• by January 3, 2005

SOME TALKABOUT WALKABOUTS - The Riff's eyes are a shade greener today and it's not because of the extra tinted Bausch & Lomb's we've medicated with to take the edge off our normally blood-shot ones. Maybe it's just the hue glinting off the other side of the fence, but we're feeling more jealous than usual today after realizing that some of Madison Avenue's most talented thinkers can opt to take a break for a bit of midlife soul-searching right at the pinnacle of their careers.

From what we know about people like Joanne Burke and Mary-Ellen Vincent they've always been driven by high standards and the pursuit of perfection. Could it be that after attaining the thing they've always strived so fervently for, that they both came to the same startling epiphany of, "Is that all there is?"

Faced with that stark reality, they both have done the only logical thing that a super smart person can do in that situation: make a change, search for something better, more "real," more personally fulfilling. Or, as Aussie Vincent describes it, "take a walkabout."

But for all their personal inflection, the departure of two of the industry's best research thinkers should also give Madison Avenue cause for pause. Maybe we should all take some time out for some introspection? Think about it. Everything we know about people like Vincent and Burke tells us that winning the opportunity to reengineer the way the world's largest advertiser "communicates" would be the highlight of their careers, if not their lives. Yet both are turning their backs on the opportunity within months of each other, and months of getting the assignment.

To put that in perspective, it would be like two of Madison Avenue's top creative directors resigning after landing Apple's business, or the Nike account in the mid-1980s. It's not supposed to get any better than that. Is it?

It's also ironic that a third key Procter media research player, former MediaCom-er Tony Jarvis, got cast out of the mix when MediaCom lost the P&G planning business. Jarvis, who just landed at Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting unit, would seem to have been the ideal person to bring into the new P&G equation.

As for Vincent and Burke, it could be - as one in our fold suggested - that they simply got "Proctered." Meaning: They got behind the curtain long enough to realize that their ain't no Oz there, even if, as in Vincent's case, you happen to actually come from Oz. In other words, the dingo ate their maybes. They discovered there's nowhere over the rainbow. No pots of gold. No opportunities to be so bold.

Well, that's what the Riff was speculating half-way through writing today's column when we got a call from Burke, who characterized the whole departure thing another way, and one that has less to do with P&G than her own sense of self-direction.

"I love working on P&G and I certainly don't want you to leave the world thinking this is why I'm leaving. It's one of the three or four or five highlights of my incredibly long career," Burke told the Riff, explaining, "I actually just think it's time. I've been doing this for years and years and years and I don't know that I'll ever do anything better than the work I've done for the last three or four months."

Huh?

Actually, we do kind of understand Burke's logic. And it's not just the idea of going out on the high note, but the idea of taking a leap into the unknown when you're at the top of your game. It's very Zen. Or, very aboriginal.

But it still doesn't resolve the Riff's angst and our sense that we're missing out on something bigger, and more fulfilling, but which we'll never find, because we're not about to walk, or walkabout.

"Oh yeah," admits Burke. "Plenty of people have been coming up to me, telling me how jealous they are of me. But they're generally people who have three kids, a family, and a much more fulfilling life than I do."

While we don't have Vincent's version of that story, we can hear the sounds of a didgeridoo reverberating somewhere in the back of our head.

And we can't help having all these green shady thoughts. Wondering if Burke's and Vincent's grass really is.