“Excuse me. I have a kimchee situation here,” Dane said as he sprayed relentlessly, insouciant of the public health risk of discharging so many disinfectant droplets into the air supply.
He feared that the word would circulate that he had an episode of fecal incontinence, which was doubtless the worst impression one could make in a corporate milieu.
Later he discovered a printed sign on his closed door:
Men’s Room Out of Order.
As befitting an ad agency, the message was professionally typed in Helvetica. Graffiti was scrawled on the margins: The copy stinks. So does the writer.
Dane shut his office door and held his head in his hands. What possessed him to eat fermented cabbage for lunch? Couldn’t he have a normal food with a familiar smell like everyone else? That night, Dane brought home his container of kimchee. When he peeled off the lid in the kitchen, Becky made him close the container and eat its fetid contents in the hallway by an open window.
9. PITCH OUT
After Dane’s kimchee experience, he received a new assignment—a drug indicated for fecal incontinence. The irony was not lost on Dane.
Was it mere coincidence that his first assignments were for heartworm, adult diapers and fecal incontinence? Dane worried that he was being type-cast as the senior writer with senior problems. Did the kimchee incident fuel this impression?
Landon never told Dane he was being tested. This was the Green Way. All writers underwent a rigorous probation, in which they were expected to work themselves up from the humblest body part to the loftiest. Only after a writer proved himself in the bowels was he allowed to write about the heart, lungs and brain.
Dane had no idea of this. All he knew was that his career was progressing slowly. After two months, he had an office at Green Healthcare but no reputation. Even so, he made the most of his fecal incontinence assignment for a drug called Conteyne. Dane’s gut told him that nobody, including a patient with fecal incontinence, wanted to see or think of feces. Thus, he transposed the problem—untimely delivery—to a different context—cargo transport. He conceived an ad in which a truck, seen from behind, loses its load of boxes, which obstruct the road. The boxes are gift-wrapped, which further idealizes the problem. The headline read: Avoid untimely deliveries. Conteyne.
Landon gave the ad several deep head nods, signifying that he liked the Conteyne concept. “Yes,” he said. “This is very good, Dane. The gift boxes are a nice touch. They almost bring a tear to the eye.”
Dane was growing in confidence but along his sense of creative prowess was stalked by restlessness. He craved a more significant assignment to show off his talent.
Finally, an important pitch came to Green for a landmark cancer drug. Only some people were asked to contribute and Dane was not one of them. It was unclear who picked the team and why but Dane was in agony. Meanwhile, The Savior was out of town and could not help him. Now Dane was certain he was stereotyped as old and stale. In addition, his exclusion triggered painful childhood flashbacks. When he was ten, he often went to a field where neighborhood boys played football. While the games were in progress, Dane watched patiently and hoped a player would drop out or drop dead, so the teams would be uneven and he could play. One player finally left but as Dane ran onto the field, other boys walked off. The game was over.
Dane was in a funk. Unexpectedly, Bushkin came to his office to cheer him up.
“Don’t worry about those guys,” he said. “You’ve got what it takes.”
Bushkin’s gesture seemed sincere; yet, it reminded Dane of his diatribe weeks before. Dane wondered if Bushkin’s caustic assessment of his talent had been candid and correct. Maybe he should not be a copywriter.
Austin Weebler, Landon’s protégé, also noted that Dane was excluded from the action.
“So are you working on the pitch?” Austin Weebler asked.
“No,” Dane told the quirky junior copywriter.
“That’s dumb. You come here from a mainstream agency and everybody knows you have an amazing book. Why did they put me on this and not you?” Weebler asked.
Dane shrugged.
“Hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t play a part. We can still brainstorm, you and me. You’d be helping me out and they’ll see what you can do.”
At first, Dane balked. Instinct told him exclusion from a project was like a strikeout in baseball—irrevocable. And Weebler was probably using him so he would have more to show at creative reviews.
Or maybe Weebler was trying to be friends. Dane knew it was better to have an ally than an enemy, and even an unofficial creative opportunity was better than none at all. He agreed to help Weebler.
Austin explained the drug: it destroyed head and neck tumors. Unlike lymphomas, leukemia, or ovarian cancer, head and neck tumors were often outcomes of unhealthy behavior. Head and neck cancer patients were typically heavy smokers and drinkers. “Irresponsible slobs” was how Austin described them. They were thought to bring cancer on themselves. Many had neoplasms the size of oranges.
This physical detail gave Dane an idea: a photograph of an old hand holding a grapefruit with a simple headline reading “This was the size of the tumor in my neck. Now I live without it.”
Weebler wrote the headline excitedly and hurried to the creative review. Dane expected to hear nothing more about the pitch.
Later Austin appeared in his office. “At the creative review, they really liked your idea of the hand holding the orange. They’re going to test it. So I told them, ‘Dane Bacchus came up with that idea.’”
Dane had hoped for this outcome but was now dissatisfied with it. Despite his being left off the pitch, his idea forced its way in. His talent was vindicated, yet the victory was empty. He was not invited to join the pitch team. While agency excitement surged at the prospect of new business, he felt more dejected. Had he come this far to be left out of the game—again, just like when he was ten?
