“You can’t be. What’s worse than toxic?”
“My body is a hazardous waste site.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My doctors wear hazmat suits.”
“It’s probably the latest style in hospital wear.”
“No. I’m really sick. I got ionized water therapy from one of the four leading therapists in the world. The water went from yellow to red to brown to black…in 30 seconds. My kidneys, bladder and prostate are all a mess. I’m 30 years old! Then the liver toxins started coming out—brown and disgusting. After that, white foam bubbled up. It was my lymphatic system. My immunity is so wiped out that my body is defenseless. Then I saw the red flecks. That’s serious blood damage.”
“There’s no such thing as blood damage.”
“I had black flecks, Dane. Black flecks. Heavy metal in my body…”
“Ron, you’re healthy,” Dane said, as if the truth could waltz in at any time and defeat all the lies.
Ron whimpered.
“You got rid of them, right?” Dane asked.
“No! The therapist said in her six months of practice, she never saw anything like it. I was like radioactive. She gave me another treatment. The water went from yellow to orange to green to brown to black in twenty seconds. My gall bladder’s leaking. My joint cartilage is jelly. She ionized me four times and the water always turned black in thirty seconds or less.”
“So does this mean you’re not coming back?”
“I may not be around long enough to come back. Maybe I can art direct in a less stressful place…like the Amazon.”
“You think there’s IT support in the rain forest?”
“I don’t know. Bye, Dane.”
Dane’s crisis of conscience was replaced by relief. He had experienced intense guilt for making Ron believe he was ill, but now that Ron really was ill, Dane was no longer culpable. In fact, making Ron think he was sick might have saved his life.
Case 6-E
A FRESH BREATH OF ASTHMA
26. BACCUS BECOMES CASSANDRA
When Grovil’s accountants reported that Sally and the marketing director had spent 25% of the re-launch budget on first-class airfares, four star hotels, and world-class spas in American cities and the Yucatan, the budget was frozen and projects were put on hold. Only when the first wave of Pepperoni foot ads appeared in every endocrine publication in the world did the extent of the misappropriation became fully known. The Grovil re-launch, whose brand character was a wrinkled foot with a fake ulcer, was a corporate embarrassment. The brand’s reputation was so badly harmed that it was said that even Grovil could not promote its healing.
Fortunately, Georgian Shield New York hardly missed a breath because the parent agency handed it a major piece of business—an asthma medication. Aleige, an expensive and powerful new biologic drug, mitigated the severity of asthma attacks by reducing the amount of allergy-producing IgE antibodies in the body. When Dane heard Aleige would be handled by Georgian Shield, he believed an advertising god had put him in the cross-hairs of magnificent fortune. He already had extensive experience with this drug. After Green Advertising he had worked briefly at an agency that launched Aleige and he knew a good deal about this drug and about allergic asthma.
Dane barraged Nigel with phone calls and emails, pleading to be assigned to the Aleige team. He tried to convey his knowledge and enthusiasm to everyone concerned and even to those who could have cared less. For weeks he received no response.
Finally, the Aleige campaign started and Dane was allowed to participate.
“Before we start, I need you to understand something incredibly important, ay?” Nigel told the multinational team. “It’s actually my favorite acronym yet: BYAO, which is short for Bill your asses off! If you even think about the product, bill it. If you take a dump, bill it.”
“All right!” the Georgian Shield creative department shouted in unison.
After a few torrid days of creative fervor, Nigel papered the conference room walls with a vast number of concepts. At the creative review, he dashed from corner to corner, tearing concepts from the walls. He balled them up, mashed them into pucks and smacked them with a toy hockey stick he had brought for the occasion. Nigel shouted, “He shoots!!” When he hit someone, he added, “—he scores!” Those concepts Nigel liked he scribbled over with headlines of his own. Dane had a Canadian déjà vu of a Madison Avenue cocktail. It required every milligram of his maturity not to bolt from the room.
During the second intermission of Nigel’s hockey-style creative review, Dane said, “I could really use a Molson!”
