Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  “Yeah, and Annie Leibovitz can shoot it,” Nadine said.

  “I like it,” Babette said. “Women write copy for a woman’s product. What could be more authentic and persuasive than that?”

  Within ten minutes, Dane brought English composition to advertising, enrolled millions of women in a copywriting sweepstakes, and became the lead writer of a national campaign.

  This project was different from anything he had undertaken. It could not be wrested from him like a line of copy. It was on a par with the Jolly Green Giant, Chiquita Banana, and the GEICO gecko. Dane finally had the big idea to lift him from a journeyman to an advertising legend.

  Once the client and PR firm agreed on the DONARAL 50th birthday campaign idea, Dane devised several concepts to advertise the event. No other teams were involved. He collaborated on ads, billboards and direct mail with an art director handpicked by Nadine to provide a woman’s viewpoint.

  They attended focus groups where women evaluated ad concepts and openly discussed hot flashes in business meetings, mood swings that wrecked marriages and other menopausal nightmares DONARAL was indicated to prevent. Most of the women in these groups warned against making the DONARAL birthday campaign a self-aggrandizing corporate affair; at the same time, they promised to support a meaningful event that helped women better understand and cope with menopause.

  These women’s attitudes about DONARAL and menopause inspired Dane and increased his enthusiasm about the project. Once again, he felt he was doing more than earning a living. He witnessed firsthand that advertising could do more than promote a product; it could address health issues and change social attitudes. He was helping to send a message to women at home and in the workforce, women who were harassed and even ashamed of the natural changes their bodies were undergoing, that their lives not only extended, but had value, beyond reproduction.

  20. RENTING SUCCESS

  By summer’s end, Dane was writing for successful osteoarthritis and menopause campaigns, and was the go-to guy in leg cramps and overactive bladder. Within ten months of his hire, Dane was the most important copywriter at Integrimedicom.

  It seemed the right moment to take a short vacation with his family. Since his summer plans had waited until the last moment, they had to book five days at a musty motel in eastern Long Island, where they occupied a tiny room and splashed around in a shallow pool shaped like a dolphin. In the evenings they ate shell-fish and contracted gastroenteritis.

  When Dane returned to Integrimedicom, he learned that Sheldon and Nadine had tested another concept while he was gone. It was a picture of a leather photo album with DONARAL 50th Anniversary embossed on its cover.

  “How could you let them do this?” he asked Goldfarb.

  “Let them?” Goldfarb protested. “I didn’t have to let them! They’ve been dying to get their hands on this project but you controlled it—until you took a break.”

  “So I can never take a vacation without being stabbed in the back?”

  “That’s it! Or be like me. Accept how things are and don’t care!”

  Regardless how much he accomplished at Integrimedicom, Dane realized he only rented success. Nadine and Sheldon were ruthless competitors who drew on the talent of the entire department. They could even induce Goldfarb to work against him.

  Fortunately, the leather book concept did not perform as well as the four aging sorority sisters holding hands and skipping, so Dane’s ownership of the DONARAL gala stayed intact.

  21. A NIGHT FOR THE AGED

  The DONARAL 50th birthday campaign made history. Ads ran in publications soliciting women’s essays. Hundreds of thousands of women responded. Dane, Nadine, and Sheldon were able to bill hundreds of hours by reading essays. The client selected the grand winners based on age, race, region, and novelty of story. One DONARAL testimonial came from a 70-year old show-girl. The most exotic DONARAL user was a nurse.

  Six months after Dane first proposed the contest, the 50th birthday celebration took place and the 12 contest winners arrived in New York. They went on a whirlwind tour of receptions, a photo shoot, a day of beauty and an awards dancer and dinner event.

  Dane was invited to the gala dinner. He could say with some justification that this was his party.

  Yet, as soon as he walked into the banquet room, Dane finally understood what Randy Newman meant in “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”

  This gala was the end result of his imagination. When he read the essays and met their authors, he believed his creativity had a purpose—to empower women to live and achieve beyond their reproductive years. So why did melancholy fill the room like air freshener?

