Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Dane’s new neighbors were all juniors in the agency like Dane but they were juniors in all respects—in their 20s and 30s. Dane’s cubicle-neighbor, Carl, an art director with black-rimmed glasses, resembled a befuddled father in a 1950s Disney movie. He drank himself into a stupor every night in a Williamsburg bar. One morning Carl stumbled into the office with white tape on his glasses. He had sat on them before passing out on his bed at 4 AM. Across the way, a loud, young art director, Danielle, was always shouting on the phone, “That’s the bottom line!” and “You’re the best!” Across from Dane sat Bettina Rios, a petite, long-haired Peruvian beauty, who teased Dane about how much a man should pay to see her nude: a topic on her favorite reality show. “A million dollars?” she asked. “I would do it for a million dollars!”

  Dane soon had significant down time, but his experience at WIF taught him how to respond. He circulated from office to office, meeting people and foraging for work. In one office, several strapping, young men yelled obscenities at each other. One had another in a headlock and delivered a “nuggy,” rubbing the man’s scalp with his knuckles. The nuggy-giver was Eton Krassweiler, who, at 29, was the youngest creative director in medical advertising history. He looked up from his roughhousing and glared balefully at Dane.

  “What do you want?”

  “You need help? I’m up,” Dane said softly.

  “No, I’ve got this under control,” Krassweiler snarled, rolling his eyes as he struggled with his squirming victim, a senior writer.

  “I meant work. Do you need writing help?”

  “He’s looking for work,” Krassweiler jeered in a high nasal voice. “No work, old man.”

  Austin whispered to Dane that this group was known as The Boys. They were the hot creative guns of the agency who had won six pitches in a row. Nobody got in their way or questioned them about anything.

  Dane believed Green Healthcare Advertising was a significant step in his rise to advertising supremacy. Great things could happen to him here if Eton Krassweiler and The Boys did not stunt his growth. They were a gang like those he scrapped with in elementary school and high school. As with any potential enemy, Dane gathered information about The Boys and soon had a profile.

  The Boys came to Green as protégés of a charismatic creative director who abruptly quit and left them to advance his teachings. They evolved into a priestly creative cult, a corporate neoplasm segregated from other staffers by a membrane of disdain. Green management, believing the Boys to be gifted, supported this separation to nurture their creative purity.

  Eton Krassweiler, The Boys’ leader, was an enfant terrible with a voracious appetite for food, success and adolescent mayhem. He and his posse of rowdy men moved en masse through Green Advertising and bivouacked in his office, where they did most of their creative work. Behind a slammed door, Krassweiler conducted brainstorming sessions. When he was bored, he tossed people and things, bolted from the office, and shouted, “I got to take a dump!”

  With their boorish elitism, The Boys reminded Dane of the Rock Star Copywriter at The Institute of Design orientation, who scratched his gonads like a non-conformist genius with scabies. Their reputation for brilliance gave them license to abuse others and a monopoly on new business pitches.

  Dane realized he was in a caste system similar to pick-up basketball. The best players could dribble and shoot while everyone else on the court rebounded, passed and watched. Dane despised these advertising wunderkinds for their surly insolence, but envied their gilded reputations and aura of success. It must be great, he thought, to be able to say and do anything with impunity and to be truly valued.

  5. THE PROCESS

  Other than the size and energy of Green Healthcare Advertising, the most important major difference to which Dane needed to adapt was the work flow. As the only copywriter at WIF Dane was the process. His creative output went from his computer to his printer to Paul and to the art director.

  At Green, projects crossed many desks and departments in sequence. All work had to be documented. It was tedious but everyone admitted that it was an improvement over the botched jobs, litigation, chaos and money routinely lost prior to the current system.

  Dane had to learn and follow process—fast. It went like this.

  The writer’s copy went to a supervisor, an account person and a client. When a client approved the copy, it was “dropped” into a folder for word processing. From there, the manuscript went into layout and all changes were scrawled on the most recent layout, called “The Bible.”

