Unless, of course, you are one of four former Fallon and Wieden + Kennedy admen who partnered to open One & All, Minneapolis. Mike Lescarbeau, formerly of Fallon, Minneapolis is creative director of One & All, with Mike Fetrow, most recently of Saatchi & Saatchi, San Francisco as head of art. Marcus Fischer, recently an account planner with Fallon is now planning director and Tom Nowak leaves his job as management supervisor at Wieden + Kennedy, Portland to be director of account services for One & All.

The two-month-old agency is balanced upon an unusual foundation: involving clients' ideas on advertising in the creative. The thesis was initially tested in a project for one of the agency's first clients: the Red Wing Shoe Company of Red Wing, Minnesota.

"It was terrifying and at times horrifying. As a creative or agency person you feel this sense of a lack of control. We had to let go and just let it happen," says Lescarbeau of the preliminary collaborative concepting with Red Wing. Peter Engle, director of marketing and communications for Red Wing, had worked with Lescarbeau at Fallon and was eager to test the collaboration.

"The reason we chose these guys was their approach to developing advertising, that is, a high level of creativity with client involvement, usually two remotely different concepts," says Engle.

The partners sat in a coffee shop with the client rep and put together one spot incorporating info furnished by the client. Another spot was assembled by the two creative partners and their two business counterparts. The final spot, a tie-in with Red Wing's sponsorship of the Petty Enterprises' NASCAR racing team gave One & All a chance to apply its model to production. "We think if you spend a lot of time up front having a dialog, the client is more likely to trust you on the skills end of it. Art directors should art direct. You don't need nine people looking at a monitor or behind a camera. People who are the tradesmen should be doing that," says Lescarbeau.

Lescarbeau, Fetrow, Fischer and Nowak had at one time or another, all worked together. After a period of reflection, they decided to address the impasse they detected between clients and agencies, which so frequently hampers the creation of quality advertising. Essentially, clients feel they are not being heard while agencies frequently contend they are creatively hobbled by their clients.

"We want to have the work result from an ongoing dialog with clients that includes sitting down and working on ads together, which for many agency people is the scariest thing in the world," says Lescarbeau. "We hope to sit down with not only the brand manager but anyone involved. Rather than making a presentation after four weeks with no client involvement, we want to keep them involved from the start. I don't think all clients are sitting there rubbing their hands and saying 'this is our chance to make some mediocre, forgettable advertising.'"

Pointing out that clients' opinions and ideas inevitably color the finished product, the One & All squad hopes that including their patrons' ideas in the process will either quash untenable concepts or contribute to better and more effective advertising.

"We want to get all the client people in the same room and facilitate them airing their own angst over what a good ad is," says Lescarbeau. "The upshot is, I've never seen a client buy ads they don't like, at least in long-term relationships, which is what we want. Client/agency-of-record relationships are averaging two years and there is a reason for that."

Nowak, from the accounts standpoint, says One & All will dispel the role of the account supervisor as a buffer between client and agency. Through maximizing the clients' knowledge of company-specific information such as distribution, sales messages or retail patterns, Nowak says arm's length relationships will quickly become obsolete, at least for One & All.

"One of the ground rules is that this isn't for any client; to make this work, clients have to make the time to participate in this thing actively," says Nowak.

Lescarbeau adds: "I think if we left a meeting and said to Tom, 'OK your job is to say to the client we don't want to do anything we talked about,' that is putting off the inevitable. It requires more at the front end; they are going to spend this time anyway, either now or at a meeting six months later. We have all been through this process, and over time frustration levels rise, the tenor of the meeting changes."

Creatives, sometimes known to view their clients as the bane of good work, should possess good business skills. This is a priority for One & All, exemplified by the fact that accounts and planning will be as involved in creative recruiting as the agency's creative heads. In the same vein, Nowak says account people and planners should have solid knowledge of good creative. This policy will, it is hoped, help replicate the creative chemistry generated when the four partners get down to work. In fact, for practitioners of art and commerce, the One & All partners place great faith in the importance of chemistry, especially when it comes to engineering long-lasting bonds.

"When you ask most clients why they let agencies go, it's not a lack of good work but a lack of chemistry and trust," says Nowak. "When you think of where good work comes from in agencies, it is from trust and chemistry and we want to involve the client in that."