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 a year before Gordon met his demise. The team had gathered in a freezing boardroom, trying to craft a winning pitch out of thin air. Someone had turned down the thermostat to “keep the mind sharp.” It was probably Joel. The room smelled like sesame oil and lime vape. Empty takeout containers and Diet Pepsi. Just like the cop shows.
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 slumped 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 we absolutely cannot open with.” Eli, the copywriter, stated plainly without looking up. He had that agency thing about him. Too much black layered over black, not enough sun. He rubbed his eyes. Hard.
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, 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 young man. 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. Soften here, drop the opacity.”
The projector threw a slapped-together slide onto the slightly textured white wall. A cliff’s edge with a man as tiny punctuation 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.
They moved in loops around the room. 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 quipped.
“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.
Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.
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Photo Credit: Sean Driscoll
Love this.
This makes me want to join the advertising industry. lol