Feature

Cheerio!

On March 10, the Saatchi 17 officially joined Interpublic (so far, neither they nor the agency will say what they’re working on or even if they have clients). The next day, Saatchi sued Burns, requesting an injunction preventing Burns from “directly or indirectly launching any company or taking employment with any advertising, marketing, or communications company which services [General Mills].” All the while, Mike Burns remained silent.

Clad in a navy Lacoste shirt and shorts, Mike Burns putters around his Sagaponack home on a brilliant June Sunday. His girlfriend, Merrie Harris, and her daughter lounge by the pool (Harris runs the Pampers account for Saatchi). Burns says he’s more than a little depressed that his 76-year-old mother is now reading in the Wall Street Journal how her son tried to steal business. “This is how most of the world knows me now.”

Although Burns and the Saatchi 17 won’t speak for attribution on the question, they strenuously deny that their goal was to leave and take General Mills with them. Their argument is simple: We are not stupid enough to think seventeen people could steal a half-billion dollars in business. Many of the seventeen had their résumés and reels on the street months before their departure, they say. The reason they departed en masse, they contend, was simply that Interpublic gave them the opportunity to keep their close-knit team together.

Maybe, but Interpublic must have thought they could get a few General Mills crumbs. “Most of the people who left were General Mills cereal people,” says a former Saatchi executive. “It suggests they thought they could get a piece of Cheerios. I don’t think Interpublic is going to spend millions in salary without thinking they are going to get some of Cheerios in return. And it’s hard to believe that Anne [Adriance] would do this without talking to Mike. I don’t know that she did, but it doesn’t follow.”

Another insider with intimate knowledge of the Saatchi 17 situation spins a slightly more benign scenario: “Interpublic knew about the clash between Kevin and Mike and what that might mean to General Mills. They knew GM might grow frustrated and put part of their cereal accounts out to bid. Wouldn’t you want to be the agency that had a team GM was already comfortable with in your stable?”

Toward the end of my reporting, I finally met with Anne Adriance, Mike Burns’s confidante and now the leader of the breakaway seventeen. It was the first time she had spoken publicly about the ordeal. A fortysomething woman, she carries herself with a quiet presence and speaks in a small voice. It’s not hard to imagine her and Kevin Roberts clashing. “I think Kevin has enormous strengths, and up to a point I was always ready to fall in line,” Adriance says. “But at the end of the day, it’s people like Mike who walk the talk, and did that long before it became some glitzy little thing you could package with a trademark-registered R next to it.”

She picked at her salad and gazed around Bryant Park as if wondering if someone were watching us. “People don’t get up and walk away from a client they love, a company they’ve been loyal to, a team they feel fabulous about working with, because things are going the way they think they should. There comes a point where you can no longer bite your tongue, suck it up, and play the game when you know the way things should be done that are better, and it’s not to be disloyal. It’s to work to a common goal.” Later, I ask her if there’s validity to the claim that she and the others intended, or intend, to poach General Mills business. “That was never our intention, but I can’t talk about that because of the lawsuit,” she says.

Out in Sagaponack, Mike Burns smiles wearily when I tell him of his friend’s words. “The only thing Anne and the Saatchi 17 wanted to take from Saatchi when they left was their dignity,” says Burns. He walks out on to his porch and looks toward his pool and garden. “Look, everything I have is because of General Mills and Saatchi. I want them both to succeed. We’ll all be better off when this suit is behind us.” He then gives me an adman’s smile, and tries to sell the unsellable. “I like Kevin. I really do.”