At Least He Made an Impression | Part 1
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The glass wasn’t there stop anyone, it was supposed to frame the skyline. The same way the Louvre frames the Mona Lisa, make sure you know this one is important. He’d gotten distracted by that little glass barrier, on this same roof, on a different quiet afternoon when they were workshopping taglines for a new energy drink campaign.
“Chaos in every can", Gordan had pitched, telling the client that the suggestion of danger was important for their fratty college kid demographic. The clients wrote it down in their little black, moleskine notebooks. They always do, and it always had to be moeskin, embossed on the front with the company logo.
This night, Gordon, the agency’s Managing Director, stood on the wrong side of the glass. He was forty-ish, had only minimal Botox, and his gray-haired pompadour flapped violently in the building’s updraft. He gripped the glass with the panic of a private school kid who had only ever fallen into soft things like goose feather pillows or cloud bread or that Vicuña wool throw he always kept neatly folded at the end of his bed. The wind lifted his cuffs, a gentle fling with every gust. The city below him buzzed as it always did, even after a train delay, when someone decides to end it all. But that’s not why he was here.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
The banging was like thunder, far away, then somehow immediately here. Fists on metal. Someone should really oil that stairwell door, he thought for a moment. Nobody ever would.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
He looked back, and they were there, and there was nowhere left to go.
The woman in the pre-war across the street watched the whole thing play out. Gordon’s Santoni dropping into the night. The blackness of the dark swallowing him, a big mouth taking a big, expensive bite. Before she knew it, he was gone. His shins, his knees, his hips, his chest, his head. A sequence of vanishing body parts all swallowed whole.
Gordon didn’t scream. He had learned how to suppress his emotions at boarding school. He had gotten quite good at it by this age. He could take any level of client criticism at any volume and would never crack. It was a skill worthy of a resume bullet point or at least a LinkedIn recommendation.
On the ground, the lookie-loos were already gathering. The Ford was a boxy, older model, positioned perfectly to catch him. The truck’s cab had collapsed in, leaving behind a clean, person-shaped indentation. The windshield had shattered, covering the street in shimmering, ragged glitter. Gordon had done the last thing that he would be paid to do. At least he made an impression.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Monday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
When is part 6 coming?
Love this babes.