The Ford Pitch | Part 2
"When you stand on the edge of a cliff, you’re not anxious you might fall, you’re anxious you could jump."
It was one year before Gordon met his fate impacted on the roof of a Ford Truck. The agency team had gathered in a freezing boardroom to late-night their way to a winning concept. Someone had turned down the thermostat to “keep the mind sharp,” it wasn’t helping. The room smelled like sesame oil, plug-in vapes filled with cheap weed, and stale Diet Pepsi. They were picking at boxes of takeout containers using chopsticks 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 10 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.”
“Which, I’m gonna just draw a thick line in the sand here, we absolutely cannot open with.” Eli, the copywriter, stated plainly without looking up. He had that agency thing about him, where it was much too much black layered over black, not enough sun. Probably all designer, but only some people would know that, which was probably the 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. “It’s like, I dunno, Thelma and Louise, except for old men and trucks.”
“That is 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, laptop open, face lit with blue light. She was twenty something, and new enough to still be amazed by Joel’s ideas. On her screen, she slowly penciled in crow’s feet on the stock image of a man who had to be 19 or 20. The Photoshop job had a particular uncanny valley-ness, where the smile lines were a few millimeters off the mark.
Eli leaned over. “It’s not ideal looking.”
“We’re working with what we have,” Joel said. It was his motto for every deck, every pitch. He 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 place down the street didn’t have a two-for-one deal on botox by the unit you could see what I mean.”
The projector threw their fifth-grade state bird-report-looking slide onto the slightly textured white wall. A cliff’s edge with a man as tiny dot at the top, the horizon big and comically vast.
Joel paced. “Ford sells quality vehicles that help get the job done.” He said out loud to himself, rehearsing the lines, not at all delivering them naturally.
They looped around the room, crossed each other awkwardly. From table to screen, from sentence to sentence, from the image of a cliff to the glossy image of a truck. The F-150 Lightning Electric Truck beamed from the slide like a prize they could pick from the Price is Right showcase. “Electric vehicles have started gaining traction among males thirty-five to fifty,” Eli recited. “So there’s a real opportunity for Ford in this space.”
“I wouldn’t buy one.” Joel scoffed.
“Neither would I,” said 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.
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Photo Credit: Sean Driscoll
Love this.
This makes me want to join the advertising industry. lol