Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [22]
But he didn’t kiss me this time.
He head-butted me.
I opened my eyes. What the fuck?
Then he kissed me.
“We’re going to make a lot of fucking money together,” he told me, punctuating the sentence with a second, softer head-butt. Even that hurt. If he’d had hair, maybe not so much.
“If you keep head-butting me, I won’t be worth much to anyone.”
He laughed. Leaned closer. Kiss or head-butt? Christ, if it’s another full-on head-butt, I wasn’t sure if I could stop myself from punching him in the mouth, promised riches or not. I was fairly drunk myself. I mean, do you think I could have read that shit in front of a crowd—Marley is this client, Ebenezer is this account guy, the competition is want and pestilence, har-har-har!—if I was sober? Then again, he did have a bottle of the Bordeaux in his hand and my glass was just about empty.
But this time he simply whispered, “You are gonna be a star, and we are gonna make a killing.”
This is the same man who would later tell me that the AT&T win was in the bag, golden. The same person who will be fired somewhere in the middle of the next anecdote. But of course, I didn’t know this. And what was I supposed to say: “No, we’re not gonna make a killing … We’re gonna run this venerable ship into the ground and then proceed directly to hell”?
I rubbed the small knot forming on my forehead. Then I looked in the mirror behind the bar at the Ghost of Adman Yet to Come, held out my glass, and said, “You got that right, partner.”
Madison Avenue Invades Normandy
One of the benefits of working at an agency in decline is that opportunities abound for the young, aggressive, and resourceful because the old, vested, and powerful are preoccupied with spending their money and/or saving their respective asses.
At N. W. Ayer in the mid-1990s my partner Kenny and I frequently benefited from the turmoil of huge account losses and upper-management turnover that in many ways allowed us to work like a creative boutique, creating and selling smaller-budget, unorthodox work that our bosses were not interested in. This included a series of quirky, down-and-dirty TV ads for the Philadelphia-headquartered auto-parts retailer Pep Boys and an unheard-of one-day $80,000, four-commercial TV shoot for the housewares chain Lechters, in which during one spot a grown man wore a gingerbread-man suit and in another a dedicated Lechters employee (played by the then-unknown comedian Jim Gaffigan) recited a disturbingly earnest ode to a tea ball in which he described the steeping perforations of said tea ball as “tiny portals to the soul.”
Ironically, the most unexpected and unforgettable experience of my entire career came in the spring of 1994 from an assignment that no one wanted for a client that would soon become an ex-client of ours: AT&T. The project in question was an extra-credit/pity thought that a client had suggested on a whim at the end of an otherwise-depressing meeting: think of ways to link the phone to significant cultural events. It was such an out-of-the-blue throwaway that it never made it into a conference report, and no one ever followed up. But my art director/partner Kenny and I didn’t forget it. We were hungry to make ads, and this seemed like a great opportunity to us precisely because no one else thought it did.
We made lists. The anniversary of Rosa Parks. The Olympics. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier—was there a phone involved? But none of the dates lined up. Then one day in February it hit us: D-day. That coming June would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Clearly there would be a lot of media attention around this. Tens