Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Dane finally thought he looked the part of an up-and-coming junior copywriter of a certain age. However, like most innovations, his new look solved one problem and spawned another. Dane wanted his wonderful shirts to look perpetually new, for their rich dyes to endure. Yet he knew with great foreboding that he would perspire in the infernal summer heat and that the shirts would smell. They would need to be washed and would lose their vibrant colors and soft textures.

  To prevent this natural disaster, Dane might have followed the example of Evan, the obnoxious junior account executive, who wore a T-shirt under his polo shirt to absorb perspiration. But Dane thought it looked “stupid” to wear one casual shirt under another. It was tantamount in his mind to wearing a sweater under a sweater or a coat under a coat. He dealt with the problem in his own way, by lumbering slowly through hot subway tunnels and down city streets. He pulled his shirt away from his torso, tucked napkins behind his neck to absorb hot-under-the-collar dampness, and ducked into bank lobbies for air conditioning. However, the last tactic prompted aggressive customer service representatives to scare him off with offers of 10-year certificates of deposit at 1% interest rate.

  Despite Dane’s clever tactics, torrid subways and concrete streets made him sweat. When he arrived at his office, he sensed the new shirt with its rich dye hovering close to his wet torso. If he continued to wear the shirt normally, it would absorb his sweat like a sponge, stink and discolor. He must act decisively and fast. He closed his office door, pulled the shirt carefully over his head to minimize body contact and laid it on the chair. While he wrote headlines he glanced at the shirt like it was a sick patient. He wondered if he had rescued it in time to preserve its cleanliness and hue. “Damn it, why did I have to wear a nice shirt on such a hot day? I can’t wear anything nice. My life doesn’t allow for it,” Dane lamented bitterly.

  As he stroked the shirt to gauge its dryness, his door opened and Deirdre Ryan was staring at him. She had dropped many hints to Dane that he should invite her to lunch but now her eyes bulged at his half nudity. “This is not what it looks like,” Dane said. “This is barechested bonding. I learned it when my daughter was born. By baring my chest at the office I feel more committed to the work.”

  “Committed. Yes. That thought crossed my mind,” Deirdre said.

  Before this incident Dane was considered weird at WIF. Now he was believed to be a semi-nudist. Yet even this did not mitigate his isolation.

  Later Dane devised a “more acceptable” way to preserve the freshness of his polo shirts. As soon as he arrived at WIF he dampened several paper towels in the men’s room and planted them in various strategic locations on his body—between his neck and his collar, on his back and under his armpits. Often he forgot to remove the towels. When he came to a meeting, one colleague said, “Dane, your wet towels are showing.”

  28. WORKING CLASS HERO

  One afternoon at lunchtime Maury Wittman threw a party for Gary, the chief of operations. A burly man with a shaggy moustache and a ponytail, Gary had been with the agency for thirty years, and worked his way up from messenger to glorified maintenance man. The festivities were in the lobby and centered on a 6-foot-long hero on a table. Maury Wittman gave a speech about how long Gary had served at WIF. He declared that his father had the utmost respect for Gary.

  Maury brandished an envelope.

  “It isn’t a watch,” he said, eliciting a laugh. “It’s an all expensespaid seven-day tour of Italy. That’s right, so Gary and Lucille can visit the land of their ancestors…But Gary, don’t get any ideas about staying there. We need you here to install the new windows.”

  During the laughter, Maury handed Gary the envelope. Gary grinned and looked askance in embarrassment. His wife had sneaked into the city to surprise him.

  “Crossing the ocean will be a piece of cake,” Mrs. Gary said. “It took me two hours to get into the city!”

  “Now you know what I go through every friggin’ day,” Gary chided her.

  Jake Ribosky stepped forward. A portly salesman from the Bronx who wore ties nearly as wide as he was, Ribotsky had worked at WIF almost as long as the guest of honor.

  “Congratulations, Gary,” Ribotsky said. “The AC sucks. When will you fix it?”

  The employees laughed. Gary promised to talk to the building superintendent.

  “It’s just like Gary to solve problems at his own party,” Maury Wittman quipped.

