Adman

By Rick McGrath

I'm a advertising copywriter. You know, a guy who writes those ads you love to hate. That's OK by me, because you have to remember 'em to hate 'em. That's what I get paid to do. Just sit around and daydream, usually with my partner, Mike, who's an art director. I think up the words and he thinks up the pictures. It's a left-brain, right-brain thing.

It all starts, military-like, with a campaign. We meet with the agency's creative director, and the suit who's assigned to suck up to the client, somebody from the media department, and a flunky from production. Maybe the head suit will also make an appearance. The suit gives us the briefing. It's a load of crap about the product we gotta sell, what's so great about it, who's most likely to buy it, how much dough we can spend producing our ideas, and, most importantly for Mike and I, how long we've got till he tries to sell our concepts to the client. It's all jive marketing crap, and we just sit there and the suit rattles off all his numbers and psychographics and case studies.

What I like to do during these sessions is sit back with my notepad and look out the window south to downtown and the lake. As soon as the suit dishes the dirt I like to let his voice become some kind of background chant in an unknown language, sonorous gibberish that frees me from rational thought. It's like staring at clouds and seeing faces involved in sexual activities. Then I play the game: come up with campaign ideas before he's finished droning. I work on three accounts, so I've got three suits to deal with, this guy's the best for playing this game. He doesn't like the creative guys, can't figure out why we tick, so he likes to write out all the marketing shit on a whiteboard in different colours as he talks out his fantasies of perfect results, whiter whites, higher sales. He can't write and watch us at the same time, and his voice is a low monotone, so I can usually flip into free association fast and easy, and generate a page of ideas before he's filled the board with his usual array of red, blue and yellow squiggles.

If it's a particularly long session, I'll pass my notes over to Mike and he'll rough up some thumbnail ads or billboards or TV sets, and when the suit finishes, turns around and asks us if we have any questions, we'll drop the rough on the table and say, "There's the answer, man, sorry it took us so long." Pisses him right off. Pisses off the Creative Director, too. Not because our ideas aren't hot, but because it blows his whole positioning on what he calls the "integrity of creative", whatever that means. But he's a bigtime guy in the biz, CD of one of Canada's most profitable, and he's gotta justify the 200 large he pulls down every year for telling us what ideas of ours he likes. And doesn't.

My partner Mike's a funky guy, a typical art director with his cowboy boots and flamboyant shirts, and like most of his ilk, he's a regular fanatic about little things like typefaces and how much space is between the letters in print headlines. Like it matters. The cowboy touch is a bit corny for Toronto, de rigeur in Vancouver, but he pays it off with a totally western motif office, with posters of old time movie cowboy stars and Roy Rogers lunchboxes and an Apache rug on one wall. He first went western in Montreal, workin for some Jewish agency, and they started calling him Tex, a name only a few of us use these days, usually when we're drunk, and one time we made him up a big sign for his door framed in a lariat. We did his name in some ugly typeface that looked like rope, which he thought was pretty neat.

So we do the briefing and then Mike and I usually split to a quiet bar, like the Scotland Yard down on Front Street, drink some beer, watch the unemployed play some darts, and bullshit about solutions to our little problem. A lot of people think we get our ideas in a sort of "aha" instant insight. That's crap. Oh yeah, sometimes you get a great idea right outta the blue, but mostly it's just the opposite. Mostly it's fuckin hard work with a brutal deadline and a lot of unimaginative suits breathing down your neck for something, anything, they can flog to the guys who pay the bills. But Mike and I have our standards. True, we play with stuff at the briefing, but that's usually just to tick off the account boys. You wanna know the usual technique? I'll tell you. It's called thinking up every goddam idea that doesn't work and throwing it away.

By a process of elimination you end up with something that works. Pure reductive thinking. Which is probably why we like the Scotland Yard as a pub. Reminds us of Sherlock, who would have made one bitchin adman.

It's nearly noon. The agency is busy, as usual. I'm on a roll, like I usually am between ten and 12. It's one of the times I focus in best during the day. The Macintosh computer is just hummin as I pound through a series of 30 second radio spots for a big bedroom furniture manufacturer. Surprised? Don't be. Most of the stuff we do is the non-glam shit that simply moves product. Gets the asses in the store. I had my fun with this guy last Fall when we picked up the account and I blew them away with my "Great in Beds" campaign for their line of bedroom furniture. Now it's Spring Break sale time, and the stuff is incredibly mundane.

