This increased the pressure on Dane. One week remained to deliver a new campaign. Prowling the streets for inspiration, he noticed men and women jogging and shooting hoops. On a handball court, a man and woman smacked a ball at each other. Dane envisioned a new campaign focused on men and women playing together. “Make it last!” put sex in the context of shared activities, wholesome fun and healthy relationships. PE would be broadened from a male problem to a couples’ issue.
Dane and Goldfarb sent several executions to the client, who liked this approach but wanted something else.
Another idea came to Dane, object-oriented and funky: photographs of large men releasing heavy objects—medicine balls, a shot put, or a huge stone. The headline, “Release the load,” would tell men to stop worrying about PE and do something about it.
The SLOJAC marketing team loved “Release the load.”
Then, out of nowhere the director of urology marketing overruled them. He had a vision in the shower: a man on a bicycle holding a bowl with a goldfish. The agency people were perplexed. How did goldfish pertain to premature ejaculation? The director of marketing explained that “a man, a bike and a goldfish” had tested extremely well for an HIV medication the previous year, so it would not need to be re-tested, which would save time and money. Anyway, why shouldn’t “a man, a bike and a goldfish” work as well for premature ejaculation as it had for HIV?
When he was told to write body copy for ‘a man, a bike and a goldfish,’ Dane said, “You’re kidding. We have to push back.”
“The client loves it. We should embrace it,” Sheldon said.
“This happens all the time,” Nadine added.
“What is the connection between ‘a man, a bike and a goldfish’ and premature ejaculation?” Dane asked.
“Don’t be so literal,” Ray Bob interjected. “It oozes healthy lifestyle.”
“You’re too close to it,” Sheldon said. “Lighten up.”
“How can I? Premature ejaculation destroys lives!” Dane cried.
“‘A man, a bike and a goldfish’ says nothing about the problem or the product.”
“You’re over-excited,” Ray Bob said. “I know premature ejaculation can be a bitch, man. We’ve all been there with a leaky water gun. But we’ve got to get beyond the personal now.”
“This is not about my water-gun!” Dane argued. “SLOJAC can be the biggest drug since Viagra. Bigger. Viagra was for old guys. SLOJAC is for all guys. We need something more than a man on a bike with a goldfish.”
“There is no time!” Ray Bob pleaded. “Look, you’ve done great work but now it’s time to do what the client says. We need you to write the most kick-ass premature ejaculation copy ever written for ‘a man, a bike and a goldfish.’ Take off the training wheels and step up to the plate!”
“It makes no sense!” Dane pleaded.
Ray Bob read the can’t-do spirit in Dane’s eyes. He exhaled hotdog breath in his favorite copywriter’s face and spoke urgently, “Listen, big guy! When I was third string guard on the worst high school team in Pennsylvania history I learned one priceless lesson. Sometimes you shoot. Other times you pass. And sometimes you take a charge. The game is on the line. You take the charge, we get the ball. We’re counting on you. Remember: shooting your load too soon in the sack is embarrassing. Shooting it too soon in business is expensive.”
It was a speech more appropriate to Hooters than Hoosiers but it worked. Dane went from petulant to professional and pledged to write the best damned copy ever written for “a man, a bike and a goldfish.”
27. PROMISCUOUS FISH
A week later, “a man, the bike, and a goldfish” were ready for regulators. The agency brass sat back smugly, poised for a big win. How could they lose? They were giving the client what they wanted.
Early on, one regulator, a Russian scientist, chastised the agency.
“I cannot believe you guys. You are unbelievable. You use goldfish for an HIV medication and I tell you many times not to go there, that goldfish are filthy beasts and bowl is metaphor for unprotected sex. So now again you serve up disgusting fish! But this time you exploit tiny carps to sell drug for premature ejaculation for more sex. Do you not understand English?”
“With all due respect, we meant ‘a man, a bike and a goldfish’ to be life-affirming. We portrayed them with taste and dignity,” Sheldon replied respectfully.