10. PROBATION
While others did vital creative tasks, Dane was saddled with daily maintenance work usually delegated to juniors and beginners. He copied by hand changes from client faxes onto the most recent layout. Dane reviewed each new round against the previous one to ensure all changes were made. Dane hated the tedium. He chose advertising because it promised creative work. Could he pretend he was more than a glorified clerk?
One afternoon, while the excitement of the pitch percolated around Dane, the junior account person on the adult diapers account, Maureen Fitzrooney, delivered a heavy folder full of corrections for his review. Dane’s face contorted in an involuntary scowl as if Maureen had delivered a bag of soiled diapers.
“What is it now?” he asked the young woman.
“It’s the changes,” Maureen said as she dropped the heavy folder on his desk.
“It’s time to change the diapers,” Dane cracked, oblivious to Maureen’s grimace and what it portended.
At around that time, Dane’s probationary period was over. At last, he would qualify for health insurance.
Late one afternoon, Landon phoned him to come to his office. Dane had no cause for concern, but The Savior’s voice was tight and unusually serious, and, unlike Paul Wittman, Landon had never summoned him by phone to his office before.
The door was closed. Dane knocked and was asked to enter the dimly lit room. Landon sat on his couch and the director of human resources, Sue Larimore, was next to him. Sue was a lounge singer by night but now she glowered like a bouncer.
“We’ve heard disturbing things about how you relate to members of your team,” she said. “We can’t tell you who complained but you’ve been described as uncooperative and unpleasant.”
Dane was stunned. Just moments before, he had been sitting back and taking stock of his success. He planned to celebrate his anniversary that evening with Becky. Now he appeared to be losing his job.
“You’re not losing your job,” Landon said as if reading Dane’s mind. Dane was not reassured. The mention of a firing suggested its p
ossibility.
The human resources officer asked Dane if he recalled doing or saying anything inappropriate. Dane struggled for composure.
“I can’t believe this,” Dane said haltingly. “I thought I was doing well. I get along with everyone.”
He noted that his interrogators were sympathetic.
“Dane, sometimes we men seem aggressive without meaning to,” Landon said. “Women can read even a tone of voice or a passing facial expression as macho, chauvinistic, misogynistic abuse. In a team environment where we often work closely and under pressure, we need to take extreme care with the signals we send.”
If Dane could have seen his facial expression at that moment, he might have wished to send more intelligent signals. His mouth was open. He looked dumbfounded or just dumb as he learned how he was betrayed by his behavior. “I try to be pleasant at all times,” he pleaded, “But my face has a mind of its own.”
Landon nodded sympathetically. He never had this problem and felt twice as much compassion for the poor wretch who did. Meanwhile, the human resources director, who, as a lounge singer, knew people best in dark rooms, studied Dane in the fading autumn light.
“Dane, before advertising you were a writer and teacher. You were autonomous. It must be hard to adapt to advertising, which is collaborative,” she remarked.
The human resources executive’s casual observation triggered immense pain, like a cold instrument pressing a chronic wound. Dane had tried to forget his prior life as a writer and teacher. He needed to prove he could be as creative in advertising, where money was to be made, as he had been in literature, where only poverty thrived. He argued with himself that art and survival were not enemies. A good salary, a respectable title and a vibrant ambience anesthetized the pain of subordination. Now the human resources director probed his hiding place where subversive longings and old demons awaited release. He felt like a fraud.
“No, no,” Dane protested, “I love working with other people. That’s part of the fun.”
He hoped they believed him after the human resources director’s direct hit exposed his guilt. He had probably lashed out at someone recently because he wanted to be a creative hero instead of a teamplayer doing the grunt work.
When the meeting was over, Landon asked Dane if he was okay. Dane was relieved to still be employed but was close to tears. Despite being forgotten for the first hour of his first day and excluded from the pitch, Dane was comfortable at Green. He never cringed before each payday, believing it would be his last—until now. He realized that regardless how genteel the workplace seemed, he was always one complaint away from termination.
Case 2-B
BRANDING INCONTINENCE
11. THE WORKSHOP
Green Healthcare Advertising strived to be more than a workplace. Top management was committed to the vision of a holistic job experience. “Hard work” was banished from the agency vocabulary and replaced by the slogan, “Heart work,” with the variation, “Work is where the heart is.” Both iterations appeared prolifically on posters in lobbies, corridors, and on old-fashioned campaign buttons, distributed to employees under every plausible pretext. The aim was to instill in staff-members a sense of family and fun.
Parties were weekly happenings at Green. Other agencies needed reasons to celebrate, but at Green, the prevailing concept was, “Celebrate and reasons will follow.”
In this festive culture, popular holidays presented ideal opportunities to foster lasting collegial bonds while stressing the creative verve that distinguished advertising from other industries. During “Green Halloween,” for instance, the featured event was the annual creative pumpkin contest, in which every employee was invited to carve and design his own, unique pumpkin. All finished jack-o’-lanterns were later displayed on a large conference table near the glass doors in a festive profusion of three-dimensional design.
