by Hugh Mackay
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Kelman, Kornfield & Craven, once regarded as the hottest of hot-shops in the Sydney advertising agency scene, still retained some of that aura.
Before he was thirty, the ectomorphic Markus Craven had been hailed as the industry’s new creative wizard as a result of a handful of attention-grabbing campaigns: ‘Improve your bottom line’ for a range of cheap underwear, ‘How to make God laugh’ for a life insurance company (the punchline, ‘Tell him your plans’, lurked in the body copy), and ‘Charm him. Disarm him. naPalm him’ for a perfume called Whispering Palms. When the perfume failed in the market, Markus had tried, unsuccessfully, to recycle the slogan for a firm of lawyers specialising in pre-nup advice to women.
He had also set a new benchmark for advertising content-recall scores with a public health TV commercial he wrote and directed himself. It featured a squadron of black drones surging over the horizon in a menacing mass, coming closer and closer, until the sky overhead was darkened and the drones dived onto their target. Over the CGI conflagration that followed appeared the message: ‘Bird flu is coming.’ In the absence of any specific call to action (and in the absence of any sign of bird flu), the campaign caused widespread panic, thousands of requests to GPs for non-existent bird flu shots, and a sharp decline in sales of supermarket chickens. It also earned Markus a swag of industry awards.
As the years passed and Markus’s highly bankable creative imagination became gradually less fertile, his ideas harder to distinguish from anyone else’s, he retained one asset that continued to set him apart – his ability to weep on demand. He could weep tears of admiration when praising a client’s product; tears of joy when people told him simple stories about the exploits of their children; tears of compassion when someone confided in him that they were having health problems. This was a particularly useful skill when presenting the agency’s creative proposals to dubious clients: with Markus himself moved to tears by the work, who would dare question its emotional power? The weeping seemed so sincere, so spontaneous, that no one ever mocked him for it. (In fact, one of the things clients routinely said about Kelman, Kornfield & Craven was that they were such a sincere bunch in an industry full of phonies. You couldn’t put a price on that.)
When he turned forty, Markus decided to establish his own agency. He teamed up with Bob Kelman, fifteen years his senior, an experienced big-agency man well known around town as a reliable suit, and Jhon Kornfield, renowned in the industry for his ability to deliver favourable financial results that bore no apparent relationship to the actual performance of the agency he worked for. Some said his secret was property deals; some said he simply treated the short-term stock market as a casino and had pulled off some astonishing wins; others had darker suggestions.
KK&C prospered. Markus continued to dream up campaign strategies that made his clients feel clever and daring and sometimes boosted sales as well. Many KK&C slogans passed into the language – ‘R u ok? It’s OK if you’re not’, for the OK brand of antacid; ‘You’re totally Awesome’ for Awesome, one of GBH’s fructose-based recreational beverages, this one promoted for its ‘purple flavour’. Bob ran the client service department with a steady hand, and had the useful ability to calm and reassure clients whenever Markus’s imagination proved too challenging for their comfort.
Jhon Kornfield found them a dilapidated three-storey terrace house in Millers Point that had harbour glimpses from the top floor. The place was renovated to reflect the agency’s cutting-edge style, with fuchsia doors and black ceilings throughout. An espresso machine was installed just inside the front door, and a barista was employed to greet visitors and take their coffee orders. This seemed like a thrilling initiative at the time, though other agencies soon outdid them with in-house sommeliers and sushi bars. (Some older people in the industry could remember tea ladies.)
When the business grew, Jhon secured the adjoining house and had a doorway punched through the common wall on the first floor. The new space became known as the West Wing, though it lay to the north. It was decorated more radically this time, with retro white ceilings instead of black, and teal doors instead of fuchsia. The client base began to change. Some of the risky, frisky entrepreneurs who had helped the agency make its name felt the place was losing its edge, becoming a bit complacent, a bit predictable, the Markus magic a little less magical, and they started looking elsewhere for the Next Big Thing. Larger clients, impressed by the boutique-y cheek of the KK&C offering and attracted by the prospect of having industry awards on their office wall, started adding the agency to their ‘possibles’ list, either to put the frighteners on an incumbent agency or to handle a new project that required a fresh approach.