  Then most of the employees rushed to the long table to honor Gary by eating his sandwich. The mega-baguette was thick, crusty and coated with sesame seeds. It was filled with deli meats and cheeses so the Hindus, Moslems, vegetarians and Kosher-keeping Jews at WIF, half of the staff, settled for sodas.

  After the party dwindled, some revelers stood by the reception counter.

  “How long till you get your sandwich?” Jake Ribotsky asked Al Vortman, the big-earning, Big Bird look-alike.

  “I decided to roll over my sandwich into several post-retirement hamburgers,” Vortman replied. “That way I don’t have to pay taxes on the condiments.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Ribotsky replied. “I’ll mention it to my estate planner.”

  “You’re better off telling your mortician!” Vortman said.

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘It’s great that Gary got…errr…recognized,” Jake Ribotsky said, “But one thing I don’t get…Why all the deli meat? It gives me gas.”

  “Yeah, why they order that?” Saroja, the Hindu art director, demanded. “They could order something for different people.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Al Vortman, chewing on his eyeglass stem. “It’s brilliant corporate finance. If up to 40% of the sandwich is uneaten, the Wittmans can claim the uneaten sandwich as a business expense. Then they donate the leftovers to a homeless shelter and reap a charitable deduction. And after three or four half-eaten sandwiches, they get a significant tax write-off. The Wittmans are always thinking.”

  “In other words, they’re cheap!” Ribotsky said.

  Everyone laughed for ten seconds, then realizing the seditious nature of their mirth, stopped abruptly and scattered to their respective jobs.

  29. AN ABSOLUT BRAINSTORM

  When Paul returned from his vacation, he asked Dane what he’d done for three weeks.

  “I wrote headlines and tags for two projects,” Dane said.

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s grim.”

  Paul had an uncanny way of stating the truth and doing nothing about it. He collected the twenty pages Dane wrote and never mentioned them again.

  Paul put Dane and the other creatives to work on a major business pitch. A national rental company specializing in furnished apartments for relocating executives was about to open communities in the New York area. These communities were designed for people with no time to find a house or apartment; they had electrical installations and amenities, such as spas and swimming pools. Convenience was their core benefit.

  Dane worked with Saroja, his first art director. They were stuck on a headline. Dane hunted for verbs with the prefix “re.” Recharge, resuscitate, revitalize. Saroja, who spoke English with an unintelligible accent, was a tough critic. When Dane called out a verb, Saroja shook her head and leafed through a thesaurus.

  “Should I use your Pantone book to come up with colors?” Dane asked resentfully.

  “Hey man, I seen plenty of writers use a thesaurus,” Saroja said.

  The art director’s taunt motivated Dane. The right words soon came to him: “Why resort to a rental? Rent a resort.”

  Paul stared at the words without speaking. He repeated them under his breath and screwed up his face, like he was squeezing the line until it yielded the same message new and improved. Then he thanked Dane for his work and went to the pitch. Several months later the real estate company hired WIF and used Dane’s headline for the first ad, which appeared in every local paper’s real estate section.

  Gr
adually, Paul called Dane in on major projects. He asked him to brainstorm a concept for a landmark building. The new owners were seeking an agency and WIF was a finalist. All creatives mustered in Maury Wittman’s office. Arlen Lesser, the freelance creative director, was there, along with Paul and Saroja, the art director.

  “I want everybody to think,” Maury, the president, said, “Close your eyes and your mouths and just think.”

  Dane was wary of closing his eyes in a crowded room. The last time he did so, he was standing at a bus station urinal with a picked pocket and wet shoes. It occurred to him that this “quiet time” could be a practical joke to see who was stupid enough to close his eyes. He squinted and found that everyone else’s eyes were shut.

  Someone opened his mouth to yawn but Maury preemptively pressed his finger to his lips and said, “Shhhh.”

  After five minutes the agency president opened his eyes, blinked miserably and admitted that his brain was fried.

  “I got it! I got it!” Arlen shouted like an overeager outfielder on a softball team.

  “The Grand Canyon!!!” Arlen announced as if he had invented it.

  “The Grand Canyon?” Paul asked skeptically.

