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“What about this book I just read?” I continued, holding up my dog-eared copy of The Hidden Persuaders. “It claimed that back in the ‘50s our thoughts and feelings were being manipulated by research people in ad agencies. Fifty years later, is there some kind of modern version of this?”

“What?” Kline laughed. “Like sex in the ice cubes?”

Actually, I thought, that’s Subliminal Seduction, another book that tried to expose the insidious evil that admen sneak into our lives (like airbrushing the word “sex” into the ice cubes of a liquor ad, or phallic imagery in all kinds of ads), and which I hadn’t read in some time. So, feeling like a jerk, I laughed, too. Ha! What was I thinking? Evil persuaders and manipulators, trying to probe our minds. Preposterous!

Then Ben Kline leaned forward and told me this: “You know what you should really check out?”

“What’s that?”

“The UCLA Brain Mapping Center.”

I swallowed hard and nodded.

“You’d get a big kick out of it because the science there has advanced so much in the last few years. It’s a pretty sexy thing; as a testing source, it eliminates the tendency we all have to either lie or not interpret what we’re feeling into words. What you’re literally seeing is the brain firing in regions where stuff gets coded and there is no room for error—it’s true or not. You can take the vagaries of human response out of the equation, so you know whether your message is having an effect.”

To someone whose life has been built upon the vagaries of human response, this sounded both compelling and troubling. “You,” I began. “You’ve seen it?”

“Yeah. It’s fascinating.”

“And … and you think there’s an advertising application for it? For brain mapping?”

“Right now, it’s probably good only as a way to do post-testing. To determine whether someone liked a spot or not. But in the future … and this is my opinion because others in our group—I call the twenty-fifth floor the best intellectual bar fight in the business because we have so many passionate brains walking its halls—they will dismiss it totally.”

“In the future?”

Kline shrugged. “Who knows?”

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

—David Ogilvy

Pay No Attention to the Worldwide Man Expert’s Breasts and Vagina

The first time I met Rose Cameron we were in the back of a town car leaving Madison Avenue for an afternoon client meeting with AT&T in New Jersey. Because I’d been too busy scrambling to prepare for the meeting to bother with lunch, I was tossing down a turkey sandwich, a protein shake, and a blond brownie while she briefed me on our latest plan of attack. She was new to my account, and I was not. We had reached the stage where every meeting with this client might be our last, and I had reached the stage where, because of the circumstances on this and every account I’d ever worked on, I had become desensitized to fear and resigned to whatever fate awaited us at their offices in Basking Ridge.

While listening to Rose, who had previously worked on the IBM business at Ogilvy & Mather, rattle off a string of profanity-laced telecom, B2B (business to business), IT (information technology), and human insights, each a nugget of truth and prescience about the work and home lives of our target (mostly male IT people and C-suite executives), I realized that she was not your average planner. She was force-of-nature smart, uninhibited, and funny. And she wasn’t afraid to tell her creative counterpart, in her thick Scottish accent, that he had honey mustard on his cheek, and jacket, and jeans. “You’re such a guy,” she said. “And no, I don’t want a piece of your bloody fucking blondie.”

I knew then that we would get along famously, and for the brief time we worked together, under less than ideal circumstances, we did. Today, Rose Cameron is a senior vice president and planning director at Burnett, working on brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Pontiac. She is also one of the agency’s resident “single-subject experts.” More specifically