My phone's intercom beeps and Mike's sotto voice creeps into my office.

"Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom," he sings, doing the opening notes to Alzo Sprach Zarathustra.

"Bring the boards, Mike, Booger's waiting."

"Be right over."

Booger's the career-terminating nickname Mike and I coined for Robert R. (Bobby) Hunter, the agency's creative director. We gave him his rather unflattering sobriquet after noticing his odd nervous tick of sniffing while pinching his left nostril between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. At first I thought he was a coke freak, but it's just his way of dealing with the kind of stress you experience when you're not sure you can do your job anymore. He's an old sonofabitch, which can be a problem in this biz, but he was hot in his day, hot when everything was great during the creative breakthrough of the 60s, when the idea was king and great ideas could sell little shitboxes like Volkswagens and big shitheads like Nixon, but he's gone dry over the past eight years. No dreams left in him. Now it's all politics and client lunches and expense accounts. Today he wants to see our ideas, roughed up as TV storyboards, for next September's Burns Wright campaign. No big sweat.

Mike and I head to the meeting room. It's empty. Mike arranges the boards on the easel and I adjust the lights. Bob arrives with Johnson the Suit and a secretary. Booger's dressed in his usual: expensive Holt Renfrew Armani sports jacket, sweater, no shirt, gray slacks, Guccis, and patterned socks. He pulls back a chair and sits at the head of the table. The secretary hovers nearby.

"Greetings, Peter. Michael. Do you wish any coffee?"

"Sure, thanks." I look at Mike and hold up two fingers.

"Frederick?"

"No thanks, Bob, I've got a lunch at 12:30. Don't want to kill my appetite."

"Be a sweetheart, please, Betsy. Three coffees. Thank you."

Johnson finds a chair and opens his file folder. Booger's already fiddling with his nose.

"All right now, gentlemen, let's begin. Frederick, perhaps we should begin with your review."

"Thanks, Bob. Now, as you know, this is our first major campaign for Burns." He gave me a this-is-important look.

"Strategically, Burns Wright Securities is well-placed among the top five Canadian investment dealers, but their retail division has been taking a beating lately, especially from Dominion Uberall and Fry&Howe. Our research shows they're a trusted name, with a good reputation, but the overall market is shrinking and their recall numbers in large centres is very poor. As you know, growth in the securities business is essentially based on brand name identification, and our biggest problem with their primary target group is that they're composed of I like to call the Lost Generation..."

Booger put up his hand to stop him as Betsy brought back the coffees on a tray. "Cream and sugar? Help yourself." Mike and I grabbed a cup each and leaned back as Johnson resumed his well-worn rap.

"Yes, the Lost Generation. Those people who should have been born between 1930 and 1945, but were denied their existence by the fact very few North Americans married during the great depression and the war."

"Guess that sort of makes it the great fuckin digression, eh?", I said. Mike giggled.

Booger gave me a squinty-eyed look.

"Don't give me your depressing humour, please, Peter. We're not here to waste valuable time. This is a short meeting. Frederick, ignore that remark, please. The floor is still yours."

The suit rifled through his notes.

"OK, what we want to present to the client is a double-edged sword. One that will cut to the quick in a hardworking campaign that delivers not only the 55- to 64-year-old males, but impacts favourably on the secondary group, the leading edge of the Baby Boomers. Media wants TV and outdoor; TV for the strong intrusive message, outdoor for the frequency factor. It's got to hit hard, and measure strongly for us to get them to phase two of the buy. That's about it." He put away his notes back in his file folder.

Booger slurped his coffee.

"Thank you Frederick. Succinctly put, as usual." He turned to Mike and I.

"So, chaps, what award-winning double-edged swords do you have to make Frederick happy and still solve all our client's business problems?" Booger leaned back in his chair and pulled out his fat, solid silver Waterman pen, his major affectation. It was filled with red ink.

Mike positioned himself by the easel while I walked around the table. I like to move while I talk. Booger and The Suit stared at the easel and the covered artboards.

"Freddy is right," I began. "This campaign has proven to be a difficult problem. A very difficult problem." I saw Mike smiling out the window. We solved this one after just one joint and three beers.

"Not only have we been asked to deliver our message to people who, in fact, were never born, but we must expect these unborn souls to invest their unlife savings with a firm that may be near death."

The suit was starting to turn the colour of Booger's ink. The Great Man was smiling, but just.