  He looked around. Where are the men? Honorees were invited to bring along “significant others,” yet few husbands, sons or brothers were in attendance. There was no sense that men were despised, unwanted or excluded—they were just absent. Was there no place for men in the lives of these fulfilled women? Dane would soon find out.

  His first task was to greet the contest winners—the twelve inspiring women who believed age was just a number and attributed their youthfulness and success to DONARAL. He shook hands with a nurse from Alaska, who blended modern medicine with shamanism, and then fulfilled her life-long dream of racing in the Iditarod; a Native American mother of ten; a world-renown surgeon; a federal judge; an operator of gourmet soup kitchens; a 66-year-old who earned a Ph.D. and gave all the credit to DONARAL for raising her I.Q.; and a hospice worker who used the gift of extended youth to give comfort to the dying.

  At the end of the reception line stood Elaine, the 70-year-old star of her community theater’s production of Follies and the founder of the Rockerettes, a silver-haired chorus line of long-legged, highkicking senior women, who toured retirement communities across the U.S. and even performed in the Grand Canyon.

  “I remember you!” Dane said as he shook Elaine’s hand. “I loved your story. And here you are.”

  “And here you are!” she said, touched by his enthusiasm. “Aren’t you sweet?”

  “You were an inspiration,” Dane said. “You helped me believe in the product—not that I would ever take hormone replacement therapy.”

  “I’m glad I inspired you,” she replied as she stared into his eyes.

  “I hope I have the vitality to achieve something when I’m your age.”

  “Oh, I have vitality,” she said. “Age is just a number.”

  “He has your number,” said Joyce, the Alaskan tundra nurse and Iditarod racer, who was on Dane’s other side.

  The two women clashed with dueling sneers. Seeing how this might go, Dane excused himself from their company and drifted to the far end of the ballroom, where he waited for people to settle before sitting at an empty table.

  As he waited for soup to be served, Babette approached with a posse of awards winners in tow.

  “There you are! Why are you sitting alone? You didn’t already offend someone and embarrass yourself, the agency and our client, did you?”

  “No, no,” one woman said. “He was charming.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. I brought you company.”

  The women surrounded Dane, poised to occupy his table.

  “Were you trying to shake us? You should know better,” Elaine, the senior showgirl, said. She posed before him in her spangled gown with the slit up to her hip and the décolletage down to her solar plexus.

  Dane helped each woman into her chair.

  “What a gentleman!” Elaine remarked. “I love that.”

  “You love anything that moves,” said Joyce, the Alaskan nurse.

  “These gestures just put people in a festive mood,” Dane said.

  “They put me in the mood,” Elaine said.

  “You’re always in the mood,” the Alaskan nurse quipped.

  The high-kicking Rockerette smiled at the Alaskan nurse and turned to Dane.

  “Manners are a lost art. I love them because I’m just an oldfashioned girl,” she said.

  “That means she
doesn’t put out on the first date unless she’s horny,” quipped the Alaskan nurse, “—which is always.”

  The Alaskan nurse and Iditarod racer may have come off as peculiarly acerbic and rude for a guest of honor at a glittering affair. As she would later explain in her journal, she had swallowed too much seal blubber while caring for sick Inuits to sit back and watch her glamorous co-winner waylay the one unescorted man at the gala.

  The show-girl scowled at her heckler, “We’re having a conversation.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  Elaine smiled at Dane. She chuckled when he smiled back.

  “Will you dance with me?” Elaine asked.

  Dane pressed his back against the chair and tried to ignore the question.

  “Let’s dance. Don’t be shy. Other people are dancing, we’ll blend in.”

  “I shouldn’t. I’m working.”

  “Tonight it’s your job to have fun!”

  The Rockerette leaned forward and jiggled her breasts to demonstrate that, real or otherwise, they were there.

  “You’re afraid your colleagues will tease you for dancing with an old broad?”

  Dane was ashamed at how right she was so he escorted the Rockerette to the dance floor.