A few concepts escaped Nigel’s unique abuse. He liked one that showed a man on a deck chair on an iceberg; the line read, “This way or the Aleige way.” He also gushed over allergy sufferers snuggling with allergic triggers, including cats and mold spores, with the headline, “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” However, the big winner was “Zap the Triggers,” in which allergens like cats, dogs, mites, dust and a woman with a tennis racket were in balloons to be zapped by a pop gun in the lower left hand corner.
“You can’t say Zap the triggers,” Dane pointed out.
“Can’t say it? Oh yes I can! Zap the triggers! Pow. Zap the triggers!” Nigel cried out. He removed a concealed squirt gun from his pocket and aimed it at Dane’s temple, then pulled the trigger. Water ran down the side of Dane’s face.
“See, I said it and did it. Zap the trigger!”
“Shooting squirt guns at people, wow, that’s real mature,” Jeremi, the copy supervisor from Muskatoon, Manitoba said, “Where can I get one?”
From across the room, Nigel threw an open magic marker at Dane but missed, hitting Dottie Wacker in the face and leaving a smudge on her forehead. Dottie, always a sport, said, “I never went to church for Ash Wednesday so this works for me.”
“You can’t say Zap the triggers! because it’s inaccurate,” Dane explained. “Aleige doesn’t eliminate allergic triggers or prevent allergies. It intercepts IgE antibodies in the blood stream before they can land on mast cells and trigger the release of inflammatory agents. By reducing the number of IgE antibodies that can link with receptors, Aleige helps to reduce the severity of asthma attacks. It’s like reducing the number of enemy paratroopers in a battle by shooting them out of the sky.”
Dane liked the paratrooper analogy but Nigel looked at him with his mouth agape. The room was silent.
“That is so fucking b-o-o-o-o-ring!” Nigel said. “Is everybody as bored as I am? Can I have a show of hands of people who lost their pulse during Dane’s explanation?”
Everyone in the room raised their hands. Dane lifted his hand to make it unanimous and prove he was a team player.
“People will prefer asthma to your message, ay? Your high science explanation won’t sell one little shot of Aleige,” Nigel said.
“But yours won’t sell any either because the FDA won’t let you say it,” Dane said.
“Oh, they won’t, won’t they?” Nigel set his jaw indignantly before stepping back and clearing his throat. “I’ll tell you something, Dane,” he resumed in the same rasping hush he saved for his reading of the Night before Christmas at the annual holiday party. “We don’t have to be so goddamn literal. Zap the triggers! will do nicely in research.”
“People may like Zap the triggers! because they understand it but what they understand is misleading and incorrect.”
Dane’s protest provoked Nigel to go on a personal creative rampage. By the next day, he had an entire studio executing concepts, which ranged from a dust mite made of glass crystal to a photograph of barbed wire with the headline Allergies Achtung! presumably to target Nazi sympathizing asthma sufferers.
Dane viewed these concepts as creative mass-suicide. Nigel continued to misstate the drug’s mode of action, to be clever at all costs, and Dane warned him of the consequences. Dane spoke truthfully, though not for heroic reasons. He deployed truth as a weapon of reverse psychol
ogy. He knew no one would listen to him, least of all Nigel. The more honestly he spoke, the more likely the creative director would do the self-destructive opposite.
“With all due respect to the Georgian Shield way,” Dane said with quiet rectitude, “if you pick Zap the triggers! the FDA will force you to withdraw the advertising. I’ve seen it happen and it can be devastating.”
The room was quiet again. Nigel stared at Dane.
“That will never happen. I will not that happen,” Nigel said.
27. KEN OF THE SPIRITS
Nigel presented Zap the triggers! with the agency’s recommendation and nearly lost the account. He came to New York and summoned Dane.
“Partnerships are mysterious,” Nigel said. “I have put two people together and it was unstoppable. Other partnerships don’t work. I’m splitting up you and Ron. He’ll work from a spa with a new writer on new business and you’ll be paired with Ken Blair.”
