Each morning he used the Ogden Adelman board room toilet. It was identified by a bronze plaque on the door emblazoned with the name of the legendary agency founder and Hall of Fame copywriter. In the Adelman john, the bowl was full of aquamarine disinfectant before the day’s first flush. The brilliantly tinted water seemed to sanctify its imminent pollution. To absolve his trespass of this historic place, Dane sat on the can with a tiny book of Adelman’s sayings. Dane had received it as a keepsake at his human resources orientation, along with a tote bag, a key chain and a tee-shirt. The measure of Adelman’s genius was that in an industry that masticated copy and evacuated copywriters, his ideas were immortal. He gave a sleazy trade respectability and raised hucksterism to an art.
“Effective messages speak to the heart and the gut,” Dane read.
Rumination and evacuation occurred simultaneously, producing inspiration. Dane wondered if the great Adelman ever sat here. If so, was it possible that Dane absorbed his genius transdermally through his butt cheeks? Reading Adelman’s epigrams reinforced his faith that he was called to Georgian Shields to carry out an important mission. He pledged to produce memorable advertising, to think strategically and to settle for no less than the best. Reading the master’s thoughts while sitting on his seat challenged Dane to address each creative problem with one overriding question: “What would Ogden think?”
6. TALKING, CHEWING & CHOKING
On his first day, he sat in a web conference with Sally Takamitsu, the account director in Toronto. Dane would be writing for Sally’s client, Grovil, a topical biologic compound that healed diabetic foot ulcers. Sally had product-driven black hair, a smooth, round face and a rapid-fire delivery that emphasized adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.
“Hello, Dane, I just want to tell you HOW VERY excited we are to have you ON BOARD. We have SO much for you to do. AND I can’t wait to tell you all ABOOT it.”
An appetizing lunch was served but Dane felt uncomfortable tucking into a thick sandwich while people watched him masticate on a monitor.
When he managed to sneak a bite, Sally asked him a question. Dane chewed vigorously, while holding up his finger to indicate that he would swallow imminently and be right with her. However, seeing how perturbed Sally was at the delay, he gagged on his sandwich.
“Oh, dear!” Sally said. “Sawry! Can someone give him water like immediately?”
Unable to stop coughing, Dane gave himself a Heimlich by punching himself in the solar plexus. The meeting proceeded.
Later that afternoon, Nigel Hogbine chugged into the New York office to interview a young art director candidate.
“Welcome aboard,” Nigel said, shaking Dane’s hand. “Liking your first day, ay?”
They went to at a neighborhood pub, where they drank Guinness, ate chicken wings and discussed The Newsroom and Slings and Arrows, two brilliant Canadian television series Dane admired. This was advertising at its civilized best. Dane thought he was respected, even liked. What was wrong with this picture?
7. NEW HIRE EUPHORIA
Dane always had to hype a job to himself. His “new hire high” helped him perform at a peak level of competence and enthusiasm for weeks or even months. If he believed a job was a turning point toward greatness, he fooled himself into putting in long hours and doing ridiculous amounts of work.
It was an unwritten rule that a new hire must love his job. Colleagues expected no less because they relied on new hire exuberance to help them cope with their old-timers’ ennui. A new hire reminded veterans how they felt once upon a time when their positions meant change, novelty, a paycheck—before redundancy and boredom set in.
However, Dane’s current euphoria exceeded his norm. This job triggered a mythic hallucination. He believed his hire was due to providence, that he was The Chosen One, whose portfolio bedazzled all who beheld it.
On his second day at Georgian Shield-New York, a courier dropped Dane’s luminous portfolio on his desk, warped and discolored with an irremovable label. Dane’s sacred book had suffered water damage in the Georgian Shield mailing room in the long months of deliberation before his ultimate hire.
