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By Root 910 0

mountains. Listen to the voice-over, the voice of God, your next-door neighbor. Your inner child. No. Listen as the vaguely recognizable celebrity voice of James Earl Kevin Costner Tom Selleck Zeta Jones speaks … about freedom and liberty and your inalienable right to revel in postmillennial, high-interest-bearing bliss. Speaks about the relationship between a smaller world, bigger dreams, and the whims of a skittish Fed. Hear the words, invoking Sartre and Keynes, Adam Smith and Britney Spears, likening the act of a simple credit card transaction to some life-changing gift from above.

Cut.

To the Great Wall. The floor of the Exchange. A New York–style pizza parlor in Sierra Leone. Cut to a hero shot of a banker shaking the hand of a cowboy client with embarrassingly shameful earnestness.

Flash cut. Jump-cut. Crosscut in black and white and slow dissolve to a slo-mo dolly pan of a lone old man enjoying the fruits of his retirement on a moonlit beach in Mykonos … on … a … unicycle.

Score it. To a world beat, a peppy salsa, a hip-hop-techno-polka fusion, a cappella, backed by Kid Rock, Celine Dion, and the Boys Choir of Harlem.

Now tag it. Sign it. Title it with a Web address and make it everlasting with a three-word, no-greater-than-twelve-syllable life-affirming wisp of marketing haiku …

And air it.

Air it on the Super Bowl. The Olympics. In theaters.

Air it on a very special episode of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Or … maybe not.

Maybe there’s another way.

Meet Joe.

(SFX: The sound of a train clickety-clacking toward Manhattan. Lights come up on Joe, onstage, sipping coffee, reading his morning paper.)

Up to this point, we had them. Maybe not their hearts, or their $800 million in annual billings. But we had their attention. I’m certain. I was off to the side, watching them try not to look impressed. None of us had ever attempted or seen a presentation like this, but so far it was working.

So far.

Does it surprise you that the rest of the pitch was a disaster? That the big screens would never quite sync up with our actors, our presenters, and that the very thing we were counting on to be the coolest, most innovative part of our presentation came off as the most inept, the least inspired?

It didn’t surprise me, but to this day that doesn’t make me feel any better. I was prepared to lose the account, but I wanted us to do it on our own terms, to make them think that their ex had really changed and had gotten his act together. New clothes. New attitude. New possibilities. Open, even, to a threesome.

But instead of going out with a flourish, we lost it spectacularly. There were seemingly endless moments when the screens blinked on and off, or an actor awkwardly stood waiting for a visual cue, or the guitar player (did I mention that we had a singing guitar player onstage to help move things along?) began to play during a very important video.

There were other similarly disastrous moments, during each of which everyone looked to me, as if I knew what the hell had gone wrong.

Does it matter that within days (thus confirming our suspicions that our fate was sealed before they even saw us) mega-bank would move its business to a very fine medium-size creative shop that would, to my dismay, do terrific, beautifully written, highly visible work?

Does it matter that later that night in a West Side theater-district bar I could be heard lamenting, like Barton Fink or any of a thousand real writers who had lost a part of their soul on the Great White Way, “If only we had one more day of rehearsals,” or “The screens! The screens! The horror!”? And then later telling my loyal creatives that I loved each and every one of them and they should all have a plan B because this is “a vile, vile business” while running up an unauthorized $1,100 bar tab?

Does it matter that I was hammered on single-malt scotch, breaking my own rule about not getting drunk when I’m down? Or that I was breaking that rule with the people who had gone to advertising war with me for years, old-school print and TV people, and several members of