Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [5]
A good agency producer can make all of that happen, and more.
Within an hour, we had a director.
Throwing lots of money his way surely helped, as did the fact that he was between productions, but still, there he was the next morning, a gloomy Saturday, staring at a guy who wasn’t exactly sky-high with optimism about this project or, for that matter, his career.
“So, is this how it was when you had to solve a problem with Arthur Miller?” I asked him later that afternoon during a mental-health walk around a deserted Midtown Manhattan. “You’d take a walk, bounce around ideas, maybe stop in a bodega to grab a six-pack?”
Soon-to-be Tony Award–winning director did not laugh. And to his credit, he took the writing and staging of the mega-bank skit as seriously as he would have taken staging a new play by Harold Pinter or Eugene O’Neill.
By Saturday night we’d fleshed out the lives of our characters and sketched out a semblance of a story. I went home and wrote it up that night, and by Sunday afternoon we had a working script and a good sense of set design, music, lighting, and the role of our secret weapon: the multimedia devices that our producer was procuring at that very moment.
Revenge of the Experientials
With script in hand, I sat down with my fellow members of the creative department the first thing Monday morning. In the creative department, first thing Monday morning means elevenish. Because of the variety of media involved, to get in the spirit of things and to demonstrate the extent that we were embracing the new advertising paradigm, I had invited our interactive agency to join us. In 2000, adding interactive messages to a marketing campaign usually meant slapping a Web address under the logo, or doing the occasional popup ad.
But these were extenuating circumstances. We were keen to do more.
During the previous year or so it seemed as if the mother ship (our holding company) had been buying or merging with a new Internet player every week. The interactive group had already gone through myriad incarnations. New names, new directors. New logos. In fact, they were no longer the interactive group. They were now an experiential agency. You can’t say we weren’t trying. Anyway, the people in the experiential group were really jacked up. Unlike my fellow creatives, who for several months had been thanklessly working on numerous campaigns for this account and had frequently been subjected to my sometimes too-frank opinion that this was the end of the line for this account (and perhaps all of us, because when a client of this size leaves, layoffs are sure to follow), the members of the experiential group saw this as a great opportunity.
I deduced this because they arrived early. They concentrated as they read through the brief. They actually listened when I went over the basic strategic and creative premise. They didn’t roll their eyes when I read the rough, less-than-Shakespearean script. And when I was through, they asked a lot of smart, unexpected questions.
Unlike the rest of us, the experiential/digital group understood that this was definitely an instance where the right message combined with the right medium could be exponentially more successful than anything the old model of advertising—print, TV, and radio ads—ever turned out.
When I was through, they immediately began to brainstorm ideas. What if we were able to give our protagonist his latest mega-bank news on his pager (this was pre-BlackBerry, pre-iPhone)? What if we sent him customized video e-mails (pre-YouTube)? What if there were live actors