Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [49]
“I guess you saw who just left my office.”
I nodded. “The grim reaper.”
As she puffed her cigarette, I thought of the first time we’d met more than ten years earlier, when we both worked at another agency, N. W. Ayer. She was the young creative star of the place, smart, energetic, always laughing, and selling good work to big clients. It was no surprise to any of us when she left the agency to assume this powerful new job. When she called to ask me to join her at Y&R, I was flattered. But in the two years that I’d worked with her, although she was still full of energy, her laughter had changed. Less joy and more anxiety. In the two years we’d been together, a series of grueling battles to save disgruntled accounts, frequently working late nights and weekends, we had both aged like wartime presidents. “Well,” she continued, “you know we haven’t exactly been on a winning streak.”
I nodded impatiently. Just tell me. I can take it.
“The bank. Now KFC.”
“I know. I understand.”
“So … I’m going to be leaving the agency.”
“You mean I’m going to be leaving the agency.”
“No, I am.”
“But me too, right?”
She dragged on her cigarette, pecked at her muffin for the second-to-last time. “No, you’re staying. You’re gonna work on yogurt.”
Several weeks earlier I had jumped in and contributed some work for a pitch for a diet-yogurt presentation. My storyboards didn’t win, but the head of the account and the client liked my presentation enough to ask me if I wanted to run the business.
“I’m shocked,” I told my soon-to-be ex-boss. “I thought if anyone, it was gonna be me. Are you all right?”
She smoked, then picked at but did not eat any more of the muffin. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “How about you?”
“Yogurt?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t think it’s a very good idea. I think they saw me on a happy day, when I decided to ramp up the charm.”
I stood up. She came around the desk and we hugged. We respected and liked each other, but the hug, it was awkward. After we let each other go, she noticed me looking at her desk, at the muffin.
“You want?”
I sure did. But I thought it best to leave it where it was.
Active Cultures
The client was in Westchester. Less than a half hour from three things I had not seen much of in the last several years: my house, my wife, and my two-year-old daughter. So for the first time in my career, after avoiding unnecessary client interaction at all costs, I became a big believer in going to meetings at the client’s place. Instead of schlepping an hour and a half each way to Manhattan every day, I had a nearby alternative. At the time they had at least five active sub-brands and another three in development, and they had meetings for everything. Package design. Rough cuts. Voice-over recommendations. Testing results. I needed to be there. I was all over all of it.
The client applauded my attention to detail. The head of the account applauded my commitment to the business. And my family applauded the fact that I was able to join them for the occasional dinner before 8:00 p.m.
Who cared if the account was looked upon in the agency as a creative wasteland, a packaged-goods penal colony run by detail-obsessed brand managers, fastidious logo police, and a den-mothering account supervisor? I was beginning to feel half-human.
My first task was to oversee production of a commercial for the client’s flagship fruit-on-the-bottom product. The ad had been created and presented before I took over the account, and in focus groups its animatic—a rough cartoon version of the spot we’d eventually film—had scored higher than any other spot they had ever tested. The reasons for the high score were not hard to figure out: it featured a bunch of handsome construction workers sitting on a girder (sex), plenty of close-ups of the yogurt (taste), and an upbeat popular song from the 1970s (fun).
After a meeting in which the