Markus enjoyed the increasing revenue but worried that the place was in danger of becoming too conservative. Bob enjoyed the increasing revenue but worried that the place was trying to service big clients with a small-client mentality. Jhon enjoyed the increasing revenue but worried that the big clients were only appointing KK&C to do small projects; it all seemed a bit chancy and short-term to the man responsible for servicing multiple mortgages.
The answer had come to them in a board meeting, held on the deck of Bob Kelman’s newly renovated Point Piper home, overlooking Sydney Harbour.
‘We need big clients to stop throwing us their crumbs and start giving us their core business,’ said Markus.
‘We need more new business,’ said Bob.
‘We need to incentivise all our clients with fresh ideas for spending more money,’ said Jhon.
‘We need Lincoln Hunter,’ they said in unison.
Lincoln Hunter (before rebranding himself The Hunter) had a formidable reputation in the world of marketing and advertising. He had previously worked for two of the country’s biggest ad agencies where he was credited with winning new business at a faster rate than anyone had previously thought possible. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he quit the second agency to work for one of its clients, Cocky, an importer and marketer of pre-mixed cocktails and high-end confectionery.
Hunter was a huge success at Cocky. First, he increased the number of retail outlets stocking the company’s products, then he established a brilliant online retail presence that infuriated all those freshly signed-on bricks-and-mortar retailers but mightily impressed his masters. He appointed KK&C as the agency for the confectionery business, with an implied promise that the cocktail business might follow if all went according to plan.
Many people harboured doubts about Lincoln Hunter: ‘Smart but slippery,’ they said; ‘brilliant but untrustworthy.’ But he was universally admired for his commercial nous and his staggering new-business strike rate. In spite of his formidable personal charm – some even called it magnetism – he appeared to have few friends in the industry.
Clients loved him, though, and he knew his way around the ad scene like nobody else. He knew where the up-and-coming talent could be found; he knew when big-budget product launches were looming; he knew where the skeletons were buried; he knew who was sleeping with whom – not because he was remotely interested, let alone prurient (indeed, he despised people who were at the mercy of their passions), but because he always liked to know when he was entering a minefield of concealed emotions.
‘Go get him,’ Markus and Jhon said to Bob. So Bob went and got him, at great expense.
Linc’s first great coup had been to bring the rest of the Cocky account with him; his second had been the seduction of Jerry Weisbrot, winning the bulk of the GBH business for the agency, with the promise of even more to come.
■
The T4 for The Ripper was drawing to a close. There had been a half-hearted attempt to describe the product in simple language, but ‘a sort of rhubarby, fizzy curry with floral undertones’ satisfied no one and Linc finally declared, to actual applause from Jerry, that this would be a nine-to-one PPAR proposition and so any product description would simply get in the way.
‘We have a brilliant name. We have a stunning pack – the strongest
pack-to-product appeal ratio any of us can remember. We have a complex and intriguing flavour that no one can quite pin down. Perfect. It can be whatever you want it to be. Our consumers will talk about it, worry away at it, and eventually make their own sense of it. We’ll leave it to them. It’s a blank slate. In fact, I think we should enshrine that in the ad brief: No attempt must be made to describe the product. Let the kids write their own stories, inside their own heads. On their own tonsils, if you will. We’ll concentrate on the pack. And what a pack! May contain traces of poison! Really? How good is that!’
Bob Kelman was always anxious when The Hunter took these great leaps of faith so early in the process of developing a campaign strategy, but he had to admit Linc usually managed to make the right call. Just as well Markus was not present, he thought, or he’d have wanted to put his own stamp on the meeting. (In fact, Markus was at that moment in another conference room, weeping copiously over a new home-loan commercial for a regional bank, featuring shots of a young couple arriving home in two matching SUVs, to be greeted by a pair of eager golden retrievers.)
