False Advertising

by Dianne Blacklock

  At one o’clock Myles clapped his hands together and announced it was time for lunch.

  ‘Okay,’ said Helen. ‘So we’ll meet back here in half an hour, or an hour, what would you prefer?’

  He frowned. ‘I would prefer to take you to lunch.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m taking you to lunch.’

  ‘That’s really not necessary, Myles,’ said Helen, feeling flustered. ‘It’s very kind, but you’re a busy man and I’ve taken up half your day as it is.’

  He looked at her directly. ‘I cleared the whole day, and I made reservations for lunch.’

  Helen blinked. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just don’t understand why you’re doing all this,’ she said carefully. She didn’t want to seem churlish, but at the same time she couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable. ‘I’m only relieving Gemma while she’s on maternity leave.’

  ‘There’s a good deal more to it than that,’ he reminded her. ‘I was under the impression you’ll be job-sharing for quite some time, Helen, indefinitely perhaps.’

  ‘Sure, but . . .’ Helen didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Listen, I’m getting hungry,’ said Myles. ‘Can we continue this over a plate of food?’

  As they were now running late for their reservation, they caught a taxi down towards the Quay, stopping outside a tower building. A doorman showed them into the foyer, from where they caught a lift to the penthouse floor. Myles led her into the kind of restaurant Helen had only seen in magazines on her rare visits to the hairdressers. The big glossy expensive magazines. And this was a big, glossy expensive restaurant. Helen felt immediately self-conscious and totally out of place. She and David had rarely gone to restaurants. Even on special occasions David baulked at ‘lining the pockets of overpaid celebrity cooks, while their underpaid underlings did all the work’.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Myles asked, noticing her apprehensive expression as she studied the menu.

  She looked up at him, a little dazed.

  ‘The veal’s good,’ he suggested. ‘Or it was last time I was here.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m sure it still is,’ said Helen. ‘But I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘Oh.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, the seafood’s also good.’

  Helen tried not to smile. ‘Fish aren’t vegetables.’

  Myles looked across his menu at her. ‘So you’re one of those vegans?’

  She shook her head. ‘I eat dairy and eggs, just not the animals themselves.’

  He seemed interested. ‘Is it a moral or a health choice, or something else? That’s if you don’t mind me asking,’ he added.

  ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said, but she wasn’t sure how to answer. David had introduced her to vegetarianism. It hadn’t been such a hardship: she’d never been a big meat-eater anyway, and after he moved in it was just easier to cook the one meal. However, she became more serious about it when she fell pregnant with Noah; if she was going to keep it up she had to do it properly, so she had to believe it was worth doing. What she discovered through her research about the way animals were raised for food was enough to make her hair stand on end, and more than enough to convince her. But Helen had never been one to force her views on anyone.

  ‘I do have some ethical concerns about the way animals are treated,’ she said finally.

  ‘Such as?’

  Helen gave him a faint smile. ‘I don’t think we should have this conversation over lunch.’

  They ordered and the waiter took away their menus. Myles leaned forward on the table. ‘Okay, back at the office I interrupted you. What were you saying?’

  Helen gathered her thoughts. ‘I guess it’s just that I’m getting the impression that this job might be a bigger deal than I was led to believe.’

  ‘PA to the managing director is a big deal,’ said Myles plainly. ‘It’s an important role with a lot of responsibility. I don’t know who led you to believe otherwise.’

  ‘Well, Gemma, of course,’ said Helen. ‘She made out she was little more than a glorified receptionist. She must have been playing it down so she wouldn’t freak me out. But seriously, I’m worried I might be in a bit over my head.’

  Myles considered her for a moment before he spoke. ‘First of all, I wouldn’t have offered you the job if I didn’t think you could do it, Helen. That would be a waste of my time and yours. I’m confident you’ve got the skills, but not to put too fine a point on it, as I told you the other day, it’s more important to me to have someone I can trust.’

