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By Root 903 0

And you do a lot of hugging and, as is the case with most reunions, talking in the past tense. What I remember about my last days at Ayer is that we were all miserable and worried about our jobs. Our careers. When I started at Ayer, the concept of “What’s next?”—for me, the economy, the emerging Internet, and the world—was thrilling. By the time I left in 1998, it had become daunting.

“What’s next?” was about to be replaced by “What now?”

Soon after that, in 2001, “What now?” would become “What happened?”

But on this night the talk was all positive. There wasn’t a lot of bitterness. I imagine the most bitter and bruised had ignored the Evite and stayed home. Sure, a few of us were intent on emphasizing what we were doing now, and business cards were exchanged to prove it.

We all came to this party because we were part of something that for better or worse had consumed such a large part of our lives, and it was important to recognize, if not come to terms with, that fact. For years we had laughed, cried, joked, shared late-night sushi, had conference calls in rental cars, and traveled the world with one another.

Then, for five, six, eight years, nothing.

The mission statements of many of the idea factories that I’ve visited in the last year are remarkably similar: create moments of cultural importance that will give the people who use their brands a unique sense of belonging and community. As I looked around the back room at O’Brien’s on West Forty-sixth Street, as people hugged and laughed and talked about a place gone more than six years now, it occurred to me that even though the physical space was gone, this reunion for N. W. Ayer, America’s first ad agency, had become exactly the kind of event that the new idea factories aspired to create: a moment of cultural importance with a shared and authentic sense of community.

Then I had a horrible thought about our reunion: a really smart brand would’ve sponsored it.

The Care and Feeding of the Next

Great American Hucksters

This is not brain surgery. You can learn brain surgery.

—Mark Fenske, former boss of the author, former creative star, current associate professor, the Brandcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University

Huckster U.

The director of the program never graduated from college. There wasn’t one PhD thesis to be seen, published or in progress, by any of its faculty. And before walking through the door to his afternoon portfolio class, one of its featured professors, a former boss of mine, announced to me with Sweeney Todd–like glee, “It’s time for the disemboweling.” Welcome to the Brandcenter at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). One part art ad agency, one part rogue MBA program, and one part laboratory for experiments in twenty-first-century branding, the Brandcenter is widely considered the nation’s most demanding, progressive, and acclaimed graduate program in advertising.*

It is also, in every way, the exact opposite of the preparation that I had for a career in advertising.

Which is precisely why I wanted to visit. I wanted to see what type of person would choose advertising not just as a major but as a profession. Had advertising indeed chosen them? Was making ads for denture cream and breakfast cereal a bona fide calling?

I’d also come to the country’s best ad school to find out if advertising could indeed be taught, to see where the future of advertising is coming from, and to determine if we should be mortified or excited.

Finally, I came to Richmond because it presented a chance to wrestle with some demons from my own beginnings in the business.

In recent years, the Brandcenter was known throughout advertising as the creatively driven Adcenter, the talent factory from which many of the most gifted and acclaimed creatives of the last decade have emerged. But the mid-January 2008 opening of a new $9 million facility designed by Clive Wilkinson (the mastermind behind the Mountain View, California, Googleplex headquarters and the ad agency Chiat\Day’s controversial and revolutionary modular workplace in Playa del