Jerry Weisbrot was wrapping up: ‘This is going to be textbook BSUF – big spend up front. We want everyone in Australia under the age of twenty-four to know about The Ripper within one month of launch –’
Linc cut in: ‘And, Jerry – if I may – we’ll want everyone over the age of forty to think it’s disgraceful and disgusting. Just saying.’ (Linc had picked up ‘just saying’ from a young sales executive at a Cocky meeting the day before and adopted it on the spot.)
Jerry gazed adoringly at him as if Linc were his very own child prodigy. ‘Absolutely.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Now boys and girls: timing. Where are we?’ He looked at his watch. ‘March twenty-five. Perfect. Dayton want a spring launch – late September. Six months. Not a moment to lose. Everything – and I mean everything – is to be pre-tested. Pre-tested and retested. Nothing left to chance. No leaps of faith, girls and boys. Taste testing like we’ve never done it before. Pre-test every line of every ad in every medium, every Twitface post, every piece of point-of-sale. Nothing left to chance. Dayton will be coming out here in force to see how we handle this launch, so a lot of reputations will be on the line.’ Jerry paused for emphasis. ‘And Bob, I want to make one thing clear right from the start: Linc is to be the lynchpin of this operation. I’ll need him to spend a lot of time with us over at GBH, totally involved at every step of the process – concept testing, marketing strategy, merchandising plans, product sampling, media strategy – online and trad. The lot. He’s to be the sole conduit between us and the agency. I don’t want people getting in each other’s way. Okay?’
Bob Kelman managed a reluctant but acquiescent smile. He was never quite sure how Hunter ingratiated himself to the extent he did, but you had to admire him for it. Mr Indispensable – wouldn’t everyone like to be positioned in their clients’ minds like that?
No one appeared to have noticed that the product had been neither opened nor tasted.
■
Back at GBH, Delia ran into Lissy, a junior customer insights analyst – a species known around the organisation as CIAs.
‘Hey, I hear your T4 presentation blew them out of the water,’ Lissy said.
‘Thanks,’ said Delia. ‘I wonder why we bother, though. It’s all going to be strategised by Jerry and Linc. Or should I say by Linc, with Jerry nodding pathetically, in his usual way.’
‘You’d almost think Linc had some, like, hold over Jerry. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like Jerry. Period. Or Linc, come to think of it. Talk about the odd couple.’
‘Jerry must soon be for the, like, high jump,’ said Lissy, whose appetite for company gossip was insatiable. ‘Dayton must be having their doubts, surely? They must know he just, like, channels Linc. When did Jerry last have an idea of his own? Not since I’ve worked here, and that’s been, like, almost six months.’
‘Oh, GBH is a very accommodating outfit, Lissy. Very loyal. Quite surprising, really. But, yeah, the word is General Manager, Special Projects – aka the kiss of death. I guess they’ll let him take the glory for The Ripper and then it’ll be pasture time. They won’t kick him out.’
‘So it’s business as usual. Linc tells Jerry what to do, and Jerry tells us. Great.’
‘Linc is amazing, though. What an operator! I do find him kind of inspiring. His enthusiasm and energy and everything. You can always feel it when Linc’s in the room. He’s a force of nature.’
‘I know what you mean. Totally. But you wouldn’t want to, like . . . I mean, he’s on fire, but he’s not, like, hot.’
‘God, no. When Jerry stares at you, you know he’s undressing you. When Linc stares at you, you feel like you’re a pawn on his chessboard and he’s plotting his next move.’
2
WITH ONE EYE on the clock, Lincoln The Hunter eased himself into Joanne Darby, personal assistant to Markus Craven. At such moments, Linc freely admitted to himself that the love of business was a major distraction from the business of love.
Linc had a perfectly nice wife at home. Her name was Hermione. Everyone said how perfectly nice she was, and how long-suffering. Of course, she would not be literally ‘at home’ at this moment. She would be assisting in the operating theatre of St Walburga’s, a small private hospital with a reputation for high fees, cutting-edge décor and superb food, but indifferent surgical outcomes. Linc, son of a wealthy orthodontist, was inordinately proud of the fact that he was married to a doctor. He never tired of mentioning it to people – clients, colleagues, shop assistants, cab drivers – whenever it seemed appropriate, or simply when there was a lull in the conversation.
