Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  “No, Dane. You are degraded plutonium!”

  “Okay. Just to show I’m a team player, I’ll agree that I’m degraded plutonium. But I still deserve a raise.”

  “Dane, your insight and knowledge are besmirched by your stubbornness. So what can we do?”

  Click. The word “CHANGE” filled the slide.

  “Dane, you must change, ay!” Nigel said.

  “But how can I? If I weren’t stubborn I wouldn’t be successful.”

  “I’m sawry, Dane. I can’t recommend a raise to someone perceived as stubborn. It’s just not how things are done, ay.”

  Clearly they were going in “Circles of Truth.”

  Nigel smiled with twinkle-eyed intransigence.

  “I will review you in six months. If things change we will talk aboot a raise.”

  Dane went to his special place, the Adelson rest room, for quiet time. He felt betrayed by Georgian Shields. He had miscalculated again. He thought personality was irrelevant in advertising, that being good was what mattered. Wrong! The churlish copywriter at The Institute of Design orientation, who scratched his gonads and worked at the best agencies, must have been the lucky exception.

  Dane’s only consolation was the law of advertising averages. Good and bad news took turns. If things were going your way they would soon go against you, and vice versa.

  30. DOTTIE GOES BATTY

  The good news was waiting in Dane’s office when he returned. The client left a voice mail with her congratulations: the senior vice presidents in the respiratory division loved his Aleige testimonial brochure. Now the Aleige product brochure job folder, Dottie’s baby, sat on his desk. An account massacre had just occurred. The pregnant client phoned Toronto and threatened to fire the agency if Dottie was not removed from the account. Dane was asked to take over her project.

  Dane’s rival was finally eliminated. The runner-up, the “other guy,” no longer shared his job.

  Dottie had not yet been notified of her dismissal because no one knew how she would react. People were comfortable with abusing her by assigning her massive quantities of work to be done in inadequate amounts of time, but they had no idea of what to expect if they took work away from her. She was a job-junkie with a limitless craving for vile assignments and the concomitant adrenaline rush. Sudden drudgery-deprivation might result in severe work-withdrawal, which could be difficult to watch.

  Reasons for their circumspection were soon confirmed. Dottie dashed frantically from office to office, checking everywhere and with everyone for the job folder on which her life, livelihood and identity depended.

  “Have you seen my patient brochure?” Dottie asked as she lifted herself on tip toes to identify the code numbers on the folder occupying his desktop. Dane did not answer.

  “That’s my job folder! What is the patient brochure doing here? Are you working on it?” she demanded.

  “They want me to be familiar with it since it’s going into research on Monday,” Dane replied.

  “They gave you my patient brochure?” Dottie asked. Her large eyes squinted and widened, flexing to resist tears.

  “Yes.”

  Dottie looked sad and resigned—normal vital signs. Otherwise, she appeared to take her demotion well. Yet, just beneath her composure, Dane sensed injury and indignation about to erupt.

  Suddenly, Dottie burst across the room and reached over his desk. Her fingers clawed for the folder. In the split second of her assault, Dane hoisted the folder and used it as a shield, but she grasped its edges, tugged hard and tore it apart at the seams. Twenty-five drafts of manuscript spilled from the folder as Dottie wrestled with Dane for the dismembered plastic covers.

  “Get off of my folder! Get off!”

  Ken entered the office.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Dottie’s having trouble letting go,” Dane gasped. The entire staff stood outside, straining to see the action from the half-open doorway.

  Flailing with nails slashing, Dottie tore at Dane’s face and shirt. When he released his half of the tattered plastic folder, she held it to her bosom, closed her eyes and let tears flow.

  “My patient brochure,” she whispered. “The job folder is empty. Where are the back-up rounds? How will I know the changes? Where is my brochure? My brochure?” she whimpered.

  “Look on the floor,” Dane said.

  When Dottie realized her job folder was ripped apart and its contents were strewn about her feet, she collapsed in sobs on her 25 drafts. “He took my patient brochure! My patient brochure.”

