"No, I'm not going to quit," she said. "I'm going to make this work."
"I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but this is hurting us."
She snuffled. "I know."
Joe put his hand on her knee, which wasn't hard to find below her short skirt. "So, is Adrienne sleeping with Bruce?"
Ana looked mildly annoyed at him for asking the question. "No. I think she'd like to, but even she knows that would be trouble. For both of us."
"Okay, good. Because you're right: it would be trouble for everyone."
Ana stood up. "I have to go."
16
What Would Jesus Drive?
Adrienne's response was the same as Ana's: "Are you fucking kidding me? I can't believe people are saying that."
Adrienne was sitting on Ana's lime-green seventies Knoll love seat, her computer open on her lap. Ana was across from her at her desk, glowering. She took a sip from her travel mug and emitted a low-pitched growl as she stared at her computer screen. (Dozens of job folders against a background of cool, striated Macintosh blue.) She had stewed over the whole thing in the car for a good twenty minutes on the way in and it just kept making her more and more angry.
"I think we should get Malcolm in here," said Adrienne, trying to take charge of the situation.
Ana sat back in her chair and nodded at her partner. "Good idea. Before we do that, are you sure there's nothing that you'd like to tell me?"
Adrienne looked hurt. "You shouldn't be asking me that."
Ana immediately regretted the implicit accusation and held her palms up, trying to quell the situation. "Okay, I just—I'm sorry."
Adrienne stared down at her laptop as she spoke. "I may do it now just to spite you," she muttered.
Ana smiled, but Adrienne didn't look up from her computer.
* * *
After a quick call, Malcolm was in Ana's office, looking a little spooked. Adrienne closed the door behind him after he sat down.
"So what's going on, you guys?"
Ana peered at him over her glasses. "Malcolm."
"Yeah?" he said hesitantly.
"What the fuck did you hear, dude?" snapped Adrienne.
Ana quickly turned to her. "I'll handle this, Ade."
Adrienne crossed her arms. "Fine."
"Soooo," said Malcolm, "I have a feeling Joe might have mentioned to you what I heard."
Ana cocked her head. "You had to know he would, Mal."
"Of course—I wanted him to. I'm sorry, I guess I just didn't want to be the messenger." Malcolm turned from Ana to Adrienne and back again. "But I hadn't been expecting this good cop, bad cop routine either."
Ana wanted to smile but just couldn't. "Who's saying this stuff?"
He sighed loudly and lowered his shoulders. "You know, all the usual suspects . . . You guys, it doesn't matter who's saying it. It's just that a few people are saying it, that's all."
"No idea why this is happening?"
Malcolm raised his foot and placed the heel of his burnished square-toed shoe on his knee. "I don't know what to tell you. They're probably just jealous."
Ana took a strained breath. "You're right. It just pisses me off that we have to be subjected to this. Are people so surprised when two women get a promotion that they have to stoop to this? Is this the only way anyone can believe that we'd get ahead?"
"People don't know how to behave," said Malcolm, shaking his head. "That's the problem." He turned to the closed door. "You guys, I have to go. I've got a ten o'clock and I still have stuff to prepare."
"Thanks, Mal," said Ana. "Appreciate it."
"Yeah, thanks." said Adrienne, closing the door behind him. "Well, that was useless," she said to Ana. "He obviously doesn't want to give anyone up."
"Malcolm's smart that way. I don't blame him."
"I don't know why he couldn't at least give us a name."
"Come on, Adrienne, you know why—because you'd march over there and bite the person's head off."
"No, I wouldn't." Ana stared at her skeptically. "All right, so maybe I would. Motherfucker would have it coming."
Ana tipped her travel mug up to her lips and drained her remaining coffee. Then she put down the cup, opened up her purse, pulled out a MAC lipstick and a compact. Flipping open the mirror, she applied a coat of Russian red. "I did not need this before our meet and greet with the WomanLyfe client."
Adrienne slumped farther down in her chair. "Oh shit. Is that today?"
