Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [9]
In its present state, our digital presentation was sub-analog.
I wanted to ask the interactive/experiential dudes for help, but they had already delivered all of their work and had moved on to another account, another, more viable pitch.
At the time, the agency was losing pieces of business left and right, but suddenly the interactive guys, they were red-hot.
The screen crisis was frustrating because it was one of the few things that I felt I couldn’t write, bullshit, or hustle my way out of. Everything was golden except for the tech, and I knew nothing about tech, especially making tech work.
On Friday night before the Monday afternoon presentation, my producer, who had never let me down, assured me that it would work out. Then she went home for the weekend. The rest of my team stayed and worked the weekend, improving the work right until the end, but every run-through was done without the accompaniment of the yet-to-arrive projection screens.
Opening (and Closing) Night
The screens finally arrived on Monday morning, several hours before the clients and just as senior management from the agency, after being invisible for several weeks, began to materialize.
We had time for two more run-throughs, neither of which went particularly well. I was not happy. But my producer said it would be all right.
The moments before the client arrives for a major creative and strategic presentation are surreal. Young junior account people scramble and fret and tend to get in the way. High-ranking executives who had no role in the preparation for this day begin to ask stupid questions and to make even stupider suggestions. Higher-ranking people who had no role in the preparation but who, in flashes of self-preservational inspiration, are beginning to think, “Maybe this ship isn’t about to sink, maybe this is something I ought to try to attach myself to,” suddenly decide that perhaps they should make some brief introductory remarks, or at least be the ones to meet the clients at the door to pass a witty comment as they’re handed their customized Playbills, their experientially branded bags of popcorn.
I tend to stand around, feeling angry and depressed, before meetings like this. Some of it is real, because of the above, and some is the by-product of having spent thirteen consecutive days and nights thinking of nothing but mega-bank.
“The things we have to do to impress these assholes. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for putting up with any of their shit—client, agency, any of them. And wouldn’t it be great if we shocked the world and won this damned thing and then told them to fuck off anyway. If we said, ‘Thanks, mega-bankers, but we don’t want to do business with mega-assholes.’”
But when the clients arrived, for their second of what I believe was to be three agency pitches that day, trudging through the lobby as if about to witness a mercy killing instead of glimpse the future of advertising, I was all firm handshakes, smiles, and self-deprecating wisecracks.
After the clients were shown to their seats and our announcer in the PA booth jokingly asked them to please turn off all pagers and cell phones, the lights went down. The day before, I had written and recorded an introductory, sound-only piece that was designed to take the piss out of all the old, tired, expected ways in which brands the size of mega-bank used to tell their advertising story—grand vignettes, celebrity endorsements, and highfalutin language about so-called emotional truths that have nothing to do with the product—thus setting the stage, literally, for the way that global brands, global banks, and global souls will live in the future. Here it is:
Narrator (over house speakers):
Open. Open on a buttery gold field at dawn. An opal sea at dusk. Open with a helicopter shot of mist-blanketed