Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [1]
How about a financial institution? Would you do ads for a bank encouraging people to refinance their homes even though you are a numbers-challenged liberal arts major with no house or savings of your own and if following your Live life to the fullest! financial credo might actually lead families to lose their homes and, by association, cause a national lending crisis and, by further association, a worldwide economic recession?
If you worked in advertising, do you know what you would and wouldn’t do, what you could live with?
Would your “moral” choices vary depending upon your financial situation and/or your place in the creative pantheon of your current agency, that is, do you bend a bit more if you haven’t sold a campaign in six months and you have a small apartment and a kid on the way and you’re thisclosetobeingvested and you hear there may be yet another round of layoffs?
Do you still say, “Under no circumstances will I work on the farm pesticides/herbicides/insecticides business or the campaign for the latest miracle boner pill or sleeping aid pharma with thirty seconds of mandatory side-effect copy that includes death and blindness, not to mention a questionable FDA situation”?
Or do you get on your high horse and say, “Fuck you!” because last week you saved the $250-million-a-year Fortune 500 corporate consulting account and there’s no way you’re going to sell crap yogurt, beer, hard stuff, unfiltereds, troop surges, chemicals, or ideologies to anyone (this, of course, is before you happen to check out the Fortune 500 corporate consultant’s client list)?
Do you? Will you? Can you?
Think about it. Because your boss wants an answer in two minutes.
The Death of Darrin Stephens
LARRY TATE: You look terrible. What’s happened?
DARRIN STEPHENS: Nothing much. I just lost the Caldwell
account and my wife all in one week.
LARRY TATE: What? That’s horrible.
DARRIN STEPHENS: I know, I can’t believe it.
LARRY TATE: Your wife too, huh?
—Bewitched (1964)
Why a Dinosaur Has Never Won a Tony Award
Advertising as I knew it began its death rattle in the fall of 2000 in an old, dark off-off-Broadway theater on the far west side of Midtown Manhattan.
Over the years the theater had been the home to world-premiere performances of works written by the likes of Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and August Wilson. But on this day the theater’s modest stage was going to be home to a different kind of performance, a one-day-only world premiere written by a previously unpublished playwright, a nobody.
This performance would definitely contain elements of drama. And, almost certainly, tragedy. Most involved in the production, and by this time there were dozens of us, were fairly certain of this, but the degree to which it could be classified as tragedy or comedy would ultimately be decided not by the author (me) or the cast (two starving actors) or the producers (the Madison Avenue office of a global ad agency) but by the audience, which was expected to total all of five extremely impatient and not particularly happy people (our clients) absolutely predisposed to hate everything they were about to see.
We were in this venerable theater to make one last desperate pitch that promised a strategically focused, bright, shiny, globally synchronized, and brilliantly branded future to our multibillion-dollar banking client of several years who, by the way, desperately wanted to fire us.
If pressed to classify the type of production we were about to put on, I would have called it a farce.
Because I knew that even if Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, or Sir John Gielgud took the stage that afternoon and had channeled the spirit of David Ogilvy, Jay Chiat, and the original Young and Rubicam, our clients still would have hated it, still would have fired us. In their eyes we were too big, too slow to adapt to a rapidly changing