by Peter Barry
At that point he leapt up from his chair, then promptly sat down again. Hugh was always of the opinion that he liked to perform such disconnected, inconsequential actions in order to show those who were with him just how youthful and spontaneous he was. But it could also possibly have been to illustrate some bizarre fantasy only he could ever fathom. Lynne brought in a tray of coffee, and left. They were expected to pour their own. Being the most junior person present, this task fell to Hugh.
‘The problem, as I see it, is that the client has already bought the previous campaign, done by Miss Bricknell, and loves it. Am I right?’
‘Not sure that he exactly loves it,’ growled Murray, ‘but he bought it.’
The truth was that Murray would have little if any idea what the client thought of the campaign, the work having been created, presented and sold by Fiona and Hugh. Hugh treated the account as his own fiefdom, not for selfish reasons, but so that his two bosses wouldn’t mess things up. However, the group account director liked to maintain the illusion that he knew what was going on. It was, after all, one of the many accounts he was nominally in charge of.
Russell, in the process of raising his coffee cup – which he held by its base rather than the handle, as if afraid of being thought effeminate – paused in mid-air. He looked at his two employees, not as if he believed they might have something worthwhile to say, but as if he was considering eating them and his only problem was to decide which one to devour first. This perception was reinforced by the fact he was continually moistening his lips with his tongue, perhaps with the expectation that he would find the meal especially tasty. ‘It’s important, Murray. Does he love it or not?’
Murray Wheeler still sprawled at the end of the sofa like a boxer whose trainer has just thrown in the towel. His limbs were loose, his eyes half-closed, and his shoulders were at the same height as his head. He raised his half-closed, bloodshot eyes to the ceiling as if his mind was intent on ascending to a higher plane, and furrowed his forehead as if he was deep in thought. And he did all of this in silence, a silence that seemed interminable. Hugh’d seen this performance so many times before, he was no longer impressed. It simply meant Murray enjoyed having an audience and, like any good actor, appreciated the importance of the Pinteresque pause, of keeping his audience in suspense. The seconds ticked by …
Hugh, bored of waiting, said, ‘It strikes me as somewhat unprofessional to go back to Bauer with a new campaign, if I understand you right, Russell, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’
The managing director, wholly intent on studying Murray, waiting for him to descend back to earth and divulge his thoughts, was taken by surprise by Hugh’s interruption. He turned to him, ‘Why?’
‘We presented Dieter with a campaign, and he’s happy with it. So why are we suddenly changing our minds?’
Murray, scrambling back down from his lofty mental zone, said, ‘We’re not changing our minds, Hugh. We’re considering – possibly – giving Dieter another option. That’s all. It strikes me, on the contrary, as being very professional.’
‘I reckon it’ll look as if we don’t know what we think. Worse, it could look as if we’re treating the client like he’s an idiot.’
Hugh hesitated to say, feeling it might almost be embarrassing to point out such a seismic shift, that he and Russell were probably in the process of lining up on opposing sides, and behind the advertising philosophies they didn’t normally support. Although Russell was a follower of the non-creative, hard sell school of advertising, frequently making comments like, ‘Clients don’t like clever-clever ideas’ and, ‘the most creative thing those in the creative department ever do is fill in their expense forms,’ it seems he’d suddenly hired a creative director from a top UK agency, who was therefore likely to be a follower of witty headlines, tongue-in-cheek commercials and advertising that takes the mickey out of the product or company it’s promoting. Hugh guessed his managing director was now jumping on an imaginary bandwagon, possibly wanting to look good in front of his mates at barbecues (‘Oh Russell, so you did that advertising campaign! I just love those commercials!’), or possibly because he was tired of being considered a Philistine, the Babbitt of the advertising world, a charge frequently laid at his doorstep by critical media. Hugh, on the other hand, although a regular supporter of work that was creative, witty or clever, was not supporting it on this occasion. He was a pragmatist, as well as a good businessman. He knew his client and knew how far Dieter could be pushed. The Bauer client had agreed to Fiona’s campaign, and for him, creatively, it had been a big step. He was unlikely to be ready to take another big step straight away, without a pause to catch his breath.
Murray was speaking: ‘It’s not in Dieter’s nature to wax lyrical about any campaign that’s put before him. He’s a fencesitter, Russ. He can be persuaded one way or the other.’
Hugh was annoyed with Murray, but realised it wouldn’t be sensible to argue with him right now, in front of the managing director. He had to be careful. Murray had scarcely been involved in the last campaign, the one he was now busy ditching so as to stay onside with Russell, and Hugh knew he would avoid getting involved in any new campaign if that was what Russell decided was required. Not only was he lazy, but he’d wait and see how it went down with the client before deciding if he would jump on board and claim it as his own.
‘I’m against throwing out a campaign that’s just been approved. It strikes me as crazy. It’s asking for trouble. And I’m sorry, but I also disagree with you, Murray, when you say that Dieter doesn’t love Fiona’s campaign. I believe he does. He feels good about it. He also feels brave buying it.’
‘By his standards, he is,’ growled Murray.
