Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [21]
The strategy reads: “So pure, it’s odorless. Natural, because it’s derived from trees.”
So I’m trying to write something that’s spare and elegant and slightly magical. But really, I’m wasting my time. Because they don’t want elegant and magical. They want shit, in their own proprietary color. They want this, I’m sure of it:
VIDEO:
Amy Irving, star of Yentl, stands in a sun-drenched gourmet kitchen (brushed-steel appliances, cherry cabinets, an island with a granite countertop), waving her hand over dishes of prepared food items: eggs, steaks, lobster, fried chicken.
VOICE-OVER:
Hi. I’m Academy Award nominee Amy Irving. And I’ve got incredible news! Now, all the foods you know and love can actually lower your cholesterol by fifteen percent—guaranteed! Introducing BenCol. A revolutionary breakthrough, discovered in Nature. BenCol is a rich, creamy spread that’s sweet and delicious. Use it just like butter, and it lowers your cholesterol throughout the day. In two weeks, your cholesterol will be fifteen percent lower—or your money back.
We called it BenCol because it’s beneficial to cholesterol. But you’ll just call it delicious.
VIDEO:
Amy bites into a drumstick, eyes wide with pleasure.
SOUND EFFECT:
Crunching chicken skin.
SILENT SUPER:
BenCol—for deliciously lower cholesterol.
So that’s exactly what they want. In the old days—the eighties—this kind of advertising was referred to as “Two Cs in a K.” Which translates to: two cunts in a kitchen. Although this spot uses only one cunt, the formula is the same.
I can’t believe this is my career: mad-scientist fake butter. And I just wonder whether in five years the FDA will discover (oops!!!) that it causes some sort of untreatable cancer or additional limb growth.
I really wouldn’t have such a problem with it if a normal food company were the manufacturer. I could almost buy into the whole idea if it came from Kraft or General Foods. Except this stuff comes not from the kitchens of Sara Lee but from the labs of a leading drug manufacturer. It doesn’t take quantitative focus groups in shopping malls to know that people do not want an artificial butter from the makers of America’s favorite synthetic broad-spectrum antibiotic agent.
After Olestra (may cause anal leakage), people are a tad suspicious of products that do things that are too good to be true in the natural world.
I tell this to the account people, and they say, “But it comes from trees!”
To which I reply, “Yes, and so does napalm and rubber cement. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to spread them on my English muffin.”
And poor Dim doesn’t understand my resistance. He lumbers into my office like a child with a few canine chromosomes and says, “Hey. Wanna brainstorm? Maybe we can make it rain, he he.”
I tell him, “After my nose stops bleeding.”
This causes his face to fall. “Oh, wow, man. Sorry. Yeah, sure.” And he backs away.
Is it me? Have I finally rotted to the core? It’s like my passion for advertising is directly related to my hair. The more hair I lose, the more I detest my job. My life is going bald.
Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots. I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled. One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.
So I wrote all about the experience of Amtrak. About how you can drink chardonnay ten feet from an alligator or cross the desert in your pajamas. The whole thing turned out to be very Zen, because I really got lost in the writing. When I read the scripts to my boss, who has a habit of shoving his fist through walls, he said, “That’s fucking great shit, man. Cowboy poetry.”
I liked this comment because it made me feel sensitive yet masculine, like a professional