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We were at the time a seventy-seven-year-old institution, an American advertising legend famous for building brands through solid, sometimes outstanding work, yes, but also through relationships (cocktails, favors, expensive dinners). We were the kings of the $2 million commercial shoot. We had offices in every corner of the world and profit centers, I mean subsidiaries, on top of subsidiaries. And of course, we could fill a football-field-size conference room with earnest, interested-looking suits and high-priced, jaded, arrogant creative talent like no one else.

The Internet?… Nontraditional?… That was beneath us.

“Don’t worry,” said my boss. “We just had a meeting. And we’re totally not gonna pitch.”

“Great,” I said. “We get to leave with a little dignity. I really hope that this is our final decision. Because the only thing worse than starting a pitch now would be waiting until someone who never actually does the work decides two weeks before the presentation, ‘On second thought, even though we have no chance of winning, maybe we should pitch.’ Then,” I said, “we’d be totally screwed.”

Two weeks before the presentation, I was put in charge of the pitch that we swore we would not do.

Thirteen days before the presentation that we swore we would not do, my boss went on vacation. The next morning, a Friday, I decided, with apologies to Mickey Rooney and MGM, to put on a show.

I am not proud of this, but there were times in my twenty-year career in advertising when I would make a creative decision that had less to do with whether or not it was right for the client or the task at hand and more to do with whether it would be fun, preserve my sanity, or make an otherwise-miserable chunk of my life interesting. Especially if the task at hand held little promise in the way of any other form of fulfillment. For instance, the occasional inclusion of a palm tree in a storyboard for a retail ad that might be filmed between January and March. Or insisting on polka band auditions for the Minnesota vignette in a regional telecom commercial. Or proposing filming a man with a laptop sitting on an elephant (representing anytime, anywhere communications) for a B2B shoot in downtown L.A. Or asking Tom Selleck if he wouldn’t mind recording a personal birthday message for my friend’s answering machine. In advertising, if you keep a straight-enough face, it can and will happen.

Having actors do a pitch on a stage in an off-off-Broadway theater was one of those instances. I knew the process was going to be brutal and we were doomed to fail, but at least we’d get to play Andrew Lloyd Webber for a few days.

But it also made sense. Because we had tried everything else and this was the last thing mega-bank would expect from us. Even though we were far from experts in nontraditional advertising, couldn’t we pretend we were? After all, wasn’t advertising, as my former colleague Augusten Burroughs wrote in his memoir Dry, “an industry based on giving people false expectations”?

The theme of our performance, it had been decided by Friday afternoon, would be to show a day in the life of a young urban couple—mega-bank’s bull’s-eye demographic—and demonstrate through clever situations and witty dialogue how frequently and in how many nontraditional ways our proposed message would “touch” them.

The media department’s term for this is “impressions.” The more relevant impressions consumers see, the theory goes, the more loyal they will be to your brand.

After bitching and whining for a good half a day with the account team, the planners and the creatives who would ultimately have to execute our plan, I took a semblance of a creative outline to the agency producer on the mega-bank account. An agency producer is someone who can make anything happen in two hours or less. Want to see snow in July? Or if the Coen brothers are interested in directing your spot? Need a pimped-out 1972 Caddy Eldorado this afternoon for a cheesy rap video for a client meeting? How about a