  ‘But you don’t know me.’

  ‘I know all I need to know,’ he said, folding his arms. ‘You have beliefs and conviction and ethics, and I admire that.’

  ‘None of that sounds like essential criteria for a job in the advertising industry.’

  Myles laughed. ‘See what I mean? I like that, when you say what you think. I feel as though I can count on you to be honest with me.’ He became thoughtful. ‘In fact, I’d appreciate your input on something when we get back to the office.’ He took out his phone. ‘Would you excuse me for a second?’

  Input? What kind of input could Helen possibly hope to contribute? She was definitely in over her head.

  ‘Gemma, it’s me.’ Myles was speaking into his phone. ‘Could you reschedule my meeting with Josh Macklin? Tell him I’ll come by his office in about an hour . . . thanks.’

  He snapped his phone shut as their meals arrived.

  ‘How’s the time going for you?’ he asked. ‘This meeting won’t take long, and then HR need you to stop by and sign some papers – will that give you plenty of time to pick up your son?’

  ‘Oh, sure, that’s fine,’ Helen said vaguely. He really was an incredibly thoughtful person. And he listened to her. Helen wasn’t used to having her opinions treated with such respect. She honestly didn’t know what Gemma’s problem was.

  Myles picked up his cutlery. ‘How old is your little boy?’

  ‘He’s four.’

  ‘Does he have a name?’

  Helen smiled. ‘Noah.’

  ‘Very fitting for the son of an animal rights advocate.’

  ‘I’m not exactly an advocate. I just don’t eat them.’

  He grinned. ‘So do you have a picture of Noah?’

  Helen was flummoxed. ‘No, no, I don’t. Not on me.’ So much for honesty. Of course she had a picture, but it was of David and Noah together; she wasn’t about to show Myles that. Instead she focused on her roasted vegetable stack, which was looking rather precarious. She wasn’t sure how to attack it.

  ‘I hope I’m not being too personal,’ Myles said carefully, ‘and please say if it’s none of my business . . .’

  Helen looked across at him warily. She didn’t want to lie again, after everything he’d said about honesty, but she wasn’t necessarily ready to tell the truth, not the whole truth, anyway.

  ‘I take it Noah’s father’s not around any more?’

  She couldn’t have said it better herself.

  ‘That’s right,’ Helen confirmed. ‘So do you have any children, Myles?’

  He took a moment to catch up with her, she’d sidestepped his question so swiftly. ‘Oh, no, no kids. Never married.’

  She nodded, managing to slice away some eggplant without causing a landslide.

  ‘Not that I’m against it or anything,’ he was quick to add. ‘In fact, I came close to getting married, once. Very close.’

  ‘Oh?’ Helen raised an eyebrow. ‘Almost a doctor, almost a husband, you’ve had a lot of near misses.’

  ‘Mm,’ he frowned. ‘Never really thought about it that way before. I wonder if it’s a pattern?’

  Helen decided to steer the conversation clear of the personal and ask him about work instead. ‘So how did an almost-doctor end up in advertising? It’s quite a flip, isn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘I suppose it is. But when I decided to leave medicine, I knew I was going to need some kind of bridging q
ualification to get into the regular workforce. So I did an MBA, and afterwards I joined a firm of management consultants. With my background they tended to place me with pharmaceutical companies at first, but over time I gradually spread my wings, requested different projects, built up some broader experience, and here I am.’

  ‘So you’re not with the management consultants any more?’ asked Helen.

  ‘No, I am. But I’m contracted to Bailey’s. I was doing some work in their Melbourne office when things almost went belly-up here. They didn’t have anyone groomed to take over at this level, so they asked me to step in and clean up the mess.’

  ‘So you don’t have a background in advertising at all?’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t need it really, not for what I have to do.’

  Helen nodded faintly, moving her food around on the plate, the stack long since disintegrated. She felt incredibly naïve; she had no idea of the workings of the corporate world, any more than she knew how to eat a vegetable stack without it collapsing.

