Dane was confused. He always believed changing jobs was the norm in advertising but now he was viewed as a vagabond. His career was supposed to be on the upswing and it might be over.
2. THE CRYBABY OF CAPISTRANO
Dane had been jobless for four months when interviews trickled in after the New Year. Tormented by his inability to find work, he viewed even the most distant opportunity as potential salvation. He drove thirty miles in a snowstorm to meet one creative director whose office was ornately furnished and fragrant with incense. Nothing came of it. The next morning, he interviewed with an old friend of Landon LeSeuer. Fred Potter had a kindly face, a scraggly beard, and framed glasses. He wore a loose cable-knit sweater, baggy corduroys, and spoke in a soft voice. In a more efficient world Fred Potter would have been the heir to Mr. Rogers.
According to advertising legend, Fred cried hysterically when he was fired at Green Advertising. Ten years after the fact, Dane searched for blood-shot eyes and salty splotches on Fred’s cheeks as if ancient tears left lasting scars. But it was Dane’s turn to cry when Fred reviewed his book and confided that there were no jobs at his agency. Fred tried to comfort Dane by saying that the interview was not a waste of time.
“When I was out of work I wrote a book about what to do when you’re out of work,” Fred confided.
“Did you tell your readers how to find a job?” Dane asked.
“Most books do that,” Fred said. “I had a new angle: When you’re out of work, you think your job is finding work but the real job is having a good attitude about being out of work.”
Dane was tempted to ask Fred to repeat the double-talk but guessed that hearing it twice would only quadruple his confusion.
The “practice” interview ended when Fred handed Dane his card. “If you have questions, please call.” The gesture was as empty as the interview. Fred had wasted Dane’s time, yet was so nice about it that Dane was not angry. He interpreted this fruitless meeting as a harbinger of imminent opportunities, like the swallows of Capistrano.
3. EINSTEIN AND ICE CREAM
A week later, a recruiter Dane vaguely knew phoned with an opportunity fifty miles away. Dane was intoxicated with hope, although this headhunter had sent him on many fruitless interviews before. The previous failures were not Dane’s fault—he once waited an hour before a meeting was cancelled—but the recruiter blamed him anyway. She coached Dane to keep his responses brief, forego extraneous remarks, and give as little information as possible. These “pointers” poked holes in Dane’s interview style and personality; but he stammered gratefully that he would suppress his verbose tendencies and make her proud.
On a raw Thursday morning Dane presented himself at the agency outside Princeton. He was an hour early. In urgent need of urinary relief, he searched for a filling station. After driving in circles, he deduced that an upscale town like Princeton must zone gas stops in its outskirts. He found a station, filled his tank and voided his bladder, then paid an impromptu pilgrimage to Einstein’s home. As Dane gazed at the modest frame house, he reflected that Einstein was his boyhood hero. “Einstein” was even Dane’s middle school moniker. What were his classmates thinking—or drinking?
Dane waited another hour at reception. Indignation was eroding his upbeat interview disposition. Suddenly he noticed a magazine on a coffee table with the headline, “Top Fifty Agencies in New Jersey.” He scribbled the agency information on the back of a résumé. Each number he transcribed raised his self-esteem and confidence. His interviewers wasted his time but he still made the most of it.
Two women finally met him. Each apologized profusely and without conviction for making him wait. The first interviewer was the human resources director. She was an expert in imposing corporate structure on human behavior, which made her skeptical of a New York resident working in central New Jersey. She claimed that the agency was more than a backwater subsidiary of a multinational corporation: it was a community. For instance, she often met employees and their families at a local ice cream parlor on Friday nights. She made it sound like part of the job description.
The creative director in need of copy support was an elegant woman in her 40s, who once worked at Integrimedicom. She described her horse and her renovated farmhouse. Dane simulated interest so well that she offered Dane an assignment. However, before Dane could enjoy the acceptance, the creative director lamented that the hiring process was complicated by the conglomerate’s accounting irregularities; reams of paper work had to be filed before Dane could start and months would pass before he would be paid.
Dane left Princeton with dim hope of working there but he had compiled a list of 25 other agencies, so his glacial campaign to find work held promise.