"You forgot?"
"Yes I did."
"Wish I could have forgotten. Woke me up at four o'clock this morning. I kept imagining myself in the meeting telling them all to fuck off and die. Then I started to fret about having no ideas for Fanning TV, then it was pretty much time to get up."
"Very efficient of you."
Ana looked at her wistfully. "It's all about time management."
"When is that thing, anyway?" Adrienne said, getting up to leave.
"One thirty."
"Guess I'll go."
Ana raised her brows and laughed harshly. "Guess you fucking will, bitch."
Adrienne opened the door. "You are such a cunt, you know that?"
Ana leaned back and stared at her partner in astonishment. "I can't believe you just called me a cunt."
"Yeah, I just decided I'm reclaiming it. Like nigger and queer."
Ana checked to see if anyone was outside her office. "Shhh. Don't say those words so loud."
"What?" said Adrienne, raising her voice as she turned to leave. "You mean cunt?" Then she laughed and walked out.
Ana sighed and laid her head on the desk. The cool laminate soothed her forehead. This was one of those moments where she honestly questioned what she did for a living. Sure, she knew that advertising paid well because it really brought nothing to humanity's table. It seemed to Ana that the more karmic good you performed in a job, the less you got paid to do it—teachers, social workers, and public defenders came to mind. Then again, it certainly wasn't like all low-paying jobs were soul-enriching and helpful to humankind. Ana had worked her way through the Center for Creative Studies (along with her scholarship) as a wage slave at the Gap helping only those seeking cheap clothing threaded together by poor brown and beige people from third world nations. She had also done double shifts schlepping food to rude and ungrateful diners, all of it for minimum wage and often skimpy tips, so maybe this meant her theory was flawed. Either way, she hated those jobs just enough to make her not want to be poor.
It had always seemed sadly true to Ana that bad people survived better in America. And to her, advertising was just bad enough to help her survive. Aside from the money and the comfortable life it gave her and Joe, it was, for the most part, a pleasant way to make a living, filled with creative challenges as well as smart and interesting and funny people. Still, she had never managed to delude herself into thinking she was doing something important. She solved problems with creativity and, when she did her job well, it made her feel good. Yet she didn't do much more than create demand for things that people probably didn't need in the first place. Ana had always been comforted by the fact that there were much greedier, eviler jobs than hers out there, like narcotics kingpin or investment banker. But now, for the first time, she wasn't so sure.
* * *
"What we'd really love to show is a friendly environment where women can go to work out, to strengthen their bodies but also enrich their souls and spirits. Through our research, we've found that way too many women continually give of themselves without any consideration of themselves. Consequently, WomanLyfe would like to be perceived not so much as a corporate entity, but almost as a . . . I don't know, a doctrine. But then that's such a dry word. I suppose lifestyle would fit better, but that seems so outmoded these days. Anyway, I leave the terminology up to you advertising people."
This client, Karin Masters, was surprising Ana. She was articulate, she was friendly, even stylish, and she certainly was not at all the shriveled, malevolent, pro-life
crone that Ana had been expecting. She was actually pretty, a slight, chestnut-haired woman dressed in what looked like Jil Sander. Still, weren't those the most dangerous kinds of enemies—the appealing ones? Maybe she was just some New York slickster hired by the clinic bombers to put a Cinderella mask on their Godzilla.
Ana watched as Bruce and Tara Exley, the account supervisor (young, smart as a whip, pretty cool for an AE, definitely not your standard-issue Michigan State MBA yes-bot), nodded in agreement at what was being said. Ana wondered if she was going to be expected to say anything. She probably was, though she had given it no thought at all. It was the one part of this new job to which she had found herself resistant, the whole client-agency interaction thing.
Ana had always had dealings with clients, but it was mostly just during presentations, when she was simply there in the capacity of art director. It was all different now; her place in the food chain had shifted. One of the lessons she was learning with every new day was that the creatives were people who were tolerated and, as often as possible, marginalized by corporate machinations.
