If business is cutthroat, running an advertising agency is the equivalent of a 1990s slasher film. Agencies get fired as quickly as they get hired and having any chance at making it depends solely on whether or not you can keep your clients happy and coming back.

In Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy joked that “the seven-year itch” wasn’t just confined to matrimony but that it had a similar effect on the agency-client relationship as well, with brands filing for divorce every seven years.

I’d argue that today, quite a few decades after the writing of that book, brands call it quits even faster.

While David Ogilvy certainly didn’t lack confidence, like most agency heads, he was scared to death at the possibility of losing a client.

So, he put a few stops in place to keep clients happy, creative work superb and his agency’s neck far out of reach from the butcher block.

One of these stops was: The Ice-Box Policy.

The moment one of Ogilvy’s clients approved a new campaign, he would immediately put a team of copywriters to work, developing another campaign to test in other markets.

He always had a second campaign in the “Ice-box” just in case the first campaign went awry.

Creatively speaking, it’s not always such a bad thing “juggle” creative projects. Isaac Asimov claims to have never suffered from writer’s block despite having written 355 books throughout his lifetime.

His secret?

He worked on multiple books at once.

By Cole Schafer.

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