‘And that’s exactly my point. We can only push him so far. Clients come to Alpha because they want a certain style of advertising: big product shots, prominent logos, possibly even a shot of the chairman or the factory. Dieter’s no different.’
‘Becoming a little cynical in our old age, aren’t we?’
‘That’s the kind of advertising we believe in as an agency, surely, Russell? And that’s the kind of advertising we produce. It’s why we have the Bauer account, aren’t I right? If Dieter wanted creative, trend-setting advertising, he’d give his account to some hot shop or other. I suggest the new creative director gets to know our client before pitching in with new work. Why not wait until next year to produce his own campaign for Bauer?’
Russell nodded, as if giving Hugh’s argument some thought. He turned to Murray. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘I hear everything Hugh’s saying, but I still agree with you.’
‘And what am I saying?’
‘I understand you to be saying that we have to move forward, that we should give Simon a go. See what he comes up with.’
‘I can’t see that we have too much to lose.’
The three men lapsed into silence. Murray stirred sugar into his second cup of coffee. Hugh watched, almost mesmerised as Russell tapped his Mont Blanc pen on the coffee table, first one end, then the other, without pause. Finally, he spoke.
‘We need to push the envelope on this one, that’s my feeling. Here’s what we’ll do. I want you to tell Dieter that the agency wants to see if it can produce an even better campaign for him. Don’t damn the existing campaign, which we might still end up running. Emphasise that this extra work won’t cost him a cent, even though it will –’ Raising his eyes as if stating the obvious, before continuing, ‘And that we’re only doing it because we want to make sure we’ve got it absolutely one hundred per cent right, and because we’re out-and-out professionals. You know the kind of stuff.’
He stood up, but didn’t move away from behind his desk. ‘In the meantime, I’ll speak to Simon. We’ll give him two weeks to come up with a new campaign, something he doesn’t think is a crock of shit. We’ll present the new campaign to the client, and Dieter will be free to make his choice. That should keep both parties happy.’
Hugh
didn’t believe this was the right way to run one of the agency’s most prestigious pieces of business, certainly one of its oldest, but felt he’d done his best.
As they walked down the corridor together, Hugh made what he suspected would be a futile attempt to persuade Murray to talk to Dieter. But true to form, his boss pleaded pressure of work and told Hugh he had to go and see the German marketing director and sell him on the idea of a new campaign. It was likely Murray could see the landmines ahead and had no particular desire to put himself on the same path.
‘I think it would be better coming from you, Murray. He’ll take the suggestion more seriously.’
‘Too much on my plate right now, Hugh.’
More like too many lunches to attend, too many golf courses to play.
‘You believe far more strongly than I do that this is the right way to go. So it would carry more weight coming from you.’
‘No can do, mate. Trust you implicitly, needless to say.’
Hugh realised, as he walked on alone, that he’d been wasting his time looking to his immediate boss for any support. He was torn anyway. He’d always been keen to run the Bauer account, and was now being given the opportunity to do just that. It was also true that the only time anything went wrong was when other people got involved. When he was left alone, without interference, everything ran smoothly. I wonder why that is, he thought, and shook his head in disbelief at what he perceived as the stupidity of his superiors.
5
Back in his office, he found Geoff Wicks sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, his hands clasped across his stomach. He regarded Hugh with a sardonic smile, almost as if he wished to convey the fact he knew something Hugh didn’t. Being the agency gossip, he probably did. Hugh tried not to look as if he was surprised by this unexpected visit. ‘Good morning, Geoff.’
Everyone in the agency called Geoff ‘Wicksy,’ except for Hugh. He had a deep-seated loathing for the practice of what he called ‘the Y Brigade,’ those in the business – and they were numerous – who insisted on adding ‘y’ to the Christian names and surnames of those they either liked or wished to be on good terms with. Wicks was one of the main perpetrators of this lexical obscenity.
‘Hughsy, what’s up?’ Wicks was happy enough to reply once Hugh had taken the first conversational step, but was seemingly unwilling to donate one word more. He reclined on the sofa very much in the manner of a crocodile reclining on a river bank, looking relaxed, even half asleep, but in fact waiting to pounce on anyone who might wander by too close. There was something cunning about the man, something wily. He was pale skinned, pasty, almost sickly, and smelt of cigarettes.
Hugh answered his visitor’s question with a noncommittal, ‘Not much.’ From long experience he knew how Wicks drew information out of people by saying very little, as if by creating a vacuum for his listeners, they then felt compelled to fill it. It often struck him, after a conversation with Geoff, that he’d given everything but received nothing in exchange. He would then promise not to make the mistake of falling into that particular trap again … and immediately do so. He determined now that if Wicks wanted to talk to him, that was fine, he’d listen, but it wouldn’t go beyond listening. He succumbed within seconds.
‘Finding you comfortably ensconced in my office obviously means you’re under the impression I was also given the flick on Friday, Geoff, and that you’re here to appraise my furniture, to see if there’s anything worth taking.’
‘Almost got it in one, Hughsy. I was actually trying to work out if it was worth moving in here myself.’
‘Wouldn’t put it past you.’