  “What happened?” Rupert McTavish, the office head, asked.

  “Dottie didn’t want to let go of the brochure,” Dane said.

  “Can you blame her?” Rupert asked reprovingly. He regarded Dane like he was the cad who seduced the pregnant client into hating Dottie.

  “It’s business,” Dane said. “The client requested the change.”

  “Right. And you care about the client!” Rupert said.

  “Don’t you?” Dane asked.

  That afternoon, the staff catered to Dottie’s nervous breakdown. They gave her sips of ginger ale and Thai left-overs from a client luncheon. It was like her birthday. Dane ruminated on the unfairness. If he had thrown a fit—come to think of it, he had—he would have been escorted out and terminated. Yet, after Dottie’s violent fit, people still viewed him as the transgressor. Dane, meanwhile, felt no responsibility or remorse for Dottie’s situation. He was the staff writer. He was hired first; Dottie came later. Prior to this patient brochure, she had done all of the taking. When she regained her composure, Nigel would find her something else to do.

  During the next few days, Dottie occasionally conferred with Dane about a project, pretending nothing had happened. With each visit she was more agitated, going from sighs to pants to raising her voice. With Ken watching intently from his desk across the room, Dane responded carefully to Dottie’s outbursts. He had to treat her kindly like she was an addict in work withdrawal. Soon she burst into his office with a layout, crying, “If you’re making the changes, make them all!” Dane and Ken looked at one another, wondering if she would explode again more violently than before.

  “I can’t work this way!” she cried.

  There it was, like an exposed, beating heart, the ego Dottie pretended did not exist. Dane felt like a detective with a confirmed hunch. Dottie’s flash of ego revealed who she was behind her, “Aw shucks, walk all over me!” façade. Her obsequious flexibility was her aid to survival, how she managed to get work away from him. By revealing it, she conceded the fight was over.

  Case 6-F

  COMING TOGETHER & APART

  31. A VISIONARY MOMENT

  The next week Dane escaped the recycled air of the office to spend two days with the clients, changing and testing the patient brochure. He drove alone to the same New Jersey town where he had been a professor for ten years.

  The meeting was in a luxury hotel complex near the interstate highway. A cadre of twenty top research and product management professionals assembled in a plush meeting room. A laptop on one long table projected manuscript pages on a screen. Key decisionmakers suggested changes to the prose pell-mell but nobody led the discussion or transcribed changes on screen.

  “Someone needs to input the changes,” the product manager said.

  “I’m the copywriter in residence. I will be your scribe.” Dane said.

  The room filled with laughter.

  Dane felt at ease. As the Aleige people called out alternatives to sentences, Dane key stroked the changes and asked, “Is this what you want to say? Or how about this?” He changed the order, moved clauses and asked for comments and suggestions. The participants chattered, offered opinions, argued and came to consensus.

  Years earlier Dane had taught remedial students how to write in computer labs. He strode from student to student, screen to screen, helping them to develop ideas and to write and organize sentences and paragraphs for optimal impact. No
w he performed the same function for an older student body—with a significant difference. His college students rarely enjoyed composition, whereas Aleige team reveled in it.

  During breaks, drug company people treated Dane like an esteemed colleague, which felt good but very strange to him. For years, clients had seemed like implacable monsters, always demanding more work and later hours. For once, he met them as people.

  He talked with Carla, from regulatory, who turned two-hour copy reviews into all-afternoon marathons by demanding that obvious statements be explained—and often deleted. Carla had her reasons for making everyone miserable. When she was a pharmacist, a customer came in with gunk on her teeth. She begged Carla for something to remove it. The woman showed her the box the gunk came from—it was a hemorrhoid drug. The woman had followed instructions by breaking the capsule before inserting it, only to insert it in the wrong end.

  “That’s why copy has to be idiot proof,” Carla concluded.

  A voice cried out, “Look, it’s Dr. Simono!”