  The orchestra struck up a medley of Lawrence Welk classics. The floor was crowded with women in formal wear dancing with each other. Dane guided Elaine to the middle so they would go unnoticed. He coaxed his feet to do the box step he had once learned at a middle school cotillion. Elaine was an expert ballroom dancer. She told him to relax and she would talk him through the steps. By the third song, Dane forgot his manifold embarrassments.

  “So, what are your fantasies?” Elaine asked Dane as she pressed against him during the fox trot.

  “I’m living my fantasy,” Dane replied.

  “Aren’t you sweet?” she cooed and touched his hand.

  “I mean being here, conceiving a national campaign—and with such a positive message. This was my fantasy.”

  “You’re lucky,” Elaine said.

  Elaine draped her arms around Dane and pressed tightly against him.

  “I know what men want,” she whispered.

  “You do?” he gasped, creating separation between them.

  Dane was saved from Elaine’s response by microphone feedback, which introduced the awards ceremony. Ordinarily Dane despised such proceedings but now he clung to every grandiloquent tribute and found refuge from Elaine’s flirtation in frequent rounds of lusty applause until his palms were as raw as they were in adolescence.

  He surveyed the banquet hall. At the next table, Babette and the DONARAL franchise manager were matching stunts. She removed her gloves to show off her bleeding cuticles while he pressed his insulin pump, gorged himself on pastries and sweated profusely.

  After the meal was over, Dane left his table, said good-bye to Babette and Nadine and headed toward the opulent lobby.

  “Hello! Elaine called after him. “You forgot something.”

  Dane patted his jacket and pants to ensure that his wallet and phone were in his pockets.

  “This is what you forgot.”

  It was a card with her phone number.

  “Call me if you’re ever in Arizona—or if you’re scheduling an event.”

  “Thank you.”

  She accompanied Dane into the lobby. Near the elevators, she asked if he would escort her up to her floor. There had been incidents in the hotel, women accosted in the corridors and ice rooms. She told Dane she shared a room with another essay winner, a woman minister who distributed condoms in Zambia.

  “Take me, take me,” she whispered. “I know what men want.”

  “It’s flattering but I can’t,” Dane said.

  “When you’re an old man and your pants are up to your nipples, you’ll regret it.”

  “If I live that long,” Dane conceded modestly.

  Joyce, the Iditarod racer, came up behind them.

  “When you left your sorbet uneaten, the spirits told me what you were up to,” the Alaskan nurse said shamanistically.

  ‘He asked me for my card,” the Rockerette replied.

  “And I ate your sorbet! I see through your sequins, lady. You’ve been all over him like peanut butter on Ritz crackers, you old vamp!”

  “Age is just a number, you old seal!” Elaine answered.

  “That hair isn’t even real!” Joyce taunted.

  To prevent the Alaskan nurse from proving her point, Elaine pounced on her and the two strong women tumbled to the marble floor of the four-star hotel, where they improvised the inaugural DONARAL gladiatorial—rolling, kicking, flailing, punching and clawing.

  Bystanders in the lobby aimed their cell phones at the fight like spontaneous paparazzi, tussling with each other for position as they feasted on the moment with photos and videos.

  “Mush! Mush, alpha bitch!” the Alaskan nurse cried out, reverting to her Iditerarod, dog-handling experience as she gained an advantage over the Rockerette.

  Dane thought he should try to stop the fight to prevent injury, impropriety and negative publicity. However, if he became entangled with their bodies, he might look like a sexual pervert trying to make a public threesome. Dane was saved from taking action by one more human eruption in the lobby. With the orchestra playing the final strains of champagne music and the clients safely away in their corporate limousine, Babette staggered back into the hotel lobby, where she found Nadine talking to a handsome bellhop. Babette had skipped her epilepsy meds for this evening so she could imbibe and was sufficiently pixilated to shout at Nadine, “I can’t have children because I’m sick. Having kids is just a number. I’m more woman than you are.”

  “You’re a pathetic incompetent!” Nadine sneered.

  “You’re a phony. You don’t even use DONARAL. I do! You twofaced bitch!” Babette cried.

