Here's what kind of silliness really goes in an ad agency.  


 “He’s such an asshole.”

“I know, but he is who he is and he is the one the client chose to host the convention.”

“How about, ‘Welcome our Master of Cerephonies, master of big screen flops and made-for-TB dead –on-arrivals.”

“TB?”

“Yeah. Instead of TV. Everyone coughs up a lung and dies like he does on the boob-tube.”

Judy laid her Graphics pad on the corner of Mike’s cluttered desk and stood. “You’ve got issues.”

“Just telling it like it is.”

Before walking out of his cubicle, his bubble-icle as he called it, she offered a parting shot.

“You’ve been in the ad business a long time. I thought I would learn something from you when you came on board. But I go home every night depressed.”

Fuck you was his first thought. His second came from staring at her tight ass. I would like to fuck her. Those low rise jeans she was poured into left little to the imagination. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t have any, he thought. Probably a lousy lay.

 

Judy leaned against the counter in the break room and dunked her bag of green tea into the mug of hot water. Each time she lifted it she watched the water sepia-darken, like successive water color strokes on Strathmore. The process reminded her of Mike. One the one hand, he was becoming darker with each keystroke of copy he wrote, each headline he struggled over. Then again, he was becoming an empty tea bag, one that’s been dunked so many times in hot water that it has nothing else to share, nothing else to offer in a creative sense. She remembered a campaign he had done for one of those coffee delivery companies. Direct mail postcards that were targeted to specific types of companies. Lawyers: Grounds for divorce was the headline. Ad agencies, which went through more coffee than the average business: Creative juices. There were more, all of the them so right on that the client more than doubled its business.

She foot-pedalled the release to the garbage can lid and dropped her spent tea bag. It  landed atop a crumpled wrapper from a fast food joint. Another reminder from Mike’s portfolio. He had helped put a North Carolina-based fast food company on the map, including coming up with its name, Scatts! After overnight success with their mesquite wood smoky burgers--Mescatts!--they had decided on doing breakfast. Mike had come up with some of the menu items. The biscuits were called Biscatts! The grits and gravy were called Hominy, Hominy, Hominy! a reminder of what Jackie Gleason’s character, Ralph, would stutter when Alice would get in his face on almost every episode of The Honeymooners. It was a name that took a lot of selling, Mike had said, but the demographics of drive-through customers suggested that they would get it. They did. Then there were the pancakes called the StackaScatts! and the Cajun-spiced fried potatoes named the Scattaters!

His samples were remarkable, she remembered. Awards out the kazoo, too. She just wondered if she’d have to remember all that he once did instead of looking back at some point in her career and feel proud of what they accomplished as a team. Doubt had
certainly set in.

 

Mike turned to his Mac and pulled out the keyboard that had been tucked underneath the desk. He used his trackball to open Word and found the document he had saved titled, jmconvention/intro. He had already written the program and sent it on to Judy, who plugged it into her InDesign file before creating a PDF and sending it on to the printer. She had emailed back to tell him that the copy fit perfectly on every page, 12 on 14,  flush left, just as the original layout suggested. No big whoop, he had thought when he read the note. He’d only WTF’d—written to fit—a million times in his life.

Now he had the job of writing the introduction of the guest MC, someone he had no regard for, someone he had dumped on Judy about and gotten the walk-away ass in the face for doing so. The ass was great but he knew his ass would be grass if he didn’t get this done.

It is with great pleasure, he pounded out on the keyboard, that I introduce to you a man…he stopped…who’s so damn stupid he  calls a scene slate a clacker and thinks Cut! means it’s time to fart. He stopped, stared at what he had written, then held down the delete key. Just in time, too. He heard sneakers squeaking on the tile floor behind him. Judy had decided to join him again.

“Ready to get this last thing done?”

Mike nodded without turning to face her. “I’ll whip it out. Ten minutes of bullshit, tops, right?”

“Better to be seven. On  stage, applause, handshake or hug, and you know he’s going to go long once he’s behind the podium.”

“What a surprise that will be. He’ll talk until someone drags him off the stage. Fuck up the whole production. I think I’ll be waiting in a wing with a sharp tonged grappling hook, do everyone a favor and lasso it around his neck and drag him off. Choke him so we don’t have to watch him choke on another line in a movie. Real tears instead of fake. Real emotion as he fights for air.”

“Wow.”

Mike swiveled his chair to face her. “Wow, what?”

