"You worked at Green & Burkhardt?"

"I didn't know Scali had an Atlanta office."

"Cargill, Wilson and What?"

But there are those who have endured, and who have done more than that. They have prevailed and excelled in a city where the whims blow hard. Some have done it by sinking roots deep enough to withstand the buffeting that comes in both the boom and the bad years. Dave Fitzgerald's agency turns 20 in 2003. Virgil Shutze and Joel Babbitt have done it differently, by riding the prevailing whims. Shutze started two agencies, sold his stake in both, and made millions in the process. Babbitt did the same.

Ellen Hartman started in Public Relations when it was the bailiwick of men and the stepchild of advertising. Then things changed - dramatically. Don Chambers came to Atlanta mainly to escape Los Angeles. Now he says it's almost exactly like the city of angels - and he's had his best year in two decades. Then there is one who has watched it all, who has worked for Coca-Cola, headed two agencies in town, been the president of the Atlanta Ad Club, and who is now a consultant and journalist and commentator. In the world of Atlanta advertising and marketing Alf Nucifora is Atlanta’s sagest observer.

These are their stories.

Joel Babbitt will readily admit to you that there was a time, not too long ago, when he was maybe the most loathed man in Atlanta advertising, and what kept that from being an absolute fact was that his partner, Joey Reiman, was probably even more universally, and thoroughly reviled.

The pair worked hard to get those reputations. If Reiman, the creative half of the duo, was quicker with the memorable quote or turn of phrase (a favorite Reiman line about creativity: "The safe way is a grocery store"), Babbitt was the more imperious of the two. Although he was born and raised in Atlanta, he came off always as slightly too good for this place.

"I just cringe thinking of some of the pompous things I said over the years," he says now. "I read the quotes now and I think 'If I didn't know myself and I read this I would think 'This guy is a real jerk.'"

It's a sunny, hot September afternoon and Babbitt is sitting in his cluttered and hiply appointed office at his latest advertising agency, Grey Global Atlanta, where he is President and Chief Creative Officer. The office is a piece of art in itself, with industrial concrete floors, and a lobby with a long curled couch that is the color and shape of a pair of red lips. This is the third agency Babbitt has headed in the city since the mid 1980s, when he and Reiman started Babbitt & Reiman and declared war on the stodgy status quo of Atlanta advertising. In those days, Babbitt was in his mid-30s (he is now 49) and already a 10 year veteran of the business.

He got his first job after graduating from the University of Georgia at the old line Atlanta agency, Liller Neal Battle, which was the second largest agency in the city, behind Tucker Wayne (now WestWayne). He worked on the Dixie Crystals sugar account. After that, he joined the Atlanta office of McCann-Erickson where he worked on the Coke business. He went to McCann in New York for a while, then returned to Atlanta, left the agency, and became a partner in the small shop Bowes/Hanlon.

Still, things weren't matching up. Bowes/Hanlon was small, and the agency felt too much like other shops around town. "There was such a formality in the business in Atlanta in those days," says Babbitt. "It was always coats and ties and offices that looked like accounting firms. Long lunches at country clubs - and 95 percent male." So, when he and New York adman Reiman met and opened Babbitt & Reiman in 1986 they invested the place with a distinctly different feel: "The agency was sort of like the bad fraternity in the movie 'Animal House,"' says Babbitt, smiling fondly at the memory.

The trade press quickly dubbed Babbitt and Reiman the "bad boys" of Atlanta advertising. The name was well deserved if you listened to agency heads who grumbled and groused - always off the record, mind you - that Babbitt and Reiman were unscrupulous in raiding talent and stealing accounts.

When the pair set their sights on the $1 million Air Atlanta account (then being handled by agency Cargill, Wilson & Acree), they erected a billboard on the side of the downtown connector, making a public plea to the airline's chief executive. "Michael Hollis," read the billboard, "We're The Right Brothers." They didn't win that account. But, by making unsolicited overtures to another Cargill client, Days Inn, they managed to wrest it away, and Days became one of the agency’s marquee clients. Within two years they had taken the agency from nothing (it was started in Reiman's Buckhead apartment) to billings of $38 million.

Then - just as fast and as stunningly as they had built it - they sold B&R to the English agency Gold Greenlees Trott. They were millionaires. Babbitt stayed on at the agency for two years. Eventually, the shop was renamed The Joey Reiman Agency and then Reiman converted it to a consultancy named BrightHouse. (Last year, Reiman bought the company back from Gold Greenlees Trott.)

Babbitt went to New York to head the office of Chiat Day, but that turned out badly when he realized he wasn't calling the shots. So when he heard that Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson was looking for a "marketing Czar" to promote the city, which had just won the Olympic games, he quit Chiat Day, moved back to Atlanta, took a $300,000 pay cut, and went to work for the city for $45,000 a year.