“These goldfish are naked! They cavort in a bowl, engage in orgies. Clearly this ad promotes unsafe sex and raunchy life-style,” the scientist regulator pushed back.
Dane never liked “a man, a bike and a goldfish,” as a concept but he considered them chaste. It seemed absurd that such insipid icons were lewd to anyone. Yet, he never intended to defend the morality of goldfish until Sheldon implored him with a fervent nod to be a character reference.
“These fish are not naked,” Dane interjected. “They wear scales. And while goldfish are prolific defecators, they are no more licentious than other beasts.”
“How can you make this claim? Goldfish live in water, which is associated with bathhouses, co-ed showers, hot-tubs and nudist beaches!” the Russian scientist insisted.
“Goldfish were never role models.” Dane argued. “They are popular pets.”
The regulators were outraged by Dane’s impudence and went offline to deliberate.
In a week they delivered their verdict in a terse email: no man, bike and goldfish need apply. Integrimedicom returned to concept development. While no one explicitly blamed Dane for the fiasco, Sheldon and Nadine appropriated the project. They gave the concept their classic touch, replacing the man with an elderly woman, the bike with a basket, and the goldfish with a dog. The client approved and submitted it to regulatory.
“This I like!” proclaimed the Russian scientist. “‘Old lady and dog’ are perfectly anti-promiscuous!” The regulators swiftly approved the revamped concept. ‘An old woman and a dog’ saved another Integrimedicom launch.
However, they could not save SLOJAC. The FDA rejected its new drug application. In the government’s view, premature ejaculation was not a legitimate medical problem and making men have longer intercourse offered no health benefit. In the wake of this devastating ruling, men on bikes with goldfish, heaving men, sports couples, and men on stilts were buried in a mass grave and forgotten.
Dane was too dejected to react.
28. GOING FACIAL
Soon after the SLOJAC debacle, two clinical studies showed that Donoral had no effect on brain function or on heart health. If women felt smarter or more vital it was all in their heads. While the studies ripped the premise of the recent 50th birthday gala, they were limited in scope and merely nipped at the myth of DONARAL, leaving its main therapeutic and safety claims intact.
The following week, a major government trial studying the health benefits of DONARAL was shut down two years prior to its scheduled end-date when an unacceptably high number of women taking it were diagnosed with tumors, heart disease and blood clots. Only a month after its birthday gala, DONARAL plunged from miracle drug to a black box warning, indicating deadly risk. News spread from the medical community to the mainstream media. A national magazine cover story about DONARAL sent the drug company’s stock into a single-digit abyss. Within days, prescriptions trickled to nothing.
No meetings were called at Integrimedicom. The client did not ask the agency for promotional tactics to deny these reports or to spin them in a positive way.
A pall gathered over the agency. The one healthy account to which everyone had gravitated was dry. Integrimedicom was on life-support.
One afternoon, Dane returned to his office with a container of Chinese noodle soup when he noted Sheldon’s corner office door was shut. While Dane poured hot pepper oil into the steaming soup, his phone rang.
“Dane, can you come to my office?” Sheldon asked in a subdued voice.
“May I finish my soup?” Dane asked as his brain linked the solemn tone, the vague invitation and the closed
door. He guessed that if he did not eat before the meeting, he would not want to eat afterward.
“Yes, but come in right afterward,” Sheldon replied.
When Dane entered the corner office, three corporate vice presidents awaited him. Sheldon stared at papers on his desk like a TV anchorman before a commercial break. He glanced at Dane, then lowered his eyes. Nadine sat on a couch against one wall. The director of human resources, a hunched woman dressed in black, leaned on the edge of Sheldon’s desk. The three executive vice presidents stared at Dane like he’d been disfigured in an accident.
“Dane, we have traveled the same path and our journey has been full of discovery and event. But now our paths diverge,” Sheldon said.
Since Dane did not respond, Sheldon felt the need to translate.
“We have to let you go,” the creative director continued. “You’ve been a fine colleague. You’ve done a great job but we’ve lost business and we’ve been ordered to make cuts.”
