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As the creative director pressed into supervising the assignment, I had come up with the idea of trying to sell this nontraditional, digitally inspired future to a financial mega-brand in this flesh-and-bones, sub-analog space. If they wanted nimble and out of the box, we’d give it to them live, in a theater, with real actors and stage props and lighting and signed black-and-white head shots of Pulitzer Prize winners on the lobby walls.

Why a theater? Advertising was entering a new age. Beyond the thirty-second television spot. Beyond print ads in People magazine. TV spots on Friends. Then of course there was that thing called the Internet. No one in big-agency advertising seemed to know what to do with it yet (beyond buying smaller digital shops that were better at pretending that they got it), so why should that stop us from pretending that we got it, that we were experts? We chose a theater because we felt that a live performance in an artistic environment was the last thing our clients expected from a dinosaur of an agency like Young & Rubicam, and onstage we could dazzle them with the countless unexpected, nontraditional, highly effective ways in which they could connect with their ideal customer.

Plus, all of our previous old-school, “traditional” attempts to save our asses had failed miserably.

Even though it was a daring idea, and even though I thought it had the makings of something special, I knew we were doomed. Mostly because I (as well as, I suspect, almost everyone else in the business at the time) had no idea what the bright, shiny digital future of advertising was. After all, in 2000, YouTube was years away from its inception, and the guy who invented Facebook was all of sixteen years old.

And did I mention that the client hated us?

In fact, if my voice counted in such matters, we wouldn’t have been spending insane money, easily several hundred thousand dollars for a two-hour presentation, pitching an account to marketing officers who clearly did not want us anymore. I’d said as much six months earlier after they’d put us on notice. I’d said as much soon after that when they’d put us on double-secret probation.

And I said it again on the day of our last presentation two months earlier, another do-or-die, last-chance meeting during which we prostrated ourselves before them in another lavishly appointed conference room filled with motivational videos, PowerPoint decks, and stacks and stacks of foam-core storyboards, dozens of creatively inspired, insight-driven campaigns from the New York office’s finest (bring in that funky young team … do we have any African American creatives?) as well as from our network around the world—London, check! Hong Kong, check! India, check! Australia, g’day!

But of course my voice didn’t count in such matters. I was a slightly jaded creative director/copywriter, and slightly jaded creative director/copywriters with an aversion to leading large groups did not typically weigh in on high-level decisions, or run pitches for $500 million accounts, unless their superiors had already resigned themselves to losing said accounts.

We had gotten the mega-bank account in the first place because global capabilities had been the big thing in the merger-crazed 1990s (now, apparently, it’s small and nimble and digital, but that could change by the time you finish this paragraph). Sharing ideas and resources with a far-reaching global network—satellite partner agencies around the world—had become an absolute necessity as brands themselves became more global. And our network had become so bloody global that there were times we could have used United Nations interpreters to have a simple strategic conference call between regional creative directors, which in retrospect probably wasn’t a good thing.

Anyway, the result of the last meeting, which we had sworn would be our final attempt to salvage the business, was that they were not impressed. They were going to put the account up for review. They were going to open things up to other