She had known that despite advertising agencies' desire to be known as "cutting edge" or "leading edge" or "bleeding edge" or whatever fucking ludicrous edge they wished to be teetering upon these days, most of the clients were corporations that tacitly resented the fact that they had to go to so-called creative people for ideas of what to do for their brands. Creatives were the black sheep of the corporate world, the bad seed, the deranged and deformed offspring kept in the attic. Here was one of the few facets of corporate work that couldn't be quantified by the business wizards or overanalyzed by the research team or off-loaded to a foreign country to be done cheaper and faster. Ana long ago realized that most company representatives would be much happier not having to talk to some black-suited creative director (or worse: arty freak, gloomy bookworm, or young punk just out of ad school) to figure out what was a good idea.
It used to be that creatives could delude themselves into thinking that there was at least a certain artfulness and autonomy and perhaps even a jot of rebel spirit to what they did for a living. That particular delusion was getting harder for Ana to maintain these days. Especially since she was now one of the official faces of the agency. She had to talk to clients and had to act as if she cared what they thought. (This just in: she didn't.) So far there hadn't been many surprises—just a lot of myopic white men obsessed with their particular widget, thinking that the whole world was as widget-centric as them, more concerned about their own position within WidgetCo and making advertising that appealed more to their WidgetCo superiors than to the public, who didn't give a rat's ass about widgets unless their old one had worn out or broken down.
When Karin came to what felt like a natural pause, Ana finally spoke: "So you feel that a genuine concern for women is at the heart of everything you do?"
"Absolutely."
Ana nodded gravely. "So, if I understand this correctly, you want to encourage women to take better care of themselves. Which is a great thing."
"Right," said Karin, intensely meeting Ana's gaze. "I mean, ultimately we want them to take better care of themselves so they can take better care of the people who really matter: their husbands and children."
There was a beat of silence. Ana suddenly felt the blood start to pound in her skull. "I'm sorry? Excuse me . . . did you just say, the people who really matter?" Somewhere in the room, Ana heard a pencil being snapped in half. She had a feeling it was Adrienne. Ana smiled and nodded, her face an unmoving rictus. She felt pinpricks along the tops of her ears just before they went numb.
Bruce interjected: "Of course, you mean the people who really matter to them."
Karin looked confused at first, then her face opened with the realization of what she had said. "Certainly. Yes, I'm sorry if I was unclear about that. You have to understand that to the women who are our target audience, their families are everything to them. They tend to give them everything they've got. But they don't understand that depleting all their own resources—all their energy, all their time, all of their selves—is not beneficial to anyone at the end of the day."
Okay. Misunderstanding. Ana felt the rigor-mortis grin slip away. Was everyone looking at her? Was her face as red as it felt? After that sudden blast of adrenaline, her brain couldn't quite reengage.
Luckily, Adrienne jumped into the fray, bless her heart. "What kind of tone do you think is appropriate for the creative?"
Karin turned her laser gaze to Adrienne. "We think our brand personality right now is friendly and approachable. We'd like to continue in that vein, but with a more professional approach. I'm sure you've noticed that what we've been doing so far is, well, kind of low-tech."
At this, everyone from the agency just smiled pleasantly and said nothing.
Karin started to laugh. "It's okay. I think what we've been doing is horrible too. It's awful."
The entire room broke out with relieved laughter. It was the kind of moment that didn't happen often in one of these meetings: someone speaking the truth. Damn this woman, thought Ana. She's good. What WomanLyfe had been doing were video testimonials that looked like they had been produced in the basement of a public-access television station in Pig's Knuckle, Iowa, in the mid-1980s.
"I've been trying to tell everyone that for ages, but they didn't want to mess with success. Yet one has to understand that part of what made WomanLyfe so friendly and approachable was that we didn't look so professional. Those crappy commercials made us look nonthreatening to the very people we wanted to reach. So, though it wasn't intentional, that approach worked in our favor."