  ‘So what made you leave nursing, Helen?’ Myles asked after a while.

  She wasn’t expecting that question. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said you were a nurse?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure. I’m a nurse. Or I was a nurse.’ She hadn’t really thought about it like that. She wasn’t sure you could ever stop being a nurse.

  ‘So why did you leave?’ Myles asked again.

  Helen took a breath. ‘It’s difficult with a young child . . . the shiftwork.’ She shrugged, as though that was all there was to it. ‘You didn’t say why you left medicine,’ she said, hitting the ball right back to him.

  Myles dropped his gaze, staring down at his plate for a long moment before answering quietly. ‘I just wasn’t cut out for it.’

  The subject stayed firmly on Bailey’s terrain after that, as Myles attempted to fill her in on the rest of its operations. He was very thorough. Helen was sure she wouldn’t remember everything, and even more sure she didn’t need to. So she just listened, and nodded at the appropriate times, and asked the occasional question. When they finished lunch they headed back to Bailey’s and directly to Josh Macklin’s office.

  ‘This is Helen Chapman,’ said Myles. ‘My new PA, part-time at least,’ he added, bowing his head slightly in deference to Helen.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Josh said, shaking her hand.

  ‘Josh is in research,’ Myles explained to Helen. ‘He’s responsible for identifying new trends, hopefully before anyone else does. So what have you got for me, Josh?’

  ‘In-game advertising,’ Josh announced portentously. ‘It’s the next big thing, and it’s going to have to be integrated into every campaign targeting eighteen to thirty-four year old males from now on.’

  ‘In-game, you mean video games?’ Myles asked.

  Josh nodded. ‘Playstation and Xbox primarily, as well as their online gaming. The demographic we’re looking at here has a mean age of twenty-eight, and they’re not watching TV any more – as little as half an hour a night according to some estimates – but they are playing video games for two hours every night. The market’s increasing every year but it’s been largely untapped till now. Independent analysts are forecasting it’ll be worth seven hundred million dollars a year by 2010 in the US alone, but the guys who are pioneering in-game advertising claim it could be as high as two billion.’

  ‘Well, they would,’ Myles remarked.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Josh. ‘The guy who came up with it is Australian actually. He noticed there were all these fake ads in the background on video games, and wondered why they couldn’t be genuine ads for real products.’

  ‘So you mean things like billboards and signage?’ said Myles.

  Josh nodded. ‘And pizza boxes, TV screens, soft-drink cans, you name it. Anything that’s branded.’

  Helen’s mind boggled.

  ‘But what’s really interesting,’ Josh went on, ‘is that the software will enable advertising to be downloaded into a game while someone’s playing online. So for example, it can be made geographically specific. And it won’t end there: there’s no reason why local advertising can’t be slotted into the background in films and TV shows.’

  Because too much advertising was obviously never enough, Helen groaned silently.

  ‘So what does this mean for us?’ Myles asked Josh.

  ‘The Australian guy sold out to Microsoft and, as usual, they have the market sewn up,’ Josh explained. ‘Not that there isn’t room to move, if it’s going to be as big as they predict. I reckon Charlie Lambert would love to get his teeth into something like this. Whatever, the teams have to be made aware that this is the future: ads will have to be designed to work within a game scenario. We’re losing traditional markets – the bulk of the advertising dollar has always gone to TV, but the next generation is turning off in droves. The challenge is going to be how to stay in their faces.’

  ‘So, what do you think?’ asked Myles after they had left Josh’s office and started along the corridor.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Helen. ‘What do you think about what Josh had to say in there?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about all that.’

  ‘But I’m asking you what you think, Helen,’ Myles persisted, pausing to look directly at her. ‘What was your gut reaction to what he was saying?’