  Arlen waved his hand to indicate that Paul didn’t understand. Arlen gazed upward at a forty-degree angle, the head-tilt reserved for visionaries and ecstatic saints.

  “We superimpose the building over a shot of the Grand Canyon. The headline reads: Experience the Wonder of New York.”

  Maury rubbed his temples as if grinding the idea in his head. Paul squinted skeptically.

  “You’re comparing the Helmsley building to the Grand Canyon? It’s no wonder of the world,” Paul remarked.

  The brainstorming session adjourned when Maury complained that his head hurt and he was seeing polka dots, two warning signs of stroke. Paul, Saroja and Dane formed a team and had an idea. Why not turn the skyscraper into a branding icon like the Absolut bottle? Dane had seen the building lit in the shape of a cross during the Christmas holidays. They could Photoshop lit windows in the building in the form of various symbols: A question mark, an exclamation point, and a V for victory sign.

  Paul presented the concept at the business pitch. He reported afterward that the client liked their idea but said it didn’t give him a “stiffy.” Although the client forgave WIF for his lack of sexual arousal and invited the Wittmans to present again, Maury and Paul could not get over the client’s snub. “Didn’t give him a stiffy…Maybe Viagra is the concept he needs!” Paul grumbled.

  Dane was unsure if WIF won this account. Many pitches had a similar outcome. People hyperventilated over new business. Yet, when it disappeared, nobody said where it went, until suddenly months later the business was back and work conceived months before was produced. Dane wondered how he could build a reputation with such dubious opportunities.

  Case 1-G

  DUMBO MON AMOUR

  30. DUMB AND DUMBO

  The Wittman brothers rarely missed a corporate leadership trend. They read that Fortune 500 company high echelon managers went on retreats for team-building and strategy-making, so as the high echelon of WIF, they went whitewater rafting. Before their trip, Paul paged Dane. “Dane, see Paul.”

  As usual, Dane expected to be fired. But after their usual conversation about how busy Dane was not, Paul had exciting news.

  “I’m running late but something big is about to happen and I want you to work on it.”

  “Big? You do? Great!” Dane spoke in short words to cut down on his loquacity because Wittman had criticized him for rambling. But Paul was now in a mood for effusive grandiloquence to match the grandeur of the project. He winced at Dane’s monosyllabic drivel. How had he hired such a feckless individual?

  “It’s a huge opportunity,” Wittman continued. “Instead of branding a building, we’re branding a neighborhood. Have you heard of DUMBO?”

  “The elephant?”

  “No. It’s the hottest new neighborhood in New York, the next SOHO. It stands for ‘down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.’ Ram Vaklemptis, the guy who invented SOHO, owns buildings in DUMBO and wants to give it the same hype. Your work has been great and I thought you should be in on this.”

  “You did? That’s great. I mean thanks,” Dane stammered.

  Paul shook his head at Dane’s inarticulate babbling.

  “Don’t thank me. You earned it. I want you to work with Arlen.”

  “Arlen Lesser? Why do I have to work under him?” Dane protested. “My work’s the selling point with clients.”

  “Don’t be arrogant,” Paul said. “Arlen’s a genius. He coined the term ‘gold coast’ in Florida. Then he coined ‘gold coast’ for Connecticut.”

  “Genius,” Dane muttered.

  “Arlen knows a lot. You can learn from him.”

  “I have an infallible gut,” Dane said.

  “That’s why you’re here. But Arlen has 25 years of experience.”

  Paul slipped on his designer backpack and patted Dane on the arm on his way out.

  “You’ll get there.”

  Dane needed to create a campaign that would bring him success and immortality. Every copywriter was stalking the concept, headline, tagline, icon that would make him famous—“Just do it,” The Jolly Green Giant, Speedy Alka Seltzer, a Cockney gecko, or a middle-aged man squeezing toilet paper. The DUMBO pitch was his ticket to transcendence but Arlen, the senior consultant, stood in his path. Dane needed to move Arlen aside…but how? The Wittman brothers believed in Arlen. He was the big idea man who branded empires by hyperventilating pithy phrases. Arlen’s Methodist Hospitals campaign slapped headlines on city buses that read: “Wheezing in Woodside,” “Flu in Flushing,” “Gastritis in Greenpoint” and “Acid reflux in Astoria.”