  Process was simple but Dane was often slow when it came to simple. It was a new concept for him and he needed to develop a new skill set.

  Sylvia Bittman, the traffic manager, made sure he did. Sylvia was a swaggering woman with matted hair and black eyes—a born overseer. Sylvia told Dane he needed to drop his latest copy.

  “Drop the copy?” Dane said. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re joking! Drop the friggin’ copy. It’s easy.”

  Dane had no idea what to do. He could ask Sylvia for an explanation and receive another demeaning diatribe or respond in a joking way by resorting to Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation must be right.

  He dropped the heavy folder Sylvia had given him on the floor. Papers scattered everywhere. Dane’s joke fell flat.

  “You idiot!” Sylvia screamed. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you stupid? Where did Landon find you? At a soup kitchen? Are you making more work for me? You think this is funny? You’d better pick it up!”

  Sylvia stormed off and Dane tagged along. He suspected that wherever she went he would need to defend himself.

  They found the threshold of Landon’s office. Dane had not seen him in weeks and did not know he was around.

  “Landon, do you know what your new writer just did? He dumped a job jacket on the floor.”

  “No!” Landon replied with ironic gravity. “That is an unusual approach.”

  “Landon, would you please explain our process to your writer? I don’t have the time!” Sylvia replied irascibly.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Landon agreed. Sylvia was already gone.

  “High strung, isn’t she?” The Savior said before returning to his e-mail. “Oh, and by the way, Dane, you’ll be in your new office next Monday.”

  “Really? That’s great!” Dane said.

  “You deserve it,” Landon replied. “Your work has been very good.”

  “Thanks…So how do I drop the manuscript in the folder?” Dane asked.

  “Call IT. They’ll help you.”

  And that was the process.

  6. OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS

  Process notwithstanding, Dane achieved the corporate symbol of success—his own office—in impressive time and this personal milestone inspired him to learn the creative idiom of this new advertising genre with comparable speed. One assignment won him special notice. It involved branding, the core of pharmaceutical advertising.

  Since pharmaceutical products were regulated by company medical and legal committees and the FDA, word play and double entendres were off limits to the copywriter because they could mislead, confuse or seduce the patient. Humorous headlines were likewise taboo, deemed inappropriate for products to treat sick and dying.

  To overcome these impediments, pharmaceutical advertising exploited visual branding elements like icons, images and logos. An image implied what a headline could never say. Dane was assigned to create a new character for a popular antibiotic. For a year, the brand’s creative team had laid waste to every bug-killing concept, dependability symbol and power icon. Flyswatters, frogs with obscenely long flypaper tongues, vintage cars, lighthouses, jets, and super-heroes that pummeled villains with names like Strep-monster and Flagellin, had all lived and died.

  With his fertile imagination, Dane invented a Saluki dog catching a rabbit in the desert, a rattlesnake assaulting a prairie dog and a lifeguard rescuing a child from a sea teeming with aquatic bacteria.

  The l
ifeguard was the winner.

  Dane was thrilled but the reason for his triumph was no food for pride.

  The antibiotic treated children’s respiratory infections, so the client liked having a lifeguard who saved children. The lifeguard also presented various tactical opportunities, including coloring books, boy and girl lifeguard dolls, comic books—for distribution to sick children at pediatricians’ offices—and cartoon commercials.

  Adults could also love the lifeguard. Men might appreciate a female lifeguard in a one-piece and women would go for a buff male lifeguard.

  “It’s got legs,” Landon LeSeuer complimented Dane. One of the young female junior executives handed Dane an unforeseen compliment.

  “I guess you can teach old dogs new tricks!”

  7. NO KENNEL FOR OLD DOGS

  If Dane was an old dog at Green Healthcare, he was not the only one in the kennel. His partner, Stan Bushkin, was more qualified for this distinction. Bushkin was a decade older than Dane.

  When Landon was out—which was often—Bushkin was Dane’s creative supervisor. His office was next door to the Boys, but he occupied the opposite end of the creative spectrum.