This sign might have returned Dane to earth—if he had wished to go there—but he saw Georgian Shield as a promised land for advancement. In other agencies there were talent vacuums to fill but peers and overseers were always present with knives aimed at his back. In Georgian Shield-New York, Dane was apparently autonomous and unchallenged; his supervisors were across the border and he was their man in America.
At last, Dane had a clear shot at making his mark on advertising.
8. PARTNERS
In keeping with Georgian Shield’s tradition of creative teams, Dane was paired with Ron, a handsome, but diffident young art director. Ron holed up in his dark office with blinds drawn and talked to no one but his girlfriend, who phoned him incessantly with problems related to female ailments and their miniature dog.
Ron’s low profile was a personality trait and career strategy. He had studied advertising at a special graduate school before enduring lean times in New York. Having never experienced the conservative redundancy of pharmaceutical advertising, Ron was eager to learn for the sake of some security.
Dane often sat in Ron’s office to develop rapport. “Relationships matter!” he repeated to himself. If Georgian Shield believed in partnerships, Dane resolved to be the best partner ever.
Ron was an advocate of spiritual and physical cleansing, exotic spas and therapies. He was a fitness fanatic, who took vitamins, drank bottled water, and had toxins removed from his body by submerging his feet in ionized water.
One Monday, Ron came to work exhausted. He had spent Sunday from dawn to dusk learning spiritual techniques, like turning his inner eye on his internal organs. In this workshop Ron learned to read the minds of things, which were inanimate but not stupid.
“If things have feelings,” Dane remarked, “floors must be bitter because we walk all over them.”
“You’re laughing now,” Ron replied as he stared at his screen. “But things get the last laugh. Do you know why they break? Because they know we’re just using them.”
Dane thought Ron was either insane or a brilliant politician. This outburst of “Panthingism” could be Ron’s way of warning Dane not to demean him. Dane made a note to himself, “Treat Ron like a human being.”
That afternoon Ron’s computer crashed. Yet his faith in the consciousness of things never wavered. When Dane barged into Ron’s office the next morning, he found the young art director hugging his motherboard with his eyes shut. Only when the IT guy came later that day with a new cord did Ron leave his office.
While Ron’s girlfriend nurtured his spiritual and physical needs, a retail department store executive gave him career guidance. On tennis courts and in hot tubs his mentor tutored him on “how to work the work environment.” These tutorials were paying off. Dane noted how his partner’s voice quavered with reverence when he received a call from a supervisor. “He’s really good,” Dane thought.
Dane perceived early on that he and Ron were treated differently. Dane agonized through multiple interviews and weeks of job limbo, while Ron was hired fast and paid to do nothing for months. A week after Dane started, Ron went on a two-week vacation during which he and his fiancée wallowed at a healing mud spa while Dane waded through a morass of tiresome projects.
A man less paranoid than Dane could have easily inferred that Ron was more highly valued than he was.
However, seven years of advertising experience had taught Dane that it was premature to resent a new partner after a few weeks. He speculated that Ron was doubtless an amazing art director despite his inexperience, and had hidden qualities, besides. He was right.
When Nigel came to town, he invited Dane, Ron, Juan and Jeremi to dinner. At midnight, they emerged from the restaurant in a driving rain. Everyone looked for cover or a cab except Ron, who got drenched by dashing across the street to buy Nigel an umbrella so the creative
director would stay dry while walking several feet to his hotel.
Even Nigel smiled with embarrassment at Ron’s obsequious kindness. “What can I say?” he asked.
Servility was Ron’s special power. Dane acknowledged that he could not compete with his partner in fawning and groveling and it would be unseemly to try. He also knew he would need to forget Ron’s kiss-ass brown-nosing or he would be unable to respect or work with him.
The hitch was that Dane was cursed with a superb memory. The more he tried to forget Ron’s sycophancy, the worse it plagued him. The mental acrobatics he needed to perform this feat depleted his new hire euphoria and forced him to reevaluate the heroic myth of his hiring. Perhaps, the Canadians had waited so long to hire a copywriter that Dane was handed the job by default.
