Two floors down and one year earlier the North & Main team had gathered in a freezing boardroom to develop a winning pitch. Someone had turned the thermostat down to “keep the mind sharp,” but it wasn’t helping. The room smelled like sesame oil, plug-in USB vapes filled with cheap weed, and flat Diet Pepsi. They were picking at boxes of takeout containers with chopsticks, cosplaying like they were on a cop show on network TV.
Joel, the creative director, wore a ripped NYU sweatshirt over pinstripe dress pants, the uniform of a man who believed in dressing the part, but only until 5 pm. His pomade was failing. His hair looked like the fins on those orcas who murder their trainers in captivity. He stood in front of the projector, really overdoing the hand motions, repeating a sentence that he had already fallen in love with hours earlier:
“Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘when you stand on the edge of a cliff, you’re not anxious you might fall, you’re anxious you could jump.’” Joel nodded to himself; he loved how it felt edgy enough to feel jarring but set up the creative in a way that felt relevant.
“I’m gonna just draw a thick line in the sand here. We absolutely cannot open with that.” Eli, the copywriter, responded plainly, without looking up from the document he had open on his computer. He had that agency thing about him, where he had layered black over black, over black and paired that with never having set foot in the sun. His t-shirt was from some obscure designer, but only a keen eye would know that, which was really the whole point.
Marie, the strategist, had gone past tired all the way to overly positive. About everything. She rolled back in her chair.
“I think I’m following,” she murmured to nobody in particular. “It’s like, I dunno, Thelma and Louise, except for old men and trucks.”
“That’s the consumer, I guess. Men, trucks, the American dream, but somehow without any guns. Oh, and the damn thing is electric,” sighed Eli.
Georgia, the art director and Joel’s right hand, sat across the table. Her laptop blasted her face with blue light, the kind that interrupts your circadian rhythm, but makes your skin look beautiful and glowy. She was twenty and new enough to still be amazed by Joel’s ideas. On her screen, she worked diligently on a stock image, penciling in individual crow’s feet on the image of a man who had to be 18 or 19. The Photoshop job had a particularly uncanny-valley-like quality, where the smile lines were a few millimeters off the mark.
Eli leaned over to inspect Georgia’s work. “I mean...” he searched for the right critical, but not too harsh words, “...it’s not ideal looking.”
“We’re working with what we have,” Joel quickly barked back. That was Joel’s motto. For every deck, every pitch. It actually made him quite good at his job. Nothing was precious; everything was temporary; there was always a new project, a new client, a new creative ask to crack. Joel leaned over Georgia’s shoulder, forced a small smile, then motioned in the air to show her.
“Look where they would naturally form.” he tried his best to force crow’s feet to show up on his face. “If the med spa two doors down didn’t have a two-for-one deal on Botox, you could see what I mean.”
Joel turned back to the slide projected on the wall. It was currently rivaling the quality level of a fifth grader’s state bird report. They hadn’t committed to purchasing the stock image, so it was plastered with squiggly lines to prevent theft. A scenic cliff’s edge with a tiny dot of a man at the top, the horizon big and comically vast.
Joel started to pace the room. “Halloway sells quality vehicles that help get the job done.” He said it out loud to himself, rehearsing the lines, not at all delivering them naturally.
Eli joined him, and the pair looped around the room rehearsing bizarre choreography that would hopefully not make the final cut.
“Electric vehicles have started gaining traction among men thirty-five to fifty,” Eli recited, “so there’s a real opportunity for Halloway in this space.”
The slide switched, and suddenly the Halloway Dynamo Lightning Electric Truck beamed from the wall, positioned like a prize you could pick from the Price is Right showcase.
“I wouldn’t buy one,” Joel scoffed.
“Neither would I,” shrugged Eli.
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, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
Photo Credit: Sean Driscoll
Love this.
This makes me want to join the advertising industry. lol