They made their way up Broadway holding bagged coffees. Three adults sucking caffeine through straws, like adult Capri Sun pouches for people who believed that nostalgia could cure depression. The plastic squeaked. Condensation slicked their hands. The bag cut into Eli’s fingers at the edges, the way that cheap plastic does. He pretended to be impressed by the innovation of beverages in a sack, said something approving that sounded almost like an influencer’s paid product review, and privately hated the whole wet situation. Marie kept shifting her grip so the straw wouldn’t geyser. Joel held his like a man carrying a candle through a church who hadn’t done a confession since 1979 and just wanted to blend in.
Broadway tossed a confetti of receipts at their torsos, flyers for comedy shows, and a coupon for free Pilates that would cost two months of rent if you actually followed up. They crossed with the light and did not look at the faces in the cars. Everyone focused on their own worries in this city. Cleaner that way. Again, “if you see something, say something” was simply a suggestion.
Marie said it first, the same way she’d set a lunch meeting with a noncommittal client. “Are we quitting, or what?” Eli admitted he had been interviewing for months. “Dentist appointments,” he added, because adults require cover stories. The lie had been clean. He had even shuffled his calendar invites so they would land at believable times. The dental practice had five different names by now, a whole network of plausible dentists.
“You didn’t actually get a root canal?” Marie asked, already shaking her head. “I bought you a feel-better stuffed duck.” The duck had been yellow and medically cheerful. An object you cannot throw away, but never really want to see.
“It’ll be fine,” Joel said, but ‘fine’ is a room with no furniture, and they used to have a couch, a coffee table, and a Keurig.
- -
They stepped back into the office and were immediately hit with a blast of cold, sobering, conditioned air. The entrance was spotless, but a woman still worked on the windows, scrubbing nothing in particular.
Upstairs, the boardroom was already set for the briefing. On the screen, a lazy deck tossed the words QUENTIN BROOKES, A MAN OF MANY MASKS onto the screen in a simple, sans-serif font.
The Doppelgängers had already made themselves at home. Doppelgänger Joel scrolled his phone; his face was smug and mean-looking. Doppelgänger Eli typed furiously between bites of his sad corporate lunch, a mix of Mediterranean ingredients tossed together in a landfill-friendly bowl that claimed it could be composted under the right circumstances. Doppelgänger Marie had a tidy, slick back and a blazer. She was meditating, or maybe just thinking. Doppelganger Georgia tapped her trackpad, moving elements around in Photoshop.
The presentation kicked off with some backstory. Doppelgänger Joel described Quentin Brookes’ elite family tree. “A nepo baby of sorts,” he stated as the overarching theme.
Doppelgänger Eli went on and on about wealth and how it limited Quentin’s ambition, and how a man born with everything must invent a series of escalating ‘needs.’ The whole thing was essentially a Comedy Central Roast dressed up as a professional case study. There were charts that appeared to show his wealth increasing every time a foreign leader incited war, newspaper clippings like it was 1950, and a handful of clickbait digital headlines from Page Six. Quentin’s live-fast-and-die-young exploits were constantly getting him into trouble. The Doppelgängers stated it as vaguely as possible, using the pussyfooting language of a team that has pitched to global, high-stakes brands and knows sometimes not saying what you mean is a good thing.
What Quentin really needed was a clear POV (point of view). From the POV, they could develop his TOV (tone of voice). What they really meant, in the space between those acronyms, was that an adult man, born into unimaginable wealth and nothing but time on his hands, needed a team of people to write his thoughts and sentences for him.
That was definitely the real assignment at the middle of all this pomp and circumstance: content.
Shape Quentin’s online persona, remove the rough edges that snag on his public perception, and make intelligence a costume Quentin can wear every time he publishes a tweet. Doppelgänger Eli voiced over the real subtext: “Convert the raw material from a dipshit into the public performance of a philosopher.”
Nobody wrote that down.
The content needed would require the team to nudge public perception by small increments until the whole picture had moved and nobody remembered the original. The type of content that says “I am not an idiot” without confessing that anyone ever thought otherwise. Words that look like spontaneity, but were actually drafted in a doc titled DRAFT_v.7final.final.
A content calendar appeared on the next slide. There were icons for drafts, reviews, approvals, and live content. There were lessons from a study on post timing, which told the team when Quentin’s average target audience was most likely to be scrolling their phones and looking to escape their own lives.
The next slide was a tone map. Upper right quadrant: curious, not offensive. Lower left quadrant: empathetic, never apologetic. Upper left quadrant: funny, not flippant. Lower right quadrant: Authentic.
Doppelgänger Marie said “authentic” out loud, and no one batted an eye, which told the real Marie everything she needed to know about how many meetings this tone map had already survived.
Eli sucked coffee through his straw. The presentation was longer than he expected, and he had gone in committed to disengaging. He already knew this process would be arduous. That a single sentence would be reworked 100 times. That he needed to find a way to make himself write like a dipshit, and craft the philosophical musing of a dipshit. He took a loud sip at the exact moment Doppelgänger Eli said “resonance.” He thought to himself: What does that even mean?
Joel was also disengaged. He was distracted by the tiny Sharpie marks on the side of Doppelgänger Georgia’s fingers. His Georgia had the same ones after she did markups on campaign imagery. Looking back, he regretted being so harsh in his feedback when she turned in the markups for review.
“Did you see this acne scar?”
“The model looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.”
“We have to do something about her flyaways.”
Thinking back, any of those campaign images would have worked just as they were.
In the last few slides, the Doppelgängers presented a series of process diagrams. A rainbow of color coding where green arrows pointed at yellow boxes. They walked through a crisis PR appendix that outlined what they would do if Quentin “went off the deep end.”
Eli didn’t write anything down. He was protesting the fact that he had to sit in this room and listen to this drivel. That decision would only shoot him in the foot later when he tried to recall the tone map guidelines from memory. His high school days were wild, and his short-term memory was shot.
When the last THANK YOU slide arrived, everyone’s eyes were glazed over. Time to get the fuck out of here. Chairs scraped, laptops slapped shut. The Doppelgängers had completed their job, and then came the best bit – the job was now someone else’s problem. That’s what happens at ad agencies: ownership evaporates, then condenses on new surfaces without any warning.
In the hallway, the Sonos had been turned back on and was cycling through a playlist called ‘Monday Morning Reset.’ It was Tuesday, 4:22 pm. The office had returned to its usual buzz, like nothing ever happened.
They split off into three directions. Marie would go back to her desk and realize not even she could read her handwriting. Eli would create a Google Doc and name it something dumb like qB_persona_polish_v01. Joel would duck into the stairwell for a few minutes, pacing like a rat trapped in a cage, ruminating on every decision that had led him to work on Quentin Brookes account.
At 4:30, just eight minutes later, their calendars pinged with a new recurring event called QUENTIN STANDUP. Mondays at nine am, thirty minutes. The invite arrived without any context. Not even a loose agenda. Everyone clicked accept on that stupid, rounded-edge button.
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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Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.
Photo Credit: Chris Johnson
"The Sonos had been turned back on, and cycled through a playlist called ‘Reset Monday.’ It was currently Tuesday at 2pm." Im dead.