"Yes, Peter, yes, certainly a challenge of historical significance. But Frederick's double-edged sword to overcome this ethereal and oh-too-solid resistance?"

It was the perfect setup, and I silently thanked the BoogerMan for his timing. I turned and looked the suit right in the eye.

"How do we create the perfect sword? The perfect Excalibur? With mythological significance, of course! Selling money is tricky, but we do have one huge advantage; the one great emotional button shared by all our target groups. The button we can push right up their retentive assholes. Their neurotic associations with money. Essentially, it boils down to two sides of the same coin: fear and greed. The neurotic fear of losing what you are comfortable having, and the neurotic greed of not having enough to be comfortable. The trick is to flog fear to the older guys, who are already cramming for their finals and can't afford not to speculate, and flog greed to the Boomers, who want more, and they want it now. I propose we do this with a historical theme, by comparing the financial genius of Burns Wright to great moments of genius throughout western civilization. Mike?"

Mike took down the first board, flipped up the covering sheet, and laid it on the table before Booger and The Suit.

"This first spot is called 'Eureka', and it's based on Archimedes' famous discovery of the displacement principle. We open with a long shot of Archie in the can, getting ready for his bath. The voice over sets up the premise that all throughout time, certain genius types made important discoveries by having a special kind of superior awareness, then after a series of cuts of toy boats floating in Archie's tubwater we hear 'Eureka' and Archie runs down the hall holding a wooden boat covered with soap. We end with a retired couple lounging in their Florida swimming pool.

The V/O reminds us that Burns Wright sees significance in situations others take for granted, and you can profit from that kind of insight. We've done the same thing for Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Each with a different target group ending. Well, whaddya think? Great, eh."

Booger looked at Johnson. The little Suit was obviously pleased.

"Very good, boys, very good. I like it. Better still, I think the client will like it. Do you have it for billboards, too?"

Mike flipped over his last artboard. It showed Newton with an apple and the Burns logo. The headline read: The ability to catch what others miss.

"Yes, good. Not too specific, not too obscure. Bob, you approve, of course?"

Booger relinquished his nostril and nodded.

"Certainly, Frederick, we've worked up a real winner here. We've done an initial costing and I think we can bring these spots in, with good talent, for about a hundred thousand each. Well within budget. When do you want to present?"

"Sooner the better. I can get research to pretest them in a focus group next week, then we'll tidy them up and make the pitch. Just one problem, though."

"Oh? What's that?" Booger's hand started creeping up to his nose again.

"The Einstein spot. Could have problems with that. Who really knows what he was talking about, and, well, I'm not sure if the client, well, ah...."

"If the client what?", I said.

"If the client wants to be associated with a Jewish scientist. Could be too controversial. Anyway, think it over. There's lots of other big name scientific guys out there. Maybe somebody Canadian."

"Good idea", Booger added.

"Jacques Cartier", Mike suggested.

"Norman Bethune", I said.

"No Frenchies, not with the Quebec situation", Johnson said. "We'll leave the commie doc alone, too." He looked at his watch. "OK, guys, twelve fifteen, gotta run. Work on it. Maybe one of those guys who cured diabetes." He stuffed his files in his folder and disappeared into the hallway.

Booger stood and adjusted his jacket. "Nice idea, crummy presentation. Why do you chaps persist in mocking Frederick so? He's not a bad suit, really. Gets along very well with the clients. Could be a man to watch."

Mike and I both made like we were hiding our watches.

"Enough, enough. You heard the man. Next week for pretesting. Mike, dress the boards up a bit and we'll give them to Frederick Monday afternoon. Cheers, boys, have a good weekend."

Mike looked at me like he wishes he was the writer, and I smile back with the grin of someone who doesn't have to do any more work that day.

"Well, so much for the usual Friday lunch", Mike sighs. "And I had it all set up with that new Bimbo in trafficking. Told her I would do her portrait. In the nude. She said OK. Shit."

"Yeah, man, that's the way the lunch breaks. Too bad."

"So what are you gonna do?"

"I'm beating the traffic outta here. Heading north for a very quiet weekend of solid, solitary R&R. Gonna do some writing, think about the world's problems."

"Come back with some solutions, eh? See ya later. Have a good time."

"I will Mikey, I will. Ciao."

I grabbed my coat and headed for the elevator. It was still late winter here in Toronto, the days are bright and cold, but the countryside has the best dreams for me and this cottage I'm borrowing is supposed to be one beautiful retreat.



© 1990 Rick McGrath