Dane found himself again in an agency where he would be underestimated and undervalued, which translated into working harder and longer hours. Yet his inspiration was so high and his ambition so sensitized, that he viewed his undervaluation as a gift—a motivational power tool. He knew more than his supervisors about what needed to be done. If he was the only one who knew how good he was, he would disarm his detractors.
9. HEALING: THE PATH TO DOMINATION
Dane’s account, Grovil, was the major piece of business in Georgian Shield’s New York office. Grovil was an ointment containing a laboratory cloned growth factor that promoted tissue growth in diabetic foot wounds. Dane spent long hours reading about the disease, the drug and how to induce medical insurers to pay for it despite its steep cost.
First, he immersed himself in the story of diabetes and its impact.
Twenty million Americans had diabetes and many diabetics had foot ulcers that did not heal. These wounds often went untreated, even unnoticed, because diabetes caused neuropathy—nerve damage. Since healing was compromised, diabetic foot ulcers often were badly infected. Infection spread and tissue died. At that point, a surgeon had to debride—cut away—the gangrene and the open wound was wrapped in moist dressings until it healed. However, once infection invaded bone, amputation was often the only option.
Along with their other contributions, the ancient Egyptians were great innovators in wound care. They gave dry and moist bandaging to the world and were the first to apply salves to wounds. Egyptian wound care, with refinements, remained the first line of treatment for diabetic foot wounds.
Grovil was a major breakthrough. By cloning growth factors, Grovil stimulated the regeneration of healthy tissue. In clinical trials Grovil was proven to accelerate wound healing when compared to conventional wound management.
However, Grovil cost several hundred dollars for a small tube and doctors were reluctant to prescribe it. Most diabetes patients could not afford Grovil out of pocket, and insurance companies would do almost anything to avoid paying for it. After three years on the market, Grovil had barely scratched the wound-treatment market with twenty million dollars in sales. At this rate, Grovil would never be profitable or recoup the drug company’s significant investment. It needed to be re-launched, remarketed and reintroduced to resistant physicians.
Dane’s first assignment was to write a brochure to explain to doctors how to prescribe Grovil to their patients while inducing insurance companies to pay for it without fraud.
His second project was a series of mood boards. Mood boards were a research tool to assess which message and tone would be most compelling to patients and physicians. Each mood board was a poster conveying a theme supported by icons and phrases. The five Grovil mood boards had five themes, selected by the client and account team according to marketing objectives and audience insights. The themes were “high science,” “medical emergency,” “speed of action,” “drug as hero” and “peer approved.” Each concept addressed a product benefit or a medical issue linked with Grovil.
After a week of perfecting headlines and subheads and shuffling icons, Dane, Sally and the clients tested the mood boards at a research facility. The theme that resonated best with the greater number of physicians and patients would become the re-launch campaign theme.
10. RESEARCH, REVELATION, REJECTION
At research, Dane finally met the account director, Sally Takamitsu in person. Sally draped her body, arms and hands on anyone whom she wished to persuade of anything. The most frequent recipient of her soft-skinned attention was the Grovil marketing director, a conservative family man who responded to her unsolicited heat with crisp resistance.
Doctors and patients, fifteen total subjects, reviewed the five mood boards. One diabetes patient was an affable, obese man. He knew he damaged his health but he could not help himself. He would eat a healthy salmon dinner at home, only to sneak away to his friend’s house and put away several large cheeseburgers. His diabetes was uncontrolled and he had foot ulcers.
“So what would you say was your favorite mood board?” the moderator-psychologist asked him.
“They’re all awesome,” the diabetic glutton gushed. “Can I take those M&Ms?”
“Sure, help yourself.”
The diabetic man submerged his fist in the candy dish, filled his hand with M&M’s and slammed them in his mouth. He sloshed them around between inflated cheeks, swallowed and reached for more candies.