He also looked forward to an interview the following day. It would be his fourth of the month. After the many messages Dane left all over town, a creative director agreed to see him. Dane showed up at the agency at 9 AM. Fifteen minutes later a human resources specialist emerged with a bland apology and escorted him to her office. It was “Bagel Friday” so she ate her bagel and schmear and asked, “What are you looking for in a job?”
Cream cheese glistened on the HR associate’s lips and chives lodged in her teeth as she questioned Dane with professional detachment. After finishing the interview and bagel simultaneously, she brought Dane to the creative director, a voluble man who wore pungent cologne and a gold Swiss watch. He was busy so he passed Dane to the Alzheimer’s team leader, a bald man in dirty jeans and a tee, who asked Dane, “What can I do for you?”
“What can you do for me?” Dane asked.
Medical writers frequently showed signs of the diseases they wrote about. Reflux medication writers had heartburn, statin writers experienced chest pains, and ophthalmologic writers were struck by partial blindness. Did this interviewer have early onset Alzheimer’s? How else to explain, “What can I do for you” at a job interview?
“I need a job,” Dane said.
“We have an opening but it’s too junior for someone with your experience,” the copy supervisor replied.
Another opportunity, another mirage. Shifting realities were to be expected in an economic desert. Dane left the agency perplexed. Was he close to a new job or as distant as before?
Case 4-B
A PASSION FOR PROSTATES
4. DANE MAKES A HIT
Dane sent cover letters and résumés to every agency he transcribed from the Pharm Ad annual. After a few days his cell rang while he was driving Iris home from school. The woman’s voice and name were unfamiliar and her voice was splintered by static. She explained that Bill Bevaqua, the creative director at UNIHEALTH, had seen Dane’s résumé and wanted to meet him the next Monday at 4 PM.
Dane drove 35 miles to the interview in single digit cold. In blue twilight he entered a concrete and glass building in the middle of a vast parking lot. A plasma billboard suspended from the skylight flashed UNIHEALTH, “SCIENCE with SOUL” and slides of smiling doctors and patients in pajamas. The slide show culminated in the image of a smiling, bald-headed boy holding a teddy bear, along with his beaming parents. The headline read: “They said you could not sell a cancer drug with a smile.”
“Can I do this?” Dane asked himself. He did not want to work on cancer but he still rode the elevator to the second floor. The door opened and Bill Bevaqua was waiting there to greet him.
Bevaqua had a square jaw and a round face. His warm intensity conveyed directness and purpose. The creative director led Dane to a small room with a sliding Plexiglas door, called a fishbowl.
“People all over are looking for work,” Bevaqua began. “I don’t hold that against them but I’m not in the business of handing out jobs.”
“I’m not here for a handout,” Dane replied. “I’ve always more than earned my pay.”
“That’s why you’re here,” Bevaqua said. “Dane, I’ll get to the point. Ten years ago, there were seventy launches a year. Last year there were forty. And the number is dropping. Companie
s are merging, pipelines are shrinking. Me-2s are now Me-6s.” Bevaqua’s eyes were wide and horrified as if the dire vision they beheld had faded to black.
Dane’s anxiety was rising. Was Bevaqua’s prophecy a ploy to make Dane not want the job before it was not offered to him?
“More agencies are competing for fewer products and less business…We have to work smarter, think better, create—,” Bevaqua paused, his lips parted like doors held open for the right adverb to stumble through, “—more creatively!” Aware of his redundancy, Bevaqua sighed. “I’m no writer. That’s why you’re here. Let me take a look.”
Bevaqua turned the pages of Dane’s book with the brisk impatience of a man shoveling snow. To put his work in the best light, Dane provided a context for each concept. Bevaqua cut Dane short. “Let the work speak,” he whispered with his forefinger over his lips. He paused often, nodded effusively and guffawed. “This I like. You did this?” He pointed at “The Faces of Premature Ejaculation” and “Make it last!” campaigns.
“Yes! That’s me,” Dane replied.
Bevaqua stopped flipping the pages and jabbed at one concept with his forefinger.
“I’ve seen this one!” he said, spinning the portfolio around so Dane could look. It was the weightlifters execution in the “Release the Load!” campaign for SLOJAC.
“That’s my work!” Dane said. “I did it at Integrimedicom before the layoff.”
“Wait!” Bevaqua finger-licked his way through a physician’s magazine and