“Just your mind.” She took a sip from the mug she cradled in both hands. “It’s warped. You  used to use it for fun. Clients enjoyed the offbeat approach. They learned it built traffic, grew sales, made people smile.”

Mike shook his head at her naiveté. “Judy, one day you’ll understand. This isn’t Judy’s Bank & Trust where you count pennies and take a cut of everyone’s savings because you—the bank—say Trust Us. This isn’t the razor blade business where you—the blade babe—positions yourself like the drug companies and tout all the R&D expense that goes in to reinventing the blade. That’s why you rake in ten bucks for five of the triple whammies. We’re in the business of mind-warping stupid consumers. Get  over it. That’s the profession you chose to get into. Here’s the point, art director ad gal: after awhile, after you’ve sat in enough client meetings and heard enough bullshit about how great their product is, you reach a point where you have to first get the ugly reality down on paper and out of your head. Except we don’t use paper anymore. You have to look at it on the screen. Visualize what it really is that you’re doing, make fun of it, get a little morose, depressed, melancholy even. You get it out of your system, you shoo away the images of unsuspecting consumers who believe—because they’ve been told to believe. After they buy the damn whatever they continue to want to believe because to not believe means they’re just plain stupid for having believed! We know the product doesn’t come close to what the happy, smiling talent we hired to push the misperception promised. But we do our job anyway. Let me tell you, Judging-me-Ms.-Judy, that now that I’ve expressed to you exactly the kind of person the client decided to pay big bucks to so he could come and wow everybody, I’m almost ready to write an award winning introduction. I’ve worked through all the trickles of truth about the man. I’ve viewed every Kodak moment that flashed in my mind, all portraits of poor performances that I remember. That’s the reality about this asshole that I’ve about worked through. You’ll learn to do the same before you jump in with a happy face and pump out what’s acceptable but never memorable.”

Mike watched a bug-eyed Judy, waiting for a response. She moved from where she had been standing, listening, and sat in the chair she had been working from before she got up and left.

“Okay. Lot there. I actually think you were trying to help me. Give me time to work through it, though. The barbs I’m going to forget. I don’t think you wanted to be mean. I do  think you felt you needed to shake me a little, though. I admit that I don’t understand all the macerations you go through before you get to what’s on  the job ticket for us to do. Design a brochure, write some catchy heads and sharp copy. Slam-dunk. I hate terms like ‘Think out of the box’ and ‘Paradigm shift’ and words like ‘strategery,’ which isn’t even a word but replaced ‘strategy’ because it was overused. I understand ‘USP’ and looking for a unique selling proposition and finally got the meaning of ‘GOST’ when you wanted to meet to come up with some ideas. We have ‘Gotten Our Shit Together’ on more than one occasion and come up with some good campaigns.”

Mike watched as she straightened in the chair. Not only did she have a world class ass…there were headlights to match.

“Anyway,” Judy continued, “I’d like to get this last job done, which really doesn’t include me graphics-wise, but it does get all the timesheets finished for billing. So, if there’s anything I can add that makes it easier for you to write the intro, let me know.”

“What would you write?”

She shrugged. “You know, stage and screen stuff, tie it into the theme of the convention, ignore his left-wing, tree-hugger, save the whale and kill the unborn child reputation.”

“Now you’re getting it! You  sound like me!

“Please Mike, compliment will get you anywhere you want to go.”

If only that were true, he thought. “Okay, you made me think of something that could be fun in the intro. Without having to mention his bad acting or his wacko ways to get even more camera time, why don’t we build him up and play to his ego with a line that everyone hears everyday.”

Judy cocked her head. “Not following.”

Mike stood and with exaggerated animation described what he saw as a backdrop to the introduction. She liked it and caught on. Over the next hour they exchanged high fives, danced mini-jigs in the cramped bubble-icle, and hugged each other when they were satisfied with what they had come up with. Mike printed out the copy while Judy worked on a rough storyboard.

 
“I’m ready,” she said.

“Me, too.”

Armed with seven minutes of slapstick they felt confident they could sell to the creative director and then the Suits, they climbed on chairs and struck the pose that had gotten them through it all. In unison, with arms raised and fingers pointed skyward, they shouted their silly segue over and over again. Cubicle dwellers rose to the clatter and Suits in corner offices stood to get a better look at two of the mysterious mavens who create what they never really understood.

The pair yelled even louder, now that their audience had grown.

“But wait! There’s more!

Mike was first to stop. He suddenly had another idea.