Ken was Nigel’s American friend. He was a short, quiet man with a red nose, matching red cheeks and blue eyes. He hailed from a great lakes town in Minnesota, where his mother and father, show business folk, had retired. When the flu hit Georgian Shield New York, Ken recounted that people in his hometown rarely called doctors or bought medicine. When they fell ill, they went to the liquor store. Ken was still compliant with this treatment plan—especially when he was healthy. It was Ken’s gift to make all he did and said seem wholesome and good—including his love of alcohol. He had discovered the essence of great advertising.
Ken was once a creative director at consumer agencies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York. Now he toiled in the studio on tedious brochures, fixing type, correcting typos, spending twice as long on such tasks as younger colleagues. However, time was unimportant to Ken. He had no children or family. On rainy weekends, he took long walks searching for old haunts—a cigar shop in Chelsea where they once rolled cigars, a Flatiron hat shop where they once sold derbies, and an apothecary where he once bought Horehound cough drops to soothe his throat after cigars.
Dane knew Ken’s partnership was another of Nigel’s punishments, but he resolved to like Ken to spite Nigel. When he noticed Ken had a spaced out gaze, he assumed his new partner was a profound thinker—or having a blackout. Dane appreciated that Ken discussed advertising thoughtfully—in terms of message, words and signs—but he also knew about Ken’s relationship with Nigel and suspected him of spying.
28. PRESENT & RESENT
One afternoon, the Aleige team drove out to the client corporate campus in New Jersey to present work: a patient brochure written by Dottie and a testimonial brochure Dane wrote about allergy sufferers who found relief with Aleige.
Dottie was also in the presentation because Nigel put her there. After her romantic meltdown she was reinstated as Dane’s #1 challenger, as Nigel continued to undermine his position. At the multinational creative briefing, which he conducted over a telephone, Nigel divided the work among all of his creatives. He singled out Dottie, “You’re doing the patient brochure, ay?”
“Ay okay, Nigel. You the man,” Dottie replied.
“Neat. And we need it next week, so can you work over the holiday weekend?”
“No problemo, Nigel.”
This association between Nigel Hogbine’s flabby ass and Dottie’s puckered lips enraged Dane. He wished to reach into the phone line and rip out Nigel’s windpipe. Patient brochures were Dane’s specialty. He was a recognized master of the fourth grade reading level and could transform it into fierce poetry. But Nigel Hogbine was vindictive and ruthless. He acknowledged Dane’s dual mastery of primary school rhetoric and the allergic cascade by assigning the brochures to frowsy, feckless Dottie, who would be poaching Dane’s assignments in perpetuity due to her amazing adaptation—a willingness to bend over and be impaled by Nigel’s demands.
En route to the drug company’s secluded corporate campus, Dane had a quasi-allergic flare up triggered by Dottie’s presence. As the only writer in the agency who understood Aleige and asthma, he viewed Dottie as extraneous; he alone should present work to the client. Dottie, meanwhile, saw herself as an associate creative director of copy, fueling Dane’s animosity. As he drove the car, he studied Dottie in his rear-view. Her blond, troll hair was washed and she wore a business suit and pumps instead of her trademark sweats. Her distended belly hiked Dottie’s skirt up to her solar plexus and she looked like a wayward, middle-aged parochial school girl. Yet, in her own eyes, Dottie was Dane’s buttoned-down boss presenting to her client.
Dane was the first to present. He told the client, a pretty woman, seven months pregnant, that he believed his testimonial book, based on real patient transcripts, would be the most important selling piece for Aleige. It would persuade doctors and patients in a manner that ads and commercials never could. Each of the patients in the book was an ordinary person with asthma: a black mother of four, who nearly died in pollen-rich South Carolina, before she found a prison job in Arizona and asthma relief with Aleige; a private school boy who nearly died from asthma but now played ice hockey after taking Aleige; a stock broker, with two inhalers on her desk, who nearly died of asthma on her brownstone stairs before she found Aleige; and the extraordinary case of Oscar Simono, MD, an allergist who spent his childhood breathing into paper bags and whose face swelled to watermelon size when he put a banana to his nose—until he found Aleige. Dane assured the client that this testimonial brochure would be an asthmatic’s classic, to be read from one exacerbation to the next and passed from generation to generation like a volume of fairy tales with an inspiring message of hope provided by Aleige.