  Bushkin was rotund and slovenly with coarse hair and a jowly face that conveyed boyish mischief. He was from the golden age of advertising and its creative, carefree ethos endured in him as a pulse.

  In Bushkin’s pre-digital prime, concepts were drawn with markers and type was set by hand. He won awards as an art director but had to relearn everything when computers, scanners and software rendered mechanical processes obsolete.

  In the yin and yang of creators and refiners, Bushkin was a creator. Witty and versatile, he drew vivid comps and crafted headlines that read like punch lines, and would have been productive if asked to conceive new ads. However, his talents were useless in medical advertising, where original work was rarely done. Bushkin was lost when told to redo old ads. His hands and jowls trembled when he showed his layouts to Gaines Burger, the captious creative director who appeared in the office as seldom as possible and reinforced his status by criticizing everything that was done in his absence.

  Other than such awkward moments, Bushkin acted like a mascot in semi-retirement. He exuded delight to have a full-time job and spent much of his time playing hide and seek and perusing eBay.

  When Bushkin did not rhapsodize about shopping at wholesale clubs or buying his cousin’s apartment for cheap, he entertained Dane with horror stories about his freelance debacles. One time Bushkin was called in to save a huge account. He worked for 48 straight hours churning out concepts. The agency lost the business anyway and the bitter creative director berated Bushkin and refused to pay him.

  On Monday mornings Bushkin told Dane in a dreamlike tone how he and his wife spent their weekend.

  “We went to Costco on Saturday. You ever go to Costco? No? What’s wrong with you? We bought a 32 oz slab of lox.”

  “Did you have people over for brunch?” Dane asked.

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because you bought so much lox. Who ate it all?”

  Bushkin stared at Dane incredulously like he was hopelessly slow.

  “We did. We ate it while we watched cable.”

  As partners, Dane and Bushkin tried to develop rapport. They often went out for lunch and sauntered around the farmer’s market at Union Square.

  Because Dane had a penchant for falafel sandwiches, Bushkin called him “Baba Ghanoush.” Before they returned to the office one afternoon, Bushkin let Dane tag along when he purchased shoe laces at the store where his orthotics were made. Dane knew this moment was significant since Bushkin wouldn’t share his bad feet with just anyone.

  Yet Bushkin was more complex than a regressive old man with flat feet. He believed he was hired for his funny, award-winning consumer campaigns, so he wracked his brain to produce uproarious drug ideas—for incontinent men without prostates and women with cancer. He trawled for goofy pictures and devised droll headlines to make sick patients and distraught caregivers laugh.

  Dane admired Bushkin’s boisterous wit but he already sensed after only a month at Green that funny and edgy were not the right tone for selling healthcare products. This audience did not consist of truck-driving, beer-guzzling sports lovers looking for a cheap laugh but patients and physicians seeking information and a reason to believe. Creativity needed to be confined to dryly clever concepts and headlines—and then only for drugs treating non-life-threatening diseases.

  Understanding the patient’s emotional state was Dane’s strength. He sympathized with the pain, the shame and the earnest desire for relief—and aimed for the trenchant phrase to sum up the audience’s response to a disease. Bushkin thought Dane’s dry, laconic statements were not advertising.

  Dane and Bushkin were able to coexist with their differences until they collaborated on an ad for adult diapers which targeted urologists and family doctors with incontinent patients. During one brainstorming session for medicated diapers, Bushkin let his imagination go.

  “Baba Ghanoush, how about we have two women talking? One says, ‘Where did you buy those diapers? They’re so chic!” Bushkin said in a falsetto voice.

  “Diapers are not chic,” Dane replied. “They keep incontinent people from peeing on the floor so they avoid humiliation.”

  “Sick people are people, too,” Bushkin protested. “They like to laugh.”

  “Not at themselves,” Dane pointed out.

  “What about this?” Dane asked. “It’s vanilla but it may work. You have a woman in a white dress and summer bonnet. The headline reads: “Now you can wear your summer whites.”