"It was a year of complete foolishness and it became more and more crazy as the year went on," he says. In the process, Babbitt became a monument of the city. How many others have been profiled in the London Daily Mail, under the headline: "Welcome To Cokeville."? Or featured in a piece in the "Washington Post," one which declared Babbitt had single-handedly "turn[ed] the city of Atlanta into one gigantic commercial."

Babbitt is still amused at the press furor ("I never sent out a single press release, and they sent a documentary crew from Australia to do a story on me"), and some of the quotes he shared with the world's press, including the idea of putting company names on stray dogs. "I made the comment that if you had a Newfoundland you could get more money for the logo than if you had a Chihuahua because the logo would be bigger," he says. "The next day I got hundreds of calls from people who wanted to have corporate logos put on their dogs."

There were successes. Visa signed a $3 million sponsorship deal with the city. But, by the end of the year, Babbitt was ready to get back into the business. Seven years ago he opened his second Atlanta agency, 360 Thinc. In February, he sold that to Grey Advertising. He says he still has a passion for the business, but it's a different business, and he's a different person, re-married, and settled down from his "Animal House" days.

"In the past when an agency talked about being creative, they meant who could create the best TV commercial," he says. "But now it means finding a creative way to spend the clients budget, to get a mix of advertising, and public relations and direct marketing." If the core of the business has changed, one thing that has not is Atlanta's status as an advertising center.

"Atlanta agencies have always been second or third on the roster for national account she says. "And that's still the story. Most clients still feel that New York is the center of the advertising world." None of that, he says, is intended to discourage anybody thinking about quitting their salaried job and starting an agency.

"When we opened Babbitt & Reiman all the experts said now is not a good time to start a new business," he says. "They said the same thing to me when I started 360. The fact of the matter is, if you think about it too much, there’s is never a good time to start an advertising agency in Atlanta."

Virgil Shutze was born in Atlanta, went to college at the University of The South in Suwanee, Tennessee, landed his first job in advertising at the old Sears store in Buckhead (at the corner of West Paces Ferry and Peachtree Road), and learned about the power of the written word his first day there.

"I had written an ad about a desk and when I got to the store the next morning I noticed all these people lined up in the furniture department," he says. "I was feeling very smug and full of myself that my ad made all these people come in here." The reason, as he quickly found out, wasn’t that his copy sang. It was that his math stunk.

He had advertised the price of the desk as $39.00. It was supposed to be $399.00. The store stood by the advertised price, and its neophyte copywriter, who later went to Henderson Advertising in Greenville before returning to Atlanta and going to work for McDonald & Little (M&L). The year was 1972. Shutze was the seventh person to be hired by the three year old agency which, over the next decade would establish itself as the greatest ad agency in the history of the city, with national clients and a national reputation akin to what decades later Fallon McElligot would become in Minneapolis, and Weiden & Kennedy would became in Portland.

His first day on the job he was given the assignment to come up with a name for a new roller coaster at Six Flags. "I asked Tom Little how soon he needed it," remembers Shutze, 58. "He said 'two hours.’" He gave Little a list of 65 names. The client picked The Great American Scream Machine.

For the next eight months he worked seven days a week at a withering pace. The day started at 5:30 and often ran long into the night. "It was like running in front of a freight train," says Shutze. "If you stumbled, you were dead."

Shutze learned the creative craft from Tom Little, and business acumen from Mike McDonald. Little grew up in Alabama. McDonald was a product of Hell's Kitchen in New York City. If their chemistry was inexplicable, it was also undeniable. The work crackled. Clients came clamoring. The agency produced one of the most famous commercials of all time for Southern Airways, which was also the debut of Director Joe Sedelmaier, who went on to fame for his quirky casting in spots for Federal Express.

When Ted Bates bought the agency in 1981, it was the largest agency in the South. Within four years, mainly because of losing business to account conflicts, the agency was shuttered, and Shutze was heading his own agency, HutchesonShutze, with offices in Buckhead.

"We used to boast that we were the biggest agency south of Three Dollar Cafe and north of the Exxon station," he says. Life became a whirlwind of successes for Shutze. His agency won a Cannes Gold Lion for a commercial for a small South Carolina bank that featured an Orangutan. By 1990 billings hit $50 million, the partners sold the agency to BBDO, and Shutze was installed as Creative Director, over the Delta account.

Six years later, Shutze left the agency and, for a time opened and ran the Atlanta office of Dallas, Texas based The Richards Group. That closed. He traveled the world for a year, and joined T.G. Madison in 1999, working with Lauren Genkinger and Joanne Truffelman who worked with him at M&L.