There was a prolonged silence. Wicks continued to smile at him with a superior air, while Hugh closed his briefcase and placed it beneath his desk as he sat down. He would carry on as if Wicks wasn’t in the room. His visitor, however, finally appreciated it was going to be up to him to move the conversation on from the banter stage. ‘So what did you make of Friday?’
Hugh should have foreseen this: after all, what else was there to talk about? He frowned. ‘I’m not sure what to make of it. I gather ten or eleven people lost their jobs. What can one say?’
‘It was thirteen.’ Said with finality.
‘Lucky!’ He grimaced. ‘You’d know better than me. It’s very sad.’ He grimaced a second time: ‘sad’ was not a word Wicks would be able to easily identify with. He sighed. He again felt the disquiet he’d been experiencing all weekend, sympathy for those who’d lost their jobs mixed in with guilt that he’d been fortunate enough to survive. There was relief in there somewhere, too. The rumours about redundancies had been circulating for a long time, and the atmosphere in the agency for many weeks had been one of paranoia. People had spoken of little else. Staff had begun to resemble those small prizes in the bottom of the glass boxes at funfairs, with pincers hanging from a crane device falling to randomly grip and pluck one of them into the air. Who would be selected next? The fact that thirteen people had been – which euphemism could be expected to cause the least amount of distress here? – let go on Friday had only made the situation worse. It was hard to remain relaxed, even harder to concentrate on work. The clients were also getting edgy about what was going on in the agency, and already beginning to ask questions.
‘Sad about Fi.’ Trying to claim a friendship that had never been there because he knew Hugh and Fiona were great friends.
Hugh ignored the bait. ‘It was.’
His colleague rolled his eyes around the office as if he expected to see nothing of interest there, then changed tack. ‘Did you hear about Lucy?’ (The ‘Y Brigade’ happily delete the ’y’ when it is already present, which always struck Hugh as both perverse and bloody-minded.)
He hadn’t heard about Lucy, and wasn’t even convinced he wanted to. ‘What about her?’
‘She only started her holiday last week, and it seems HR called her mother, got the phone number of where Lucy was staying in Italy and rang her to say not to bother to come back.’ Geoff, like a vulture hopping eagerly towards the carrion, was warming to the subject at hand.
‘That’s hardly the message one wants to hear when lying on the shores of the Mediterranean, basking in the sun.’
This longer than expected response seemingly raised in Wicks the expectation that more was to follow, that, if he could hold on, the floodgates might open. But it was followed by silence. Wicks waited, mouth half open, for a further conversational morsel, failing to appreciate that Hugh wasn’t the kind of person who was keen to discuss the whys and wherefores of all the people who’d lost their jobs on Friday. ‘Unlikely to make her holiday more enjoyable, that’s for sure,’ was the modest contribution cast up from the couch, and intended to tempt.
Hugh knew Wicks would be spending his morning visiting as many offices as possible, gathering stories about what had happened to whom on Friday, who’d said what, and why. Hugh’s office must have been one of the first on the list. He wanted no part of it but, as usual, felt obliged by his visitor’s reticence to say something.
‘A lot of those people will have planned to go away over the Easter break. It’s hardly a good time.’
‘They had to get rid of someone, Hughsy. We’ve lost too much business.’
Hugh appreciated this was the logical conclusion, the accepted way for management to deal with lost business, yet it didn’t lessen his feeling of unease when people lost their jobs. He felt and understood the misery it caused, and always wondered if there was not a better way to ride a business downturn. Why couldn’t the agency carry a few surplus staff until they put on new business? Somewhere, once, he’d read that during the Depression Proctor & Gamble had a policy of not firing any of their staff anywhere in the world. That had impressed him. To consider the welfare of your staff when it was uneconomic to do so, that was the right way, the decent way to handle things. It was humanitarian, but it was probably also old fashioned. Today, everything had to be sacrificed for the bottom line, and that included p
eople.
‘In my book, many of them deserved to go. Without question. Didn’t pull their weight.’
It went through Hugh’s mind that Wicks hardly deserved to keep his job, yet somehow he’d avoided the cull. It was probably because he played the game. He was one of those people who make sure they’re seen rushing around the corridors of a company at different times of the day, clutching folders or reports and shouting out to everyone they run into that they’d love to stop and chat but they’re too busy right now, because management or a client or someone very important was screaming for this information that would, at the very least, save the agency’s most valued piece of business – possibly even the planet – before retreating back to their office to continue with the personal phone calls, playing Solitaire and surfing the World Wide Web.
Hugh was irritated by his visitor’s feet resting on his coffee table. He felt it displayed an unacceptable degree of complacency and self-satisfaction, neither of which, in his opinion, were deserved. ‘That’s a little harsh, isn’t it?’
‘It’s true.’
It was true that Geoff had his supermarket account pretty well tied down, if only by means of regular and prolonged drinking sessions with the client, so his job was likely to be more secure than most. In Hugh’s opinion, this was not deserved. But companies – and agencies were no exception – were notorious for getting rid of the wrong people.
Wicks was saying, ‘Lucky bastard, aren’t I, being in retail? Not as glamorous as your side of the business of course, but supermarkets are never going to stop spending. That’s the bottom line. Everyone has to eat, Hughsy, even when times are tough, even in the middle of a recession.’