The client was transfixed by Dane’s enthusiasm. Pharmaceutical executives usually loved their product. If you loved their product, they loved you, too. The pregnant client told Dane she was impressed with his vision and eager to see his next draft.
Dottie was up next. She presented her patient brochure in a nasal voice. Her words stuck in her mouth like peanut butter. The pregnant client stared with revulsion at Dottie’s distended belly. She seemed appalled by this feature. She may have believed Dottie was a pregnant imposter stuffing a pillow in her blouse to win points with her or to make a joke in poor taste about pregnancy.
For once, Dane observed a personality clash that did not involve him. It felt great. Dane watched the female marketing director’s loathing of Dottie gather force. He saw what it looked like when someone could not stand to be in a room with you. The client glared at Dottie, propped her chin under her palm, glanced at her watch with rising frequency, realized she was late for something, and cut Dottie off in mid-sentence. Dottie had a high tolerance for abuse. She said it was no big deal.
Despite her brave disclaimer, Dottie’s Silly Putty ego was flattened and disfigured. Dane sympathized with her, yet also felt vindicated. Finally, someone confirmed his impression that “the other guy” was incompetent. He hoped Dottie would give up or get fired and leave the field to him. She was another human being trying to make a living but she had been threatening his living for nearly a year—and he wanted her gone.
29. CIRCLE OF TRUTH
When the group returned to the office, news of their success had preceded them and there were congratulations all around. Dane was surprised by the glory. It was as if the agency was overjoyed that the client actually liked something they were doing.
Dane had client love and understood its power in advertising. He finally appreciated why an account guy had his client’s dead father’s golf shoes enshrined in a display case.
He also sensed that this was the right moment to ask for a raise.
His annual “Circle of Truth” review was imminent though nobody mentioned it. Did his supervisors think of firing him? Or did Georgian Shield, ordinarily fastidious about procedures, forget about this one because it might result in spending more money?
After he had called human resources and left Nigel numerous messages, receiving no response, Nigel acquiesced to reviewing
Dane.
It was a cold, rainy day in June when Nigel descended on the New York office. That afternoon he called Dane into a conference room and set up a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide showed a circle with people inside it. Then the people were outside the circle and a question mark was inside. Nigel narrated the slide presentation in a deep, cavernous voice, as if it were a public television documentary.
“We have a procedure for finding out how we’re doing at Georgian Shields—the Circle of Truth. Each employee is evaluated by peers, supervisors and underlings. We call it a circle because a circle has no sides and only one center. All viewpoints are equal and important. You have worked with many people and each one has a unique perspective on you. Together they tell us who you are as an employee, a colleague and a professional.”
Nigel cleared his throat. “And now we come to you, Dane Bacchus. This is your circle of truth.”
Click. A slide showing Dane’s ID photograph, read:
“It was an interesting year for Dane Bacchus. There was the Grovil launch. The Aleige testimonial brochure. Miscellaneous projects. Click. Another slide. The word “Problem” had red licks of fire sprouting from it.
“But we have a problem!” Nigel said. He did not click to the next slide. He wanted Dane to linger on the mysterious problem.
“Problem? My work is the one thing our client likes, so you guys have the problem.”
Nigel stepped back and clicked. The slide had several words with checks next to them: Quality of Work, check. Creativity, check. Client relations, check. Productivity, check. Responsibility, check.
“Yes, your work is top drawer,” Nigel said. “But your colleagues say…”
Click.
“Dane is stubborn!”
“That’s good, right?” Dane exclaimed. “Nigel, you said you’re stubborn.”
“True, but I’m stubborn like titanium. You’re stubborn like pig iron.”
“I am not pig iron! I am enriched uranium.”
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