Unintentional incompetence resulting in accidental success. If that wasn't advertising in a nutshell, Ana didn't know what was.
"So are you saying that you want to continue in a similar direction?" said Adrienne, pencil shard threaded through her fingers.
That was the big question. Ana was glad Adrienne had asked it and not her. Ana put her pen down next to her notebook, hoping that this woman wasn't going to say yes.
Karin paused for a moment, shifted her eyes to the corner of the conference room, then over to Bruce, before answering the question. Not a good sign, thought Ana.
"Well, it has been a very successful approach, and I'd be lying if I said it wouldn't be well received if you were to continue our current campaign with better production values, but we are open to other approaches."
Was it just Ana or could she feel a palpable sense of disappointment in the room? That answer, as far as Ana could interpret it, was a definite yes. Okay, maybe not a definite yes, but a yes that said, We'll certainly look at another approach out of politeness, but we'll most likely be staying with the tried and true, thank you.
Bruce's expression told her that this was indeed the correct interpretation. He was in full damage-control mode. "I'm glad to hear that you're open to other approaches, because if WomanLyfe wants to be perceived as something other than just—forgive me for saying this—a cut-rate, low-end, strip-mall operation, they will definitely have to raise the stakes somewhat. Across the board: creative, media, Internet presence, strategic thinking—everything."
Karin looked hard at Bruce and nodded. "Okay, I understand that. Thank you for your candor. I'll start to prepare everyone for the idea that they're not necessarily going to see just more of the same kind of advertising."
Bruce flashed his winning, market-tested smile at Karin. "That would be great. Thanks."
Ana wanted to go over and give Bruce a hug for saying what he did.
Karin started to reach for her bag, then stopped. She put both elbows on the conference table and clasped her hands. "There is one thing, though. I do think that they're going to expect a certain Christian sensibility to the work."
That was when Ana noticed the cross around Karin's neck. Why hadn't she noticed it before? Of course she was one of them. Was Ana that much of a liberal elitist to believe that a stylish, nice, funny Christian couldn't exist?
&n
bsp; "Really," said Adrienne, her carefully styled eyebrows raised about as far as Ana had ever seen them. "What exactly is that?"
"One that reflects what we're all about at WomanLyfe: family, traditional values, Christian morals, Jesus." Her smile seemed to dare anyone in the room to defy her.
"We have to put Jesus in the advertising?" said Ana, before she had a chance to stop herself.
Karin Masters laughed. "Of course not."
Ana nodded. "Oh, okay."
"Just His teachings."
* * *
After the client had been walked out of the building and put into her car by Tara, the rest of them headed back to the conference room for a debriefing.
Bruce was the first to speak. "Jesus Christ, that was a good meeting!" he chirped, insincerely pumping his fist into the air. "Whooo!"
Ana was still stunned. "We're supposed to put the teachings of Jesus in the advertising? What the fuck, Bruce?"
He shook his head dismissively. "Don't sweat it. I think that's just bullshit to get us to do what they want. Our real problem is that they want the same crap they've been doing all along. Only slightly better-looking crap."
"Are we going to give it to them?" queried Adrienne.
Just then, Tara walked back into the room. She put her BlackBerry on the table next to her laptop, then said, "Why does a It's a Child, Not a Choice bumper sticker look so weird on the back of an S-Class Mercedes?"
This comment made Ana like Tara even more. One didn't much run into youthful exuberance with a side order of weltschmerz.
"Which begs the bigger question," said Ana, taking it a step farther. "Just what would Jesus drive?"
Adrienne jumped on it: "My Jesus would drive an Escalade. Murdered-out with smoked glass and twenty-six-inch black rims. My Jesus is a bad motherfucker."
"Interesting," said Bruce, leaning back and crossing his arms. "Because my Jesus does not believe in material wealth. He drives a Yugo. He just wants to get around in an economical manner. He's also Yugoslavian."
The Narcissism of Small Differences Page 12