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So there I was, thinking, “This cat food is not about the cat at all. It’s all about the owner, who could care less about what chemicals his beloved Tuffy-san ingests as long as the turds are tidy.” Thinking, “These people are incredibly stupid, but then again they were smart enough to figure out how to make me fix their ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Turd’ spot.” And thinking, “In addition to going to People Hell for this, now we’ll surely have to do time in Pet Purgatory.”

And this favorite, even though I knew the answer: “How did I end up here?”

I looked at the account guy next to me who had multiple degrees, had done some kind of fellowship in London, and had a sharp, seemingly rational mind. Then I looked at the creative team across from me that had been led to believe that the cynical old bastard across from them was going to become their boss, their unwanted mentor, two funny, talented, and much-abused young men, one of whom had hung out in college with the guys who made the film Napoleon Dynamite and who could make art out of an e-mail newsletter about a Central Park kickball league, and I wondered what they thought of all this: Why were they here?

Packaged-goods work is created and judged differently from other forms of advertising. The strategic briefs are concise and demanding, requiring in our allotted thirty seconds myriad talking points (problem/solution, unique attribute, key emotional takeaway, and so on), numerous product mentions, and one overt and heavy-handed product demo (the magical whitening of the teeth, the efficient genocide of the germs, the time-elapsed shrinking of the turd/ stain/prostate), and so it is hard to find room for creativity. The truly driven will always try to do creative work that transcends the category—work that’s “great for a feminine hygiene product” or “really funny for a laxative commercial”—and those that do are heralded in the trades and at awards shows. But in addition to being truly driven, those creatives must also be truly thick-skinned and unflappable, since in the land of packaged goods great work often dies because it diverged half a degree away from the path of the brief.

My problem was I was no longer thick-skinned or unflappable. And the thought of ever having to celebrate one of those incremental, “in-category” triumphs made me want to blow my head off. After twenty years of shoveling concepts into the idea furnace, I was done.

It helped just a bit that I had recently finished a novel and had gotten an agent. This was indeed promising, but I had finished novels before and had agents before, one of whom died, one of whom quit weeks after I signed with her, and one of whom told me that she was leaving the industry to go to clown school.* So it’s not like I was all set or anything.

Near the end of the conversation with the Japanese, I looked up to see everyone on our end of the call staring at me. The turd baton was about to be passed to the U.S. team, and I was to be its anchorman.

“Do you have everything you need?” asked someone from the other side of the world.

I shook my head no, but couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Does anyone?”

The Last Shoot

The assignment, my last, was to do an Americanized remake of a men’s deodorant commercial that had tested well in that hotbed of advertising excellence … Russia.

To the best of my knowledge there was no precedent for this, no legacy of killer creative coming to the States via the Siberian pipeline. And to the best of my knowledge there was no rational reason to believe that this exercise was even remotely a good idea.

“What form of testing was it subjected to in Russia?” I asked.

“We’re not sure, but it scored well.”

“Compared to what? They may have said it scored better than any deodorant spot ever had in Russia, but for all we know, this may be the only deodorant commercial in the history of the country.”

“We don’t know. Listen, they just want us to do this, okay?”

It never ceases to amaze me how brand managers who spend millions of dollars on research can take the most obscure bit of data, or