Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [8]
But when an agency of this size is engaged in a pitch of this magnitude, the machine cranks up to another level, a level that would be impossible to sustain at a boutique or even most medium-size agencies. And it is a thing to behold.
Individually and collectively, writers, art directors, producers, group assistants, strategic planners, and account execs all begin to interpret the work in progress for their own purposes. What’s the overarching graphic glue or look for all components, right down to the PowerPoint deck? Is that the final tagline? Has anyone done a copyright check? How does it translate to Spanish? French? Has the lead art director chosen a storyboard artist?
Scraps of paper become 28-point headlines. A twenty-five-year-old copywriter’s rant becomes a TV script. Pencil sketches become fully realized illustrations, and with final approvals it all gets scanned and shipped and sent (at least in the year 2000) to the studio. At my agency at this time a visit to the art studio would find anywhere from twenty to fifty designers and bull-pen artists finessing work for myriad aspects of the presentation. Day and night leading up to a pitch, a series of huge full-color printers churned out poster-size prints of storyboards, billboards, mock Web pages, and other key elements of the presentation.
This part of the process has its moments, but they’re not nearly as satisfying as the original period of creativity that started everything. Seeing the work take shape is exciting, but at this stage the presentation looms over everything, and every ad, every line, every second of face time is fretted over and contested. Luckily in this instance, senior management, for reasons that I suspect had to do with knowing enough not to board a sinking, burning ship, stayed away entirely, or made the most cursory of inspections. Plus, my boss was on vacation. And her boss never asked to see so much as a coupon ad. Which was fine with me.
Days passed. Things seemed to be coming together. The traditional ads looked good. The digital stuff was different and promising. The actors were real actors, and in rehearsals they began to bring a touch of humanity to the script, a charming, slacker romantic comedy with an obscene amount of product placement. Kind of like most sitcoms on the networks today.
The director tweaked props, lighting, sound design. The theater looked great. We made posters for our production and hung them in the lobby. We made Playbills that served as agendas and experiential ads unto themselves. We even put a snappy headline on the bags of popcorn we’d be handing out to the clients. The bastards could fire us, but they couldn’t accuse us of giving up or mailing it in.
It’s around this time that we started allowing ourselves to say delusional, Cinderella-story-like things such as “This is going to blow them away,” and “Wait until [insert agency or client nonbeliever here] sees this,” and, the most dangerous of all, “Imagine if, with no help, no chance, we actually won this thing.”
The only remaining problem was with the large projection screens that were vital to the production. They were supposed to work in perfect synchronicity with the actors and various digital devices, reinforcing strategic points and showcasing virtually every manner of mega-bank message that was burned into the script. We were going to show animated storyboards of TV spots on the big screens. We were going to show funny and emotional videos on the big screens. We were going to show the entire totally revolutionary, monumentally experiential Web experience on the big screens.
Only thing is, we didn’t have any.
First they were late in arriving. Then, when they finally showed up and were installed, we couldn’t get the screens to sync with our videos, our soundtracks, our computers, and our PowerPoint