Shutze's assessment of Atlanta from the last three decades is a recurring theme heard to anyone who worked at M&L in its heyday. "Nobody has been able to recapture that fire," he says. "Although I like to think we did at HutchesonShutze. But, truthfully, in Atlanta the city's advertising community runs around flapping its wings on the runway. It’s never taken off."

He says the key to making it in the business is working ruthless hours ("advertising people never win yard of the month"), being selective about clients, and that key to that is first doing good work: "People always want to know why Michelangelo gets all the good ceilings. Well, he was a pretty good painter."

Either be small or get large. "Medium is dead," he says. And, although selling HutchesonShutze to BBDO made him a millionaire (and kept him in Ferarris and a vacation home he's building in Big Sky, Montana), now that he's at independent T. G. Madison, he’s not so sure being a branch office is a good idea. "A branch office is basically an ATM for the parent company," he says. "The obligation is to fill the machine with money so the mothership can withdraw it." He says the business is different now, sure. But it's also the same.

"The internet has changed everything," he says. "It figured out a direct way to get to people. And media advertising has gotten so expensive, it’s hard to argue for it with a client. But advertising still works. The solution just isn't a headline anymore. If it ever was. It's finding a creative way to reach people with a message that matters to them, whether it's on TV, in print, radio, or on the web."

When Ellen Hartman arrived in Atlanta in 1974, in the public relations business it was as though the world were still flat. Companies and advertising agencies had yet to recognize the scope and power of PR. And Atlanta itself was about one third the size it is today. "The only thing I remember that was downtown was the Hyatt Regency," she says, laughing.

Hartman, 50, came to the city from Mississippi State, where she worked in the communications department. She worked at a number of small shops long forgotten, such as The Marcus Group and Quigley & Co. Manning Selvage & Lee, then the only international based PR firm, hired her in 1986. She worked there five years before joining Fleishman-Hillard. In 1995, she joined AFC Enterprises, Inc. as Vice President and Chief Communications Officer. AFC is a franchiser of more than 3,700 restaurants in 30 countries, including Church's Chicken, Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits and Seattle's Best Coffee.

In Atlanta, the change in PR is evidenced by the change in the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) Atlanta chapter, says Hartman. The PRSA in Atlanta was founded 50 years ago by 12 white men. When Hartman arrived in Atlanta, its membership was about 300. Today it is 800, and a diverse group of minorities and women.

The PRSA chapters in New York and Washington D.C. are larger, making Atlanta more prominent nationally as a PR ad center rather than an advertising one. "The change has been dramatic," says Hartman. "It used to be a that a lot of ad agencies were just ad agencies, now almost all of them have PR. And now there a handful of international PR firms here, including Edelman, Golin Harris, Porter Novelli, and GCI."

She says smart corporations now realize that PR is a central management function, and not an extension of marketing. "PR addresses internal and external audiences," she says. "And you can see that clearly now with the troubles some corporations have been having with investors, and the scandals."

Technology has sped up her world, made communicating more efficient, but, at the same time, more hectic. "I'm on call right now," she says on a Tuesday night. "News has become 24/7, and around the world. I have to deal with crisis in the middle of the night in Texas and Thailand."

Photographer Don Chambers and partner Steve Pelosi came to Atlanta in 1982. What brought them here was a ranking by Rand McNally, which named the city as one of the most liveable places in America. At the time he and Pelosi live in Los Angeles. "Can you believe it?" asks Chambers, relaxed on a couch at Pelosi & Chambers's 18-month old studio off Chattahoochee, west of downtown. "This place is just like L.A. now."

For 20 years Chambers and Pelosi have worked as a team. Chambers’ specialty is "Real Life" or people - and Pelosi's is still life, or "anything that doesn't move," says Chambers. Chambers also directs commercials, and his reel includes recent work for the Georgia Lottery and the "Big Haired Lady" spots for Longhorn Steak House. In the last two decades, he says the city has changed dramatically, but one thing has remained a constant. "This is a service business," he says. "No matter what you sell, this is a service business. You have to serve your clients."

Sure, the clients have changed. When he and Pelosi opened their first studio on Peachtree Street in Midtown, Don Trousdale, then the Art Director at McDonald & Little. would walk down the street from Colony square and in the front door with assignments. It was the heyday of M&L, and another independent giant, Burton-Campbell, both long gone. "In those days all the hot accounts were banks," says Chambers. "Every agency had to have a bank. Now there's only one bank left in the world, right?"