Silence.
“It’s the rule at Integrimedicom. The last to come must be the first to go,” Sheldon explained.
They studied his face for signs of acknowledgement.
“Oh,” Dane said.
Dane was acutely aware of his hot cheeks, the tautness of his jaws. Job-related dystonia, a general rigidity, gripped his limbs. His entire being contracted into one question, “Why are you doing this to me?” Was it because of Prunastadil”s “greasy stools” and the discredit of DONARAL? Or was it because he failed to purchase even one box of candies to support Nadine’s children’s daycare center?
“We’ve all gone through this,” Sheldon said.
“We’ve all been there,” Nadine added.
“You’ll receive a severance package,” the human resources director assured him flatly.
Dane’s mind was like a ransacked room, with thoughts and sentences scattered, broken and disordered. Out of the shambles, he uttered the one thought left intact. “It’s not my fault the agency is losing business. My work has been successful.”
“Yes. We’re glad we hired you and we’re sorry you have to go,” Sheldon said.
“So why am I being laid off?”
“It’s not you,” Nadine added. “It’s the business.”
Nadine told a fable. It was Christmas and Nadine expected a bonus but received a pink slip instead. “Quite a bonus!” she laughed and slapped her hands. “Good times!”
“If we can do anything, just call,” Sheldon said. “Even when you’re not with us, we’re always with you.”
“We’re family,” Nadine affirmed.
The human resources director, with her black eyes and fine, long beak, leaned against Sheldon’s desk, poised like a raptor to bear off the carcass of Dane’s employment to her administrative nest of separation papers, benefits explanations, rights, privileges, a booklet on how to handle a “reduction in force” and best wishes for a great future.
The humiliation of facing colleagues who considered him expendable and the strain of guarding his emotions proved so heavy that Dane sank into the couch, wishing to flee but unable to do more than blink.
Put your stuff in a trash bag, he thought. A good thing you didn’t keep your plants. Everything for a reason. What will they think when they see the trash bag in the subway and when I’m walking home?
He reflected bitterly that everyone else had worked here forever whereas he lasted less than two years. What was his problem? He saw Goldfarb’s behavior now as more than shameless groveling—it was a life strategy to avoid this.
They were talking. His face twitched and trembled from the strain of blankness. Open mouth and show teeth, let eyes pop and blaze wide like the Maori warrior faces New Zealand’s All Blacks put on before every match. No scenes! They want to feel good about letting you go. Don’t let them.
Suddenly, needle-pricks and muscles jumped like creatures trapped under Dane’s skin that were trying to escape. He laid his hands on his face to hide the tics.
“Are you okay, Dane?” Sheldon asked.
“Yes, of course.” The spasms continued. He pressed his palms on his face.
“We offer a generous severance package,” the HR vice president interjected. “You’ll receive vacation pay and three weeks salary. If you sign the release today, your settlement will come by mail in ten business days. But you have to sign now.” Dane could have written her copy. All that was missing was a 1-800 number.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Contemplating the hard stop of four years of employment and the seismic interruption of his career was unbearable, so Dane escaped into the handshaking, door-opening, hallway-walking, bag-filling, everybody-knowing twilight between corporate separation and physical departure as he crossed the divide from inside to out, from earning to yearning.
In fifteen minutes, the separation was final. Dane transformed from dead weight to moving man. His anger was assuaged by the severance package and his fear metabolized into hope as new excolleagues predicted that he would land a new job before he wanted one.
He said good-bye to Goldfarb, who called Sheldon and Nadine “bastards” under his breath. The door of a young Croatian art director in the next office was closed and she was sobbing behind it. She had been recently promoted to art director and purchased an apartment. Now she was unemployed. Nadine and Roscoe had jokingly named her “the little mouse” because she worked quietly till all hours on projects nobody else wanted. On her birthday, she brought in a cake from a Croatian bakery for everyone to share. Yet, despite her sweetness and submissiveness, she was laid off.