Though he tried to avoid making direct comparisons between Hermione and Joanne Darby, he did notice that, on the very rare occasions when he and Hermione had sex, Hermione had rather more to say than Joanne during the lead-up, and not always about the matter in hand. Even before he had experienced any intimacy with The Darby (as he generally thought of Joanne), he had occasionally wondered why his wife always seemed to choose the preliminary stages of sex to recite a litany of her life’s dissatisfactions and disappointments, almost as if there were a glitch in Hermione’s program that caused her to misfire – to go off in quite the wrong direction – in response to what Linc regarded as his own commendably disciplined attempts at foreplay. And later, when her abrupt switch from engaged to disengaged mode signalled that the moment of release had come and gone, as it were, she would take up the refrain of domestic discontent where she had briefly left off. Her job at St Walburga’s, it appeared, was the only source of real satisfaction in her life – an attitude Linc could easily relate to. In fact, Linc often wondered why he and Hermione bothered with sex at all now the work of reproduction was done.
By contrast, The Darby seemed to enjoy everything about sex – the before, the during and the after. As Linc watched her office clock tick over from 5.57 to 5.58, she reached the peak he had been assisting her to scale with impressive speed. She uttered a faint cry, almost a whimper, that scarcely broke the silence but was enough to signify to Linc that matters had reached a satisfactory conclusion. In fact the Darby’s enthusiasm for the act, and these welcome signs of her pleasure, muted though they were, greatly increased Linc’s own feelings of gratification, and drove him to accept her playful late-afternoon phone invitations to ‘come and catch me, my Hunter’ whenever they were issued.
Their affair – a term neither of them ever used – had begun on a pleasant autumn afternoon after Linc had returned to the agency in high spirits following a particularly satisfying meeting at GBH. Barely a month into the project, his plans for the launch of The Ripper were starting to take shape and then, to add to his general sense of wellbeing, The Darby had encouraged him most explicitly, right there in her office, to throw off the shackles of restraint, and had wasted no time in turning words into action. Linc was surprised, to say the least, that an idea so recently planted
in his mind had come so swiftly to fruition.
She was an attractive woman (‘for fifty,’ he had said to himself), but the thought of actually having sex with Joanne had frankly never crossed his mind until he had a rather bracing conversation with Otis, the agency’s young strategy director, imported from Germany, who had shared with Linc the results of some recent research into the characteristics of the most powerful men in business.
Otis, despite his youthful appearance, had lately become a kind of personal guru to Linc. Linc was dazzled by how much Otis seemed to know about so many things. Most recently, Otis had come up with ‘translational marketing’, borrowed from the emerging field of ‘translational medicine’. The term had been enthusiastically adopted by clients keen to grab hold of any new jargon, especially if it made what they were doing sound more scientific and less odiously exploitative. As far as anyone could tell, ‘translational marketing’ simply meant translating research into practical marketing and advertising strategies, and Otis was very, very good at that: ‘It’s not so much about winning hearts and minds as opening wallets,’ he was fond of saying, a sentiment that endeared him to employers and clients alike.
That kind of directness also appealed to Linc, as did Otis’s uncanny ability to present his research data in ways that invariably turned out to confirm the wisdom of the very strategies being proposed by the agency to its clients. But Linc knew there was more to this remarkable young man than his ability to sense which way the commercial wind was blowing, admirable and invaluable though that skill was. Conversations with Otis often seemed to have surprising relevance to Linc’s own life – personal and professional – as well.
That study of the characteristics of the most powerful men in business, for instance. If there was one thing that interested Linc more than the dynamic and often brutal business of business itself, it was the idea that power, wealth and – yes! – status could be won through business success. To say that Lincoln The Hunter was ambitious would be like saying that there were many stars in the sky: it would understate the situation by an incalculable factor – a phrase Linc himself often used, shamelessly borrowed from Otis. Linc loved the way Otis talked, and people in the agency had begun laughing among themselves at the extent to which Linc was adopting Otis’s turn of phrase, with even an occasional hint of Otis’s accent.