Hot Shops : With 250 ad agencies in the L.A. area, getting started is tough. Of newer firms, just a few are making a splash.

The room got strangely quiet. At most advertising agencies, that is usually a sign that a client had been lost.

But that was hardly the case at the tiny ad firm Stein Robaire Helm. The Los Angeles agency was just weeks old and operating out of a converted apartment with a kitchen that doubled as a conference room.

On the kitchen table, Jean Robaire and John Stein had just completed an advertisement for their first client, a wheelchair maker. The unusual ad--which has since appeared in several specialty magazines--has text that winds around everyday obstacles to show the sort of barriers people in wheelchairs face each day. As the two creators stared at the ad, Greg Helm, the agency’s president, walked into the room. “The guys turned to me and asked who to show the ad to for approval,” Helm recalled. “We all realized, there was no one.”

After years of reporting to the top brass at the giant Los Angeles advertising agency Chiat/Day, these three ad men are just getting accustomed to reporting to themselves. They broke off from Chiat/Day nearly a year ago and decided to test the Los Angeles ad market on their own. Already, many in the advertising industry recognize them as one of Southern California’s few “hot” ad shops.

To say the least, that is an elite status. The Los Angeles area has more than 250 advertising agencies, but in recent years only a sprinkling of new ad firms have created many ripples--let alone waves. Some say the fierce competition for business here has somehow stifled creativity and discouraged some of the most creative ad folks from starting their own agencies. But several newer agencies, such as Stein Robaire Helm, are beginning to turn some heads.

The agency’s wheelchair ad, for example, helped push sales out of the doldrums. On one particular line, “we’ve quadrupled the base of our business since the ad ran three months ago.” said Robert Ladendecker, manager of marketing services at Everest & Jennings, the Camarillo-based wheelchair maker.

But it takes more than one good wheelchair ad for an agency to leap out of the pack in the competitive Los Angeles ad market. It can be especially difficult for the newer and smaller ad firms, whose clients have relatively small advertising budgets--often less than $1 million.

On the other hand, some advertising experts say they are bewildered by the apparent dearth of talented young ad firms in the Los Angeles market.

“For all of its spunk, vigor and life on the creative edge, Los Angeles has never been a great creative town for advertising,” said Hal Riney, president of the San Francisco ad firm Hal Riney & Partners, which created the original Bartles & Jaymes ads. “You’d think there’d be great creative boutiques opening up all the time here,” Riney said. “Maybe everyone’s home writing movie scripts.”

Well, not quite everyone. At least a handful of young Southern California ad agencies are raising industry eyebrows. And for prices often far less than big-name firms, they can sometimes deliver fresh advertising. Although no one can definitively say which are hot--and which are not--several young ad firms were mentioned repeatedly in interviews with top Los Angeles advertising executives.

Besides Stein Robaire Helm--which also creates ads for Foster Farms Restaurants--executives point to two other Los Angeles ad firms and one Orange County agency as hotbeds of talent. In Los Angeles, the year-old Shalek Agency, which creates ads for Ocean Pacific Sunwear, and Suissa & Associates, which devised those pun-filled slogans for Marie Callender billboards, are viewed as two young agencies to watch. And in Irvine, the ad agency deYong Ginsberg Weisman Bailey, which creates ads for the Orange County Transit District, is also considered a rising star among the small ad shops.

Getting hot doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a willingness to take lots of risks. At Chiat/Day, where salaries for talented employees can quickly edge into the six-figure bracket, Stein was a copywriter, Robaire was an art director and, as office general manager, Helm was their boss. “We pulled Greg aside one day and told him about our idea to start an ad agency,” Stein said. “We knew we’d either have a partner--or we’d get fired.”

For several weeks, the agency operated out of Helm’s apartment. It has since moved, but even today--nearly a year later--much of the furniture in the agency’s new office has been hauled in from its founders’ homes. Clients know not to ask the guys who run the agency for goodies such as tickets to Lakers games. Said Helm, “We don’t have any.”

Of course, not all clients expect skyboxes at the Forum. Some are satisfied with good advertising that doesn’t cost a lot of money. “Our clients don’t have a lot of money, and neither do we,” Robaire said. The agency has six clients that in total will spend about $7 million in advertising over the next year. (At Chiat/Day, a single client could conceivably spend that much in a few weeks.)

Perhaps the most visible risk taker among the smaller ad shops in Los Angeles is the Shalek Agency. “The Los Angeles ad market is at the tip of a new life cycle,” said Nancy G. Shalek, president of the year-old agency. “The window is right now for upstart ad agencies to step in.”

Some say television’s top-rated TV show, “Roseanne,” grew out of commercials that the Shalek Agency created several years ago for the former Giant grocery chain. The satirical ads featured Roseanne Barr, who was then a nearly unknown comedienne. Others credit the Shalek Agency with completely changing the look of surf-wear advertising. Its offbeat ads for Gotcha and Ocean Pacific may say next to nothing about surfing, but they say plenty about surfing life styles.