  Dr. Oscar Simono, a hero of Dane’s testimonial book, entered the room to comment on the product brochure. Dr. Simono was a paid consultant and his response would not be in the research report. Still, he was an asthma expert who had self-injected Aleige for years.

  “Maybe he’ll do his trick!” someone exclaimed.

  Dr. Simono was highly allergic. Touching a banana skin or inhaling the scent of a strawberry swelled his face to twice its size. He casually peeled a banana and chomped.

  “This banana was like a loaded gun but now it’s just a banana. Thanks to Aleige. Say, you should use that as body copy,” Dr. Simono said. The executives gave Dr. Simono a standing ovation. He was a genius.

  Suddenly, Dr. Simono staggered backward, panted and gripped his chest. Before the respiratory brain trust’s astonished eyes, his face grew red and large like a balloon filling with water.

  “What’s wrong? Call a doctor!”

  The heady ambience trembled with apprehension. How could this happen? The attendees believed they were witnessing the death of Dr. Simono, their beloved advocate, and a public relations debacle. Did they need to report this to the FDA? Why did Dr. Simono insist on daredevil stunts? Did he think he was the Knievel of Allergies?

  An allergist, waiting to be called in to give his opinions on the patient brochure, revived Dr. Simono with a shot of Benadryl. Dr. Simono would live on to perform more death-defying fruit stunts. But what caused his collapse? Dr. Simono admitted that he had not taken his Aleige for three weeks. He ate the potentially deadly banana to test how long a dose of Aleige remained effective.

  The spectacle of life and death was not disruptive. It stimulated a burst of creativity from the group.

  Page by page, Dane orchestrated the complete rewriting of Dottie’s brochure, which had taken her a month to write. He was like a maestro using an orchestra of creativity-starved business people to write a twenty page brochure. After ten hours, the drug company cohort was exhausted but in good spirits and ready to go home.

  During the process, Dane realized that his peak advertising experiences happened when people created together. The usual agency-client relationship—one party submitting, the other receiving—was adversarial. Work went back and forth like a tennis ball, and projects were completed only when both players were sick of the game. When agency and client collaborated like partners and shared the project, revisions and approval were simple.

  “This was great,” he told the drug company executives when the brochure was completed. “We wrote this together. Now we know it’s right and we can sign off. This is how all work should be done. Together.”

  They raised their soda cans and plastic coffee cups and toasted, “To the future of advertising!” then applauded, before breaking out for the night.

  32. OLD SCHOOL DETENTION

  The next morning Ken came to the facility to present new work with Dane. They started late. Dane explained a piece and read the headline. Then he described the photograph as it related to the copy.

  “I’ll do the art!” Ken blurted.

  “Oh, okay,” Dane said.

  Ken spoke quickly and softly.

  “We selected PMS 450 because that is your primary color and we thought it breathed well, as opposed to the target audience. Heh! Heh! Then we chose elegant type because the product offers high end relief…and…the subjects are shot in soft focus…” Ken went on to explain the colors, design elements and photograph without vocal expression or eye contact. When he was done, his hand was across his chest, his face was crimson, and he was gasping for air.

  “It looks like you’ve got another Aleige patient,” Dane cracked.

  The client laughed. Ken’s eyes widened as he sucked in enough air to come out of his panic zone.

  When their presentation was over, Dane and the client moved on to the brochure revision session but Ken waved at Dane to come back. He seemed to need help standing up.

  “You stepped on my lines,” Ken said.

  “I did? Not intentionally.”

  “You explained the photograph. We’ve talked about this.”

  “I mentioned it to explain the relevance of the copy,” Dane said.

  “You’re not supposed to describe visual content. You’re supposed to read the copy.”

  “Clients don’t need me to read copy, Ken. They know how to read.”

  “The photograph is part of art. That’s my domain,” Ken insisted.

  “Your domain, my domain. We shouldn’t see it that way, Ken. We work together. You can read the copy and I can discuss the art. It’s the same concept.”

