Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [11]
I guess not.
I guess what mattered in the fall of 2000, when the lights came back up in that old theater and our somber (not a good sign) clients left their Playbills on their seats (definitely not a good sign) and shook our hands for the last time, is that we all knew that we had just been part of a profound paradigm shift. In advertising, someone says paradigm shift every time a client checks his BlackBerry, but this was real.
Lines had been drawn. Advertising would never be the same again. Time had passed my agency by, and for the next seven years, like many agencies large and small, we would struggle to catch up with it.
Some kind of torch was about to be passed, but not to or by me.
I was angry because I knew I had seen the future of advertising. I just hadn’t quite figured out how to make it work.
One Huckster’s Beginnings
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Charo as Guidance Counselor
Mahopac, New York, Spring 1978
“What about advertising?”
My sister Karen posed this question to me one spring night after dinner while I was a senior in high school. After the plates had been cleared, we remained at the table with my mother to discuss a topic to which I hadn’t given much thought since, well, I had discovered sex, drugs, and alcohol*1: my future.
Some teenagers would dread an encounter like this. But as the youngest of four children, and the last one living at home, I was excited that anyone was paying attention to me at all. My older brother had recently joined the navy, and both of my sisters were married and living in homes of their own.
Another bonus was that my father wasn’t part of the discussion. His participation in such matters usually concluded with a deep reddening of the face, a bulging of the eyes, and a look of shame-inducing disgust. It’s not that my father had anything against college or my having a fulfilling future, but he had made it clear that after my negligible academic and social performance of the last few years, he wasn’t about to spend a cent sending me anywhere. At the time, his vision of my future entailed my spending another summer, and perhaps more, working for his masonry business, laying block in a mental institution.
So, sure, my future. Let’s discuss. Let’s break out the Devil Dogs and figure this sucker out. Besides, what else was I going to do, go to my room to listen to an eight track of Jethro Tull and think unsavory things about Charo’s appearance on The Mike Douglas Show that afternoon?
“What about advertising?” I repeated, but with skepticism rather than Karen’s enthusiasm.
“You know, like Bewitched.”
I wriggled my nose. “But I have no supernatural powers.”
My sister did not smile. She had recently graduated from college. She knew that I was teetering on the vocational brink, and I should have known better than to give her a hard time. After all, this is the person who had taught me an entire year’s worth of algebra in one week before my Regents exam. This is the person who still saw a glimmer of promise in my slanted stoner’s eyes. “Like Darrin Stephens, jerko.” She’s also the person who once found me so irritating that she kicked me through the glass of a storm door. “Darrin Stephens writes commercials and snappy jingles for a living.” I nodded. Of course I was familiar with Stephens’s work. He was the hybrid account/creative guy at McMahon and Tate. Wore a suit, kowtowed to his blustering boss, Larry Tate, and tried to keep his wife, who was a witch, from getting him in trouble.
From what I could discern, besides the witchcraft issues, Darrin Stephens’s world seemed to revolve around schmoozing clients, enjoying cocktails, and coming through with the occasional burst of ass-saving inspiration.
I also knew why my sister had suggested Stephens as a mentor: her little brother was a liberal arts specialist with a smart mouth, so why not advertising? But