Ocean Pacific may be Shalek’s wildest gamble. The giant surf-wear maker alienated many surfers when its clothing--once exclusively sold in surf shops--was suddenly available in department stores. Ocean Pacific’s mistake, said Shalek, “was growing without seeking permission to be big.” So now, the current billboard and print campaign uses bold lettering that intentionally resembles Russian graphics. “It’s sort of a feeling of solidarity,” said Shalek, “you know, like ‘come join our cause.’ ”

If there is one cause attracting advertisers to smaller ad agencies in Los Angeles, it is the search for advertising talent that stands out. “You can’t try to ‘out big’ the big agencies,” said David Suissa, president of Suissa Associates in Santa Monica. “You have to fess up to who you are.”

His 4-year-old ad firm, which has about $20 million in annual billings, may be best known for its Marie Callender campaign, which features billboards with pun-laden slogans such as, “Hello, Good Pie.” In fact, consumers have sent dozens of letters suggesting food puns for future Marie Callender billboards.

“That campaign was a gutsy thing to do,” Suissa said. “We took every nickel out of television and put it all into billboards. But we figure we reach nearly 10 times more people for the same money.”

But just as small ad agencies take risks, so do their clients. Take, for example, the Orange County Transit District. Last year, OCTD plastered posters on the sides of its buses that showed bus illustrations below the headline “Be a Coach Potato.”

The ads, created by Jim deYong, executive creative director of deYong Ginsberg Weisman Bailey, won several industry awards. And the campaign has since helped the year-old agency win plenty of new business. But it didn’t win the praise of many bus drivers. Some riders took the “Coach Potato” ads to heart and started calling the bus drivers coach potatoes. Three days after the bus posters went up, they were quietly removed.

Magazines Split Over Ad Picturing Dukakis

Fortune magazine said no. Newsweek said yes. But no one asked Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Dukakis--or at least an unflattering photo of him--is featured in a provocative new print ad for a personal computer accessory that allows people to make color slides with their personal computers. Under a large photo of Dukakis, the headline says, “There are some people even we couldn’t make more persuasive.”

The ad, for Presentation Technologies, was created by the year-old San Francisco advertising agency Mandelbaum Mooney Ashley. Fortune magazine rejected the ad, a Fortune spokesman said, because it was “demeaning to Dukakis.” But it will appear next week in the California edition of Newsweek and Inc. magazines.

The agency never asked Dukakis for permission to use his photo in the ad. “We were working under the assumption that if we asked, they’d say no,” said Ken Mandelbaum, president of the ad firm.

“We did not intend the ad as an attack on Dukakis,” Mandelbaum added. After all, he said, the ad agency’s creative director, Cathi Mooney, was a Dukakis volunteer in the San Francisco area. “She still has a ‘Dukakis for President’ bumper sticker on her BMW.”

Sterling Wants to Bond Itself to Car Buyers

James Bond has driven all kinds of fancy foreign cars--but he’s never driven a Sterling. So what’s the big idea of this British car maker, Sterling, using Bond’s familiar musical theme in its commercials?

“We went through extensive research and found the results remarkable when we put our car on the screen with that music,” said Tony Cumming, director of marketing communications at Miami-based Sterling Motor Cars, the U.S. importer and distributor of the upscale car.

In the commercial, an unseen Patrick MacNee, the star of the 1960s TV spy series “The Avengers,” drives a Sterling around harrowing turns while the Bond theme plays. When he finally steps out of the car, he asks, “You were expecting someone else?”

“This is how American consumers see the British,” said Cumming. “People who retain their grace under pressure.” Not only has the company purchased the rights to use the Bond theme song, but it has also signed a deal with MGM/UA Communications for a Sterling car to actually appear in a yet-to-be-written Bond screenplay--tentatively scheduled for release in two years.

But you won’t see a Sterling in the newest Bond film, “License to Kill.” The company that paid for that privilege was American--Lincoln Continental.

“Car companies always want to be involved in James Bond movies,” said Andrea Hein, vice president of merchandising at MGM Pictures. “They like his life style.”

Director of TV Spots Makes Big-Screen Film

He may be best known for directing Pepsi’s ad featuring Madonna that was recently yanked from the airwaves. Or perhaps for directing that Michael Jackson spot for Pepsi in which the singer’s hair accidentally burst into flames.

Soon the public will also know TV commercial director Joe Pytka as a film director. He just completed his first feature film, “Let It Ride,” starring Richard Dreyfuss. The film, about a day in the life of a race track bettor, is scheduled to premiere Sept. 29.

“I’m not really nervous about it yet,” Pytka said. “I’m too busy working on it.” Although the filming is mostly complete, Pytka said he is still working with film editors and musicians composing a score for the film. And he is also negotiating for a second movie contract.

Pytka, considered one of the most highly paid commercial directors in the business, is also regarded as among the most high strung. Pytka said he greatly admires Dreyfuss’ acting talents but acknowledged that there was plenty of tension between them on the set. “We’re both Scorpios, so you can imagine the sparks,” Pytka said. “I’d say he’s a double Scorpio, but I’m a triple.”