He says the market is tougher now because there's a bigger pool of photographers and not as much work. "There are so many ways to get to people beyond TV and print ads," he says. "And the way computers are, there are so many ways to manipulate photos and illustrations. That’s cut into our business, too." On the other hand, he says the city is constantly regenerating itself. Agencies such as Huey/Paprocki and Adair-Green are turning out first rate creative. "There's always a new crop of young people with great ideas in this city," he says.

Even when he was in the business, Alf Nucifora could always be counted on to take a longer view of things, step outside himself, and his agency, and, well, sometimes just rip it to shreds with trenchant analysis. "We have never delivered on our potential as an advertising market," he says. "And I have to accept that I'm part to blame for that."

Over the last 27 years, Nucifora, a native of Brisbane, Australia, has been a fixture in the city's advertising community, first as an executive at McDonald & Little (1976), then as the head of his own agency, Nucifora & Associates (1982), then as head of the Atlanta office of Fahlgren & Swink (1984), and Earle Palmer Brown (1989).

He has hosted talk shows on WSB and WQXI, lectured at Emory University, and been the president of the Atlanta Ad Club. He writes a weekly marketing column for the "Atlanta Business Chronicle" syndicated in 60 business publications around the country, and delivers about 100 speeches a year on marketing. He is a man in a hurry. Talking to Nucifora on the phone, a person gets the feeling a cab is waiting for Mr. Nucifora, the meter running.

"How can I help you?" he says briskly.

He likes giving speeches he says: "It's easy money. It's good money. It keeps me on the edge. I have to stay fresh. I have to stay on top of things."

Atlanta has changed in his time here, he says, but not remarkably. "We went from a small hickey town to a large hickey town. You can see that in our politics, you can see it our arts, in our parochialism. You used to be able to see that in our restaurants, but finally they're starting to get better."

He says he's not sure why the city's advertising community has failed on its promise, especially after the example set by M&L. "We've never been able to develop a core quality," he says. "There's always been a certain tinge of mediocrity. Since M&L we’ve never had a strong independent agency to lead the way."

He says he's not sure what plagues the city. "I don't know if it's the personality base, or the clients, or it may be that we're too comfortable," he says. "It's too easy to make money here. We're pragmatists. I wonder if we had more aspirationists, if that would make a difference. People driven by more than making a buck."

Atlanta, he says, has "just always been a really quirky market."

Dave Fitzgerald is the kind of ad man nobody dreams about becoming in advertising school but wishes, later in their career - perhaps too late - that they had been. "He's made more money than me," says Joel Babbitt, which, when repeated to Dave elicits a smile and laugh from the button down ad executive. "Did he say that?" asks Dave. "That I've made more money than him?"

Fitzgerald (53), has been the rock of Atlanta advertising for almost two decades. His agency, with about 120 employees, and about $120 million in billings, is a marvel of consistency and steady growth. His agency's mission statement carries a mandate to "have fun." Nobody's had more than Dave.

"Do you think I could survive in this business if I didn't love it?" he says. "It's too much work if you don't love it."

Fitzgerald, like Shutze and Alf Nucifora, is a veteran of McDonald & Little, though his first job in the city was at Tucker Wayne (now WestWayne). He had come to Atlanta, without a job, fresh from the University of Dayton. The year was 1973. He saw a story in the newspaper that talked about an ad the Chamber of Commerce was running, "Atlanta. The World's Next Great City," wrote a letter to TW, which created the ad, and was hired in account service.

"I had been in town exactly two days," says Fitzgerald.

A year and a half later he went to McDonald & Little, where he ran the Busch Gardens and Sabena Airlines account. Six years later he left to join the short-lived start-up agency Green & Burkhardt, where he headed the Marriott account. But he saw the future, and it was in red ink. "Every month the agency lost money," he says. So, in December 1983, he quit the agency and he and Lisa Galanti, who is still with him as a Vice President, Managing Director, opened Fitzgerald & Co. in Piedmont Center in Buckhead. They had a piece of Marriott business and that grew from 7 properties to 55. He picked up the OptiWorld account. That grew from one store to 60.

"I knew when I went into the business, I wanted to grow the business steadily," he says. "I didn't want to be a lark, a flash in the pan." In 1991 he bought the PR firm, Julie Davis Associates, and the design firm, Youngblood, Sweat & Tears. In 1997, Fitzgerald sold to Interpublic, making him a millionaire a few times over, and in the IPG stable with shops such as McCann and The Martin Agency in Richmond.

Fitzgerald is one of the minority, rejecting the idea that as an ad town Atlanta is weak tea. "Pound for pound Atlanta agencies create better advertising than agencies in Chicago and New York," he says. But he does agree that no agency since M&L has captured as much national attention or as many national clients. $