  At Integrimedicom, Nadine would have ignored the insult but in a four-star hotel she was acutely aware of her reputation. Nadine slapped Babette, who retaliated by swatting Nadine’s face with her black gloves. The two women grabbed hold of one another’s coats and lost their balance. When they fell to the carpet, Babette’s body started to thrash.

  “Put your fingers in her mouth!”

  The Alaskan nurse’s health care instincts superseded her competitive pride. She pried herself free of the Rockerette and assisted Babette. The mood after the gala quickly degenerated from slapstick to somber as the hotel staff surrounded the fallen vicepresident of account services in order to shield guests from the terror of epilepsy, prevent more lurid footage and avert a lawsuit.

  22. GRANDMAS GONE WILD

  After a quiet night for mayhem in the City, the front pages of the next morning’s tabloids splashed cell-phone photographs of the Rockerette and the Alaskan nurse wrestling on the floor of the 4-Star Hotel under the headline,” GRANDMAS GONE WILD!”

  The story mentioned that the female gladiators were in town for the DONARAL 50th anniversary celebration as winners of the “Age is just a number” essay contest entered by millions of women worldwide. On the inside pages, a smaller photograph showed the undercard—Babette grappling with Nadine. Dane imagined how the DONARAL product team felt about having their dignified event depicted as a woman’s wrestling match. He left the office and took a long walk to Chinatown for noodle soup, unable to sit still for the repercussions. After all he had done and been through at Integrimedicom, he would finally be fired over this embarrassing fracas.

  But nothing happened when he returned and he was at a loss. After three years in advertising, Dane had not fully grasped its mercurial ways. DONARAL’s public relations and advertising budgets were in the millions but could never buy a fraction of the media coverage the old drug now received. News shows worldwide picked up the DONARAL story because of the raw footage of the Rockerette grappling with the Alaskan nurse. In 24 hours, millions of people knew about DONARAL and witnessed its putative effects. For every viewer who laughed, three others believed
that DONARAL must be a wonder drug to make these older women fight so hard. Thousands of women in their age bracket wished to try DONARAL, to feel physical passion again or simply to thrash an aggravating neighbor. DONARAL’s 1-800 number was inundated by calls; the website crashed from the number of visitors seeking the free trial offer.

  The DONARAL account was flying that week as prescriptions soared by 2000%. The product team was in a superb mood. After one day off, Babette returned to the office, bruised but undeterred, with several pieces of new business. American Pharmacon loved the gala, loved the publicity, and was even moved by Babette’s fit. They wanted to extend and expand the campaign, to the point of sponsoring a martial arts event for older women.

  Case 3-F

  PROMISCUOUS GOLDFISH

  23. DISPOSSESSED

  With such a spectacular outcome to his campaign, Dane had every reason to believe he could ride his triumph right onto the cover of Pharm Annals, the bible of medical advertising, as “The Genius behind GRANDMAS GONE WILD!”

  When he strolled into the DONARAL status meeting after the gala, he braced himself for a standing ovation. Instead, there was nowhere for him to sit. The conference room was a bloated infection of displaced advertising folk. Dane had made DONARAL relevant again but was now reduced to competing for business scraps with every other copywriter.

  It was no reflection on Dane. Despite the DONARAL triumph, Integrimedicom was in crisis.

  Another client was lost. Prunastadil took its flat sales and disgusting side effects elsewhere. The Prunastadil commercials were legendary. An austere doctor in a white lab coat recited the product’s effectiveness at producing weight loss and explained how it removed fat from the blood stream, only to conclude that Prunastadil was associated with side effects like greasy stools and fecal incontinence.

  Was it shocking that Prunastadil fell short of sales targets?

  The client blamed Integrimedicom for the debacle. They claimed their agency of record had given poor direction, although it was documented that Babette, Sheldon and Nadine first advised against a doctor commercial, and secondly, against having a doctor read the gruesome fair balance. Due to the mention of greasy stools, the media group could not buy air time during the all-important evening news hour when people were eating dinner.