  DUMBO lurked in the corner of Dane’s mind where imagination and ambition coiled like passionate lovers. The DUMBO visit would take place on Friday. All week Dane created concepts and headlines on his own since art directors’ time was considered too precious to waste on him. He dismissed the slight. When he conceived the winning idea, he would enter the Advertising Hall of Fame. It was no Nobel Prize but he would take it. Dane heard nothing from Arlen until Friday, when the short, great man showed up in a silk jacket that flowed down to his knee caps. He introduced himself to Dane, though they had recently worked together. Arlen’s red face reeked of his after-shave, Water Polo. He hunched like he was ducking a missile.

  The main topic of conversation on the way to DUMBO was its name. DUMBO evoked flying elephants and a white elephant was slang for a fiasco. Would it be possible to come up with another name? No, Vaklemptis, the developer, was attached to it.

  Arlen revealed his idea. Since DUMBO was on the waterfront how cool would it be to do an “On the Waterfront” campaign with stills from the movie classic?

  “Will longshoremen live in DUMBO?” Dane asked, “These lofts go for a million bucks.”

  “People know the movie,” Arlen said, “It could give the area immediate recognition. Plus I can get my friend Bud Shulberg to write the DUMBO ads.”

  “Is Bud Shulberg alive?” Dane asked.

  “It makes no difference,” Arlen said.

  Arlen’s plan left everyone speechless. He filled this void with another story from the annals of his life.

  “So I wrote this campaign for an apartment complex in Washington. This garden community was on an island in the Potomac near the Memorial Bridge. You been to D.C.? It’s the nation’s capital. Beautiful. The developers could not give these units away—and real estate was hot! So I saw an article in the Post claiming women in D.C. outnumbered men by 3-1. Bingo! I did an ad showing young men pushing shopping carts over the Memorial Bridge to this new island community. The headline read: Most Single Men Per Capita in Washington. The place filled up in weeks.”

  “Were there really so many single men?”

  “Who knew? Who cared?” Arlen jeered.

  “If it wasn’t true the women would move out.�
��

  “But I moved on. I’m the copywriter, not the landlord.”

  The drive was fast. One claim the DUMBO realtors made was true—the neighborhood was close to Manhattan. DUMBO looked deserted except for a long line of addicts waiting for methadone at a drug center.

  The WIF cohort’s destination was “The Bell Tower,” the first of several factory buildings Vaklemptis would convert into luxury dwellings. “The Bell Tower” was a rugged, ten story bastion of white concrete which was once a toilet paper factory. The builder was an English immigrant with a fondness for “Big Ben,” so he had a bell tower designed for the roof. The bells originally sounded to announce the time of day, to make the company and its product seem important, and to remind workers of “the mother country.” When the factory went out of business, the bells were dismantled. They were now simulated by a computer synthesizer connected to the elevator’s electric system, and were played on special occasions.

  The developer, Ram Vaklemptis, arrived at “The Bell Tower” with casual grandeur. He was a sixty-something urban pioneer with the remote cool of a shaman. The self-anointed “Father of SOHO” had transformed an industrial ghetto into the most chic neighborhood on earth and would need all his magic to turn the same trick with DUMBO. If he succeeded, his genius would be chiseled in stone. If he failed, history would dub him the Doofus of DUMBO and his SOHO success would go down as a lucky footnote. Vaklemptis had a dusty appearance and a fresh smell, which Dane identified as baby powder. The crusty developer had sprinkled talc on his construction togs to appear dirty while smelling clean.

  Vaklemptis shook everyone’s hands but lost interest when he came around to Dane, who wondered why he was snubbed. Was he wearing respect repellent? True, the junior copywriter exuded low status. No question, he was a middle-aged guy in jeans and long hair with a camera around his neck, who conjured up a bad actor playing an oafish tourist. Vaklemptis had sound reasons for slighting him but Dane shoved his insignificance in the mogul’s face. He snapped pictures, asked questions, cheerfully told Vaklemptis, “I’m the junior copywriter!” and offered his hand to the client, who shook it because he did not know what else to do.