Dane hoisted the black trash bag stuffed with his personal effects—a cheap, plastic radio, a poster demonstrating the knee joint in detail, and other medical mementoes—and staggered backward under their unsentimental weight. Shifting the bag in front of him, Dane lumbered unsteadily out of Integrimedicom and down to the street.
AD NOMAD 4
DRUGS, SEX AND ADVERTISING
Case 4-A
EINSTEIN, ICE CREAM & THE CRYBABY OF CAPISTRANO
1. A BRIDGE OVER THE ABYSS
If the layoff was an abyss, a phone call on Dane’s last day at Integrimedicom was the bridge over which he might safely cross. A creative director at a new agency liked his book and wanted to meet him.
Dane’s need to superimpose structure on coincidence was a side effect of his creativity. In a quasi-religious impulse, he imputed the recent sequence of events to providence and wrapped their randomness in fate. As he dragged his Glad Bag into the torrid subway car for one last commute, he interpreted his layoff as good luck, while fellow travelers scorned him for the space his sad sack occupied and the disgrace it meant.
His interview took place the next Monday. Edie Plinkus, the interviewer, had climbed from traffic to creative director. While Dane dressed to impress, Edie’s droopy sweats were more à propos of a jog than a job. “I’m competing in a world martial arts meet in California next week,” she explained. “I can’t wait!”
Dane had learned two principles of social communication, which he applied to interviews: 1. Show interest in others by overcoming a lack of it; and 2. Interact with the other person’s interest by discussing a similar pastime.
Determined to respond pleasantly, Dane asked which martial art Edie Plinkus practiced. When she blurted Chinese words with Sinosinus precision, Dane nodded effusively to mask the vacancy in his eyes. He then confided that he studied Kung Fu when he was a cab driver after being attacked by a cohort of cavorting insurance salesmen. Edie Plinkus nodded with naked disinterest before launching a new topic.
“The agency is like a factory,” Edie said. “There isn’t much creativity.”
Dane was crushed. Being considered for this position was no longer a compliment but an insult. He did not realize that Edie was practicing her martial arts on him mentally. She turned his exuberance against him by depreciating the job.
“That sounds great!” Dane replied with twice as much enthusiasm. His need for
work made him impervious to pain. “Creativity was getting boring…It’s so overrated.”
Dane’s reversal made Edie Plinkus smile. Oh, he was good! Impressed by his interview-jitsu, she extended the meeting to expound on commitment, teamwork and long hours. Dane nodded with oblivious fervor as her palaver washed over him. His mind drifted into financial projections: with the Integrimedicom severance package, vacation pay and the first paycheck from this new position, his lay-off could yield his highest monthly income ever!
Edie all but told him he was hired when she stood up and thanked him for coming in. As Dane waited for the job offer, Edie said she would be interviewing all week and would let him know her decision. She had thrown Dane again but this time he had no time to recover. He walked out on two feet; emotionally he was flat on his back.
Two weeks later, the recruiter told him Edie filled the position from within. Dane did not linger on the setback. He phoned recruiters, agencies and former colleagues, lining up interviews. He was sure persistence would land him a job.
The fourth quarter of every year was typically hectic in pharmaceutical advertising. Clients had to splurge on end-of-the-year projects or forfeit their unspent budgets. Agencies could not cope with the work overflow and hired freelancers and billed clients at a higher rate.
This year was different. Dane received no offers. It was a bleak sign of his low market value or an industry slump.
He had one interview in September, another in October and a third in November. The dearth of opportunity worried him but not as much as the interviews, themselves. Dane approached each meeting with The Three C’s: confidence (trusts self), competence (has skill), and compliments (likes others). He described his swift career ascent, the DONARAL campaign and other successes; and the good people he had met. The interviewers smiled and politely asked why he had held no job for longer than 18 months. He explained the circumstances: he left Green to make more money and was laid off at Integrimedicom when they lost their clients. The interviewers replied that they needed someone who would stay for years, not months.
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