  “What’s that?” Bushkin yelled.

  “Women want to be stylish but they can’t if they’re worried about leakage. With our product, they don’t have to worry,” Dane explained. “We can also put her in a tennis outfit and a white pant suit.”

  “No!” Bushkin shouted. He stood up and shook his fist at Dane, then reached for the nearest projectile, a half-empty coffee cup, and hurled it at the wall. “What are you doing here?” Bushkin blurted furiously. “You don’t know how to write. Your ads aren’t funny! They’re not even clever!”

  This was a milestone in Dane’s career. He had been disrespected and ignored many times but never told to his face that he lacked talent. Though he was stunned by Bushkin’s insult, his fights at WIF taught him to renounce anger. He explained himself calmly to his partner, who implacably shook his fist at Dane and shouted, “Get out!”

  Dane retreated to his office to process what had just transpired. Was he in trouble? He knew cheap jokes were irrelevant to selling drugs but Bushkin was from the Golden Age. He was out of touch, yet possessed a nobler aesthetic! He once sold Miller Light!

  In Bushkin’s diatribes, Dane heard echoes of The Institute of Design, of “The Three Stooges” and Sal Sambucca with his Madison Avenue Cocktail, and even of Arlen Lesser at WIF—all traditional ad men. Dane conceded that he might not have been hired in the Golden Age; no doubt, he fit in better with aluminum or tin. Yet, he also knew he would surpass Bushkin in medical advertising if Bushkin did not have him fired first!

  What if Bushkin reported to Landon that Dane was strictly aluminum or tin and Bushkin refused to work with him? It might raise questions about the quality and authenticity of Dane’s portfolio.

  At WIF, Dane was banished to a closet after three months and to an office rice paddy after ten. Was the pattern repeating itself after only two months at Green?

  Such speculations spun in his head until they gave him vertigo. He did not know what to do so he went to lunch.

  8. PUNGENT LUNCH

  While one famous character had breakfast at Tiffany’s to feel better, Dane improved his outlook with lunch at the farmer’s market in Union Square. There he tried to lose himself in the vitality of the people and the variety of foods.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, upstate farmers, coastal fishmongers, and local tradesmen plied their wares a
nd Dane purchased tart organic apples and molar-cracking pretzels.

  After his fight with Bushkin, Dane stopped at the concession of a Korean kimchee vendor—a market newcomer. Dane tasted the kimchee. It was the best he ever had. It reminded him of a simpler time when he was a graduate student tutoring Korean children at their Flushing apartment and inhaled pungent cabbage fermenting in a flower box on their terrace. Nostalgic for when he was poor but appreciated, Dane bought a container of kimchee and returned to the office.

  He closed his door and pried open the plastic top, eager to taste the funky delicacy. It was like opening Pandora’s Box of shit. Out of doors, the kimchee aroma mingled with other smells and dissipated rapidly in the chill air; in a restaurant it was a pungent fanfare to Korean feasting. But Dane’s kimchee offended the impersonal business setting, permeating the stale air of the sealed office with a fleet and feculent stench.

  Dane closed the container and waved his arms to sweep away the spreading effluvium but was helpless against it. Unable to expel the smell, he fled to locate an antidote. After hiding the kimchee in a paper bag in the fridge, he foraged for air spray. From halfway across the office floor, he heard Danielle, the loud art director, shout, “Ass odor!” It was a safe bet she wasn’t thinking, “Prized Korean condiment.”

  However, the loud woman’s accusatory cries gave Dane an idea. If he joined the loud protest against the kimchee smell, people might look elsewhere for the culprit; the ploy often worked for flatulent subway riders.

  Dane raced to the chief administrator’s office and found a can of Lysol, then returned to his office, hoping to eliminate the kimchee odor before most of his office neighbors returned from lunch. Too late. A crowd had gathered outside his door. They were sniffing through clogged sinuses as if morbidly attracted to the stench or curiously seeking the carcass from which it came.