  “You laughed at me,” Ken said.

  “You had us worried there so I tried to lighten the mood. If the clients laugh, they’ll keep us,” Dane reassured his partner. He was still imbued with his revelation of the previous evening—creative unity—everyone working together.

  But Ken did not share his experience.

  “I need to be assertive. I have to do this,” Ken gasped.

  33. BUTT WHAT?

  The two-day client contact gave Dane confidence but he could not shake his discontent.

  The office he shared with Ken was like a cell. Their desks faced one another and every time Dane looked up, Ken was there. Ken tried to be gracious. That was the problem. Dane felt Ken trying. Ken resented Dane’s phone conversations with Becky. He left the room or his red round face puckered in strenuous efforts to concentrate. When Dane said he was sorry, Ken replied, “Not at all” without meaning it.

  People were nervous. The Aleige account was now a skeleton with only a few projects left on the bones. Dane and Ken stayed busy creating kits and newsletters. On morning, they presented the latest work to the new account supervisor.

  The presentation was informal and took place in their office. Dane recited the headline and started to explain it but realized that there was nothing to explain—they had used the same headline before. Ken followed with a description of the art. Dane commented on the symbolism of a woman staring in a mirror when Ken shouted, “You did it again!”

  “Did what?”

  “You interrupted me.”

  The account person looked bewildered. Dane was stunned and humiliated. As the account person left, Dane closed the door and turned to Ken.

  “Don’t do that again!”

  “I warned you not to interrupt!” Ken replied.

  “I added a thought,” Dane said. “And if I did interrupt, you still had no right to shout at me—even if you were my boss, which you’re not. You barely know what you’re doing.”

  Ken’s shoulders twitched like a wind-up toy ready to run.

  “I have to be a presence,” Ken said as if he were coaching himself. His fists were clenched. “I need to assert myself.”

  Ken charged Dane.

  For years Dane had been swimming and lifting weights. When Ken, a short, angry man, collided with him, he bounced off of his chest, staggered backward against his desk and shouted. “So you t
hink I’m going to run from you? Not so fast!” Ken charged again and stopped short. He stood up to Dane, belly to belly, forehead to chin, like a bilious baseball manager confronting an ump.

  “Save face or save your job!”

  Two forces competed for control of Dane’s body—physical instinct and economic survival, the law of the street versus the employee manual. Instincts honed in playgrounds throbbed in his fists. He itched to cock his right shoulder and punch Ken’s presumptuous red face. He had never retreated from a fight, even against superior numbers and men of size. It was how he nipped victim-hood in the bud. Was it not his second amendment right to bear arms when his arms were literally his arms? Yet, as juiced as he was with adrenaline, the rule of the workplace froze his shoulder and pinned his arms to his sides. Physical contact would put his livelihood and family’s welfare at risk.

  “Get out of my face!” Dane snarled at Ken, hoping anything, even his breath would force his partner to retreat.

  “Why should I, Dane? Huh? Going to beat me up?”

  “Just back off!” Dane replied. He now understood the anxiety of the big man against a smaller man. He must neither advance nor retreat.

  “Are you going to hit me, Dane? It’s what you want to do. Go ahead. But if you do, you’ll get fired. Fired!”

  The dread of capitulating to instinct tightened Dane’s body till it twitched. He could not abide Ken so close, yet the smaller man stood firm against him. Dane would not risk harm to Ken by hitting him but he needed space and his energy surged to be released. He bowed his head and bumped Ken’s forehead. Ken staggered backward and flopped on the floor. His face contorted like a fist and he jabbed his forefinger at Dane. “You head-butted me!”

  He crawled to his feet and bolted from the room. Dane was dismayed. He barely touched him.

  “He hit me! He hit me!” Ken shouted.

  Ken disappeared and Dane had the office to himself. Rupert, who headed Georgian Shield-New York, and Juan and Jeremi, the creative supervisors, interviewed Dane to file reports. Dane recounted that Ken shouted at him and violated his personal space.