“But which was your favorite concept?” the moderator asked.
“It’s so hard. They were all really good,” the diabetic said. He shoveled deep handfuls of M&Ms into his mouth, chomped twice and swallowed.
“Try to tell me. Did you like the medical emergency?” the moderator asked.
“Oh yeah. Can I have a Coke?” the diabetic asked.
“Sure,” the moderator handed a Coke can to the diabetic, who flipped the top and downed its contents in a fluid motion.
“So can you tell me why you like the medical emergency concept?” the moderator asked.
“‘Cause my life is one big, fat medical emergency. Ha! Ha!” the uncontrolled diabetic said as he belched the carbonation.
Behind the two-way mirror, Sally gave high-fives and thumbs up to everyone. “I told you medical emergency was the ticket!”
Then the interview took a turn. The diabetic sat back in his chair, his eyes glazed and his mouth agape. He did not look well.
“So what do you think of this message?” the moderator asked in his soft, officious voice. No answer. “What do you think of this mood board?”
The diabetic man’s mouth went slack; eyelids drooping, his eyes rolled back. He keeled over on the chair, coughed and spewed a geyser of vomit.
“Are you all right?” the moderator asked the sick man in the same bland, middle register. Then he broke professional character and spoke to the two-way mirror. “We need an ambulance and a mop.”
They changed interview rooms. Doctors came in the afternoon. They were not golf-playing demigods of popular stereotype but hardworking, weary men, beleaguered by teeming caseloads of hopeless patients. These physicians sighed when asked to comment on the mood boards as if they were being asked to take a test for which they had not studied.
“Doctor, do you agree that diabetic foot ulcers are a medical emergency?”
“Nah! Diabetic foot ulcers can go on for years, usually do,” one doctor replied. “I know—the drug company’s going to try to take away my license for saying that diabetic foot ulcers aren’t as serious as cancer or stroke. Even if diabetic foot ulcer were as serious as the plague, I’d need data to believe ‘Grovil reduces the risk of amputation.’”
Another doctor sorted through the mood boards like he was tossing bad cards. He smirked and chuckled.
“Doctor, what do you think of medical emergency?” the psychologist-moderator, a vulture for responses, asked.
“It’s wonderful. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?” the doctor stared at the two-way mirror, where he suspected the drug company people were watching him.
“We want you to tell us what you think,” the moderator insisted.
“What I think?” the doctor mimicked and
smirked. “Okay. The drug company would probably accuse me of malpractice for not using Grovil early in the healing process, but my patients can’t even afford the co-pay for Grovil if the health plan approves it.”
“Doctor, do you think your patients would benefit from Grovil?”
“Maybe, but my patients can’t even read their prescription bottles! I had a patient bite into a hemorrhoid suppository! Now that’s a medical emergency!”
“Doctor, does Grovil sound like an effective therapy?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s wonderful.” The doctor said, waving at the two way mirror where the Grovil team watched. “You hear me? I said your product is terrific! But it’s too damned expensive!”
The doctor turned to the moderator. “Have I been helpful?”
One by one, every doctor reiterated the financial issue with Grovil.
After three days of research no theme was a clear winner. The team convened to discuss their learnings.
“Maybe, we should consider the economic angle as a concept,” Dane said.
“Cost isn’t urgent or sexy,” Sally said. “And it’s incredibly boring!”
“Are diabetic foot ulcers sexy in any way?” Dane asked. “Cost is the major barrier and we don’t have one message to address it.”
“It’s a good point,” the Grovil marketing director agreed. “But the price isn’t coming down.”
Sally had quickly worked herself into high dudgeon.
“Well, I think it’s so outrageous and out of line for a copywriter to try to direct strategy. This is my job. Time and again the most powerful message has proven without a doot to be medical emergency. Amputation grabs people’s attention. If doctors and patients see how close diabetic foot ulcers are to amputation, cost will be swept aside!”
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