  Helen took a breath. ‘Honestly? I think it’s terrible.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She sighed. ‘Aren’t kids bombarded with enough advertising as it is?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what Josh said, Helen? This is eighteen to thirty-four year olds we’re talking about. They’re adults, they’re big enough to look after themselves.’

  ‘But do we really need more advertising?’

  They arrived at the lift bay and Myles pressed the Up button. ‘From a business point of view, of course we do,’ he said wryly. ‘But the ads were there already, remember; they’re simply making them genuine.’

  Doors opened behind them and they turned around and walked inside the lift.

  ‘Then will it make any difference?’ said Helen.

  Myles looked curiously at her. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, slipping his security card in and out of the slot before pressing one of the buttons.

  ‘Do you really think subliminal advertising works?’ she asked. ‘I’ve heard companies pay a fortune for product placement in movies, that kind of thing. But just because George Clooney wears a certain brand of watch, do you really think people are going to rush out and buy it? I wouldn’t even notice it.’

  ‘Me either,’ Myles agreed. ‘But we’re not the ones they’re trying to snag.’

  ‘We’re not?’

  He shook his head. ‘You and I are what’s known in the business as “lost causes”. There are certain people who wouldn’t be swayed whatever the hook. So they don’t even try to catch us. There are plenty of other fish in the ocean who’ll swallow anything.’

  Myles was a ‘lost cause’ and yet he headed up an advertising agency? Helen was bamboozled.

  ‘What about the kids, sorry, the eighteen to thirty-fours playing the games?’ she asked. ‘They must have tuned out the ads in the background if they’re all fake. What makes them think they’re going to tune in again?’

  Myles nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s a good point.’

  Helen felt a little twinge, like a tiny surge of pride. She’d actually made a valid point? ‘You know the streetscapes you always see of New York, Tokyo, places like that?’ She was on a roll now. With all the neon lights?’

  ‘Sure. Broadway, Times Square, Shinjuku . . .’

  Helen realised that Myles had probably seen them for real. ‘I’ve only seen them in pictures,’ she admitted, ‘but can you honestly say people distinguish each single ad in that whole sea of neon? And even if they did, is it going to make them rush out and buy the thing anyway?’

  ‘It’s not as straightforward as that, Helen. It’s all part of an attempt to con
stantly imprint the brand onto the mind of the consumer. They don’t have to run off and buy the product on the spot, but next time they’re looking, the brand that has most successfully imprinted is likely to be the one they choose.’

  ‘But when there’s so many, how can one stand out amongst the rest?’

  ‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,’ he smiled. ‘And why so much is spent on market research and focus groups in the hope of finding that elusive image that will attract the customer. In the meantime, if everyone else is doing it, you have to do it too. Maybe you don’t stand out, but at least you exist.’

  The lift had come to a stop and the doors opened. Myles stood in the way to hold them back. ‘Well, this is where I leave you, Helen, we’re back at HR.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Helen, looking around. She would have been hard-pressed to tell the difference from any other floor.

  ‘It’s been good getting to know you better today,’ said Myles, with a sincerity that made Helen’s cheeks go pink. ‘I’d like you to tell Kelly that I want you to start as soon as possible. That’s if you’re okay with that?’

  Helen stirred. ‘Um, sure, but I don’t think Gemma’s ready to leave just yet.’

  ‘Well, Gemma doesn’t necessarily get to decide that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She won’t be going anywhere for a while yet,’ Myles reassured her, ‘but we need to get things rolling. You’ll be training for the first couple of weeks under Gemma’s supervision, then you’ll be job-sharing till she is ready to leave to have her baby.’

  He was right, it was all happening.

  ‘Organise it with Gemma, okay? Let me know what you come up with.’

  Helen decided not to drop by and see Gemma on her way out. She’d save that conversation for later; she had a feeling it wasn’t going to go down all that well.

  So that meant she had a little time to spare before picking up Noah, and a good opportunity to call in and see her mother.