When Jane Cavalier '83 sat down in 1989 at the Union Square Cafe with Brian Buckle and Tom DeCerchio, two upstarts who were forming their own advertising agency, she thought she was content with her professional life.
After six years in advertising, during which she became an account executive with Saatchi & Saatchi, perhaps New York's hottest ad agency of the eighties, Cavalier had become marketing director of ActMedia, a highly successful, in-store marketing firm in Darien, Conn. A newlywed with hopes of beginning a family, Cavalier was not planning a return to the pressure-filled world of New York advertising.
It didn't take her long to change her mind. “Five minutes after I sat down with Brian and Tom, I knew I was on my way back,” she says. “They just had so much energy and such a vision of that they wanted to accomplish. They had won the Godfather's Pizza account even before I met them and wanted General Motors the next. These were definitely the kind of people I wanted to work with.”
Buckle and DeCerchio got what they wanted, too-one of the hottest young account managers in New York. So the three twentysomethings set up shop in DeCerchio's loft.
They realized that Godfather's needed to focus on the desires of sixteen-year-old boys, who seemed like the most sensible group to employ. By the time the storyboards rose, a job driving for Godfather's sounded like adolescent heaven. There were three different print ads and three different slogans: Take a Job Where the Only Person You Have to Listen to is Bon Jovi, Put Your Back Seat to Good Use Every Friday Night, and Feed Hungry Women on a Nightly Basis.
“What made us successful,” Cavalier says, “was that there wasn't any campaign we felt we couldn't handle. People suggested that since we were a small, young agency, we should focus on youth-oriented advertising. But we wanted the biggest campaigns available and wouldn't quit until we had them. Even early on, when we were on the brink of bankruptcy, we wouldn't quit.”
The perseverance paid off. Two days before their first Christmas, just when the funds were about to run short, Snapple Beverages signed on with the young agency; 9 West and Russ Togs followed shortly thereafter. A year later, after they had told the world that Snapple was “Made from the best stuff on earth” and had worked with worldwide companies like Nikon and Nabisco, BDC had earned more advertising industry awards that any other major agency in New York.
But for Cavalier, marriage, motherhood, and the realities of the business world meant more change.
In 1991, the other two-thirds of Buckle DeCerchio Cavalier decided to pursue screenwriting and directing careers in Hollywood. Cavalier prompt
ly brokered a merger between the agency, which had grown to nineteen persons, and the international design firm Frankfurt Gips Balkind.
A year after the Frankfurt Gips merger, Cavalier was ready for a new challenge. With one child in the nursery and another on the way, she wanted to spend more time at home in suburban Connecticut. The solution-today Cavalier is one of the few presidents in advertising who's never in the office more than four days a week.
Has the abbreviated work schedule at the small firm of Cox Landey Partners hurt her career? Not likely, since she's heading an account for
Viatel-a worldwide telecommunications corporation (“MCI for the rest of the world,” is how she describes it)-and helping John F. Kennedy, Jr., launch his new political magazine.
“There are a lot of tough choices women today have to confront,” she says. “My children are so central to who I am, and I really miss them when I'm not with them, while at the same time I really love my work and wouldn't want to stop.”
With her husband, a Connecticut litigator, Cavalier has sought a balance among motherhood, advertising, and her latest venture, an ever-growing greeting card company featuring the character Sally the Maladjusted, which Cavalier and a friend began last year. “I think the key is deciding just what it is you want to do and then doing it,” she says.