During Dane’s first “Green Halloween,” Landon was represented not by a pumpkin caricature, like other Green notables, but by an empty space and a card reading “OOTO” (Out of the office). This gag derided The Savior for his many business trips. Although Dane suffered from his mentor’s frequent absences, he felt considerable loyalty for him and was incensed by this public ridicule.
Dane removed the card from the display and showed it to Landon.
“Ah,” The Savior said with wry amusement. “Someone is impugning my good name. Thank you, Dane!”
“It was the probably The Boys,” Dane said. “They act like they own the place.”
Landon nodded and gave Dane an appraising and sympathetic look.
“This has been a difficult time of adjustment for you, hasn’t it? I’ll be out of town for a week. I need you to attend a branding workshop in my place. What do you know about urinary incontinence?”
It was one of those trick questions to which there was no comfortable answer in medical advertising.
Nevertheless, a week after Dane’s near-firing (he believed only his tears saved him), Dane was rewarded for defending his mentor’s reputation. He received a creative assignment—direct mail letters to women suffering from urinary incontinence—and earned a spot in a brand-identity workshop for an injectable product used to treat the embarrassing condition. This workshop would bring together the client and the finest minds in urinary incontinence marketing. When it was over, a device comprised of collagen, a needle, and a syringe would possess a brand identity, a positioning statement, and the basis for an ad campaign.
Green’s urology client had never advertised its products because urologists understood and trusted them without promotion. However, the manufacturer now faced competition from major pharmaceutical firms that outspent it in sales forces, marketing materials, and physician-oriented events. Since Green’s client had only developed technical literature to support its products, it needed the full advertising treatment Green Advertising provided—branding workshops, positioning laboratories, and brand character constructions.
A branding workshop was a combination of college literary seminar, religious séance and nursery school. Account managers did PowerPoint presentations, led the group in analytical discussions, and facilitated creative collages with magazine pictures, glue, sparkles, feathers and other arts supplies. There were short writing exercises with sentences that began: “Dr. Urologist says, “When I relieve a patient’s incontinence, I feel like….” Answers included Louis Pasteur, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, and House.
From these creative exercises, insights and perceptions emerged. Participants formed more than an image for their product; they imbued it with a soul, an identity, a personality and a spiritual life. A brand character was born; an advertising strategy was charted.
It was nothing less than miraculous for a needle, a syringe and collagen.
Dane was no neophyte in this prestigious specialty. He had done brand research for his adult diaper product. In one session, he took notes behind a two-way mirror while venal pediatricians on their lunch hour were asked, “If Disposable Diaper X drove into this room what make of car would Disposable Diaper X be driving?” Dane could barely refrain from laughing.
However, this urology brand character workshop was high profile compared to disposable diaper research. Dane found himself in a brightly lit corporate boardroom with clients, the highest agency officials and catered lunch. He would need to participate, create concepts, propose ideas, and eat neatly.
In order to give the product a brand character, everyone needed to be clear about the audience—in this case, urologists. Who were these specialists? How did they view themselves? What make of car did they drive?
“They have inferiority complexes,” claimed a consulting psychotherapist, who had many urologists as patients. A nurse, who had worked with urologists for 25 years, corroborated this profile. She said her employers often labeled themselves, “plumbers in white coats.” However, a guest urologist countered that he and his peers enjoyed “stellar” self-esteem and considered themselves “masters of
the urinary tract.” Later, the clients described urologists by the vehicles they drove, the beverages they drank and their favorite foods, TV programs, musical selections, hair colors, and vacation destinations, as documented in secret videos taken by sales reps during complimentary dinners and events.
Based on this input, agency people and their clients wrote statements depicting urologists’ psyches and perspectives. Clients and ad people enjoyed workshops because everyone involved believed that they were doing something more interesting, more stimulating and more important than devising a cartoon character or a generic sounding logo. That would come later.
At the end of three days, the client and agency understood who urologists really were. Most were self-described plumbers of the medical trade—self-deprecating and unpretentious. Yet, within their generic low self-esteem lurked the individual need for affirmation, validation and respect. They yearned to be thought masters of their specialty.
The brand workshop reminded Dane of his teaching days and he thrived in its seminar structure. In the long and painful gestation of the brand character, he played the role of male midwife, helping others to articulate their ideas, then rephrasing them, providing insights, and building consensus. Dane had a strong voice in crafting the brand character statement, positioning statement and brand aspiration statement. But he did not stop there. He gave the brand character its first words, suggested which schools the brand character would attend and what it would look like and do in twenty years. Account people and clients nodded appreciatively when Dane spoke and he made a substantial impression.
12. A BREAKTHROUGH IN INCONTINENCE
The news of Dane’s contribution to the incontinence workshop reached Landon when he returned from his travels.
The creative director called Dane into his office. Dane was once again on his guard. He had no idea why Landon summoned him, which increased his nervousness. Had a client or an agency satrap complained that Dane talked too much at the workshop, or that he slobbered over his salad?
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