away on a previous shoot, and I wanted to give the project at hand my full concentration in order to do right by him.

You can imagine what that was like.

Still sick and not really up for extra-curricular activities anyway, I spent most of my free time locked in my room watching the Subway Series.

It was a very nice room.

It was on Tuesday or Wednesday that Jim told me the police had confirmed Phil had killed himself. He had taken his shotgun and a bottle of Crown Royal outside and sat under a tree where he snapped off and whittled a twig with his knife. The Crown Royal, he drank. The twig, he used to reach the shotgun’s trigger after placing its barrel between his eyes.

Yes, there was money missing from the agency. No, we don’t know how much yet.

The Daisy shoot was a blur. I remember that it rained and we had to make the grass, literally on the other side of a fence in one scene, green in post. It was a nice spot. Bright, sunny and cheerful, it was everything I wasn’t at the time.

On November the 15th, Jim once again called everyone in to the main conference room. This time, though, I was there for the group emotional bombshell.

He announced that Phil had indeed been siphoning off money from the agency’s accounts and that the amount he had taken, at that counting, over five million dollars, was “fatal” (a word choice I find interesting to this day).

The agency would be closing and that day marked the end of the final pay period for the 23-year-old shop.

He asked that a few of us remain on to close existing projects (my own included, which still required music production and final mixing) as a matter of professionalism, and a few others to do the physical work of closing down the agency.

I remember commenting that, if we were going to liquidate the agency’s assets, we might as well begin with the wet bar.

So we did.

~

Over the next two weeks those of us who were left finished our projects, packed up our belongings and removed ourselves from 3100 McKinnon for good, at least physically.

Jim and Sharon, two-thirds of the Jim-Sharon-Phil management team who only recently had purchased the agency from its founder, Bob, were left with the unenviable task of sorting out the legal issues that remained.

Phil, no doubt, used some of his ill-gotten gains to purchase his share.

I’m not sure what Bob was left doing. Reflecting on opportunities for outside audits squandered, I hope.

Phil? Well, I have some ideas on what Phil was left doing (and none of them involve helping George Bailey learn it really is a Wonderful Life).

The final scorecard tally showed 6.25 million dollars stolen over the course of several years, 60 million dollars in accounts and client relationships up in smoke and 54 employees left unemployed and numb just days before the holidays.

There’s a decent D Magazine article on the subject and a couple of obituary notices still around on the net.

The obits both mention Phil was the agency’s CFO while neglecting to point out he was also its downfall.

The D Magazine article’s primary source was Melissa, a junior AE who joined the agency a scant twenty-five minutes before its closing (only a slight exaggeration).

No one with tenure wanted to talk about it.

I certainly didn’t and, to a certain degree, I still don’t.

The story doesn’t roll from my mind with the effortlessness of my other adventures. Even retelling my experience of surviving a very serious tornado with the she monkey (an event that had life-and-death consequences, killing six and blowing our home down around us) comes with greater ease.

I still receive the occasional legal update by mail.

I read them with stomach acid-inducing speed, wad them up and toss them into the trash. Then I daydream about unleashing a horde of rabid, ravenous monkeys on Phil, the weird guy we had been forced to trust because someone else said we had to.

Originally written May 1, 2003.

A couple of notes that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it into the original story:

Phil killed himself the night before Berry-Brown’s management team was to meet with an accounting team from Publicis, who was in negotiations to purchase the agency at the time. Berry-Brown held a large portion of the Quaker Oats account and Publicis saw our purchase as being entrée to the Gatorade business. Two weeks later, Quaker was purchased by PepsiCo, who then sent the account to Omnicom, effectively shutting the door– even after Phil’s actions came to light– on any sort of acquisition of Berry-Brown by Publicis.

Phil, it turns out, simply pissed away the money, spending it on his Oklahoma ranch, over-priced race horses, cars, and on alternative lifestyle excursions, such as flying in the reigning Mr. Hawaii of the time and escorting him to parties in Miami, New York and San Francisco.

In the end, less than $700,000 in recoverable assets remained and I now understand a great deal about the specialty known as “forensic accounting.”

I once again work on the Gatorade account, this time as a Creative Director for the financially healthy (and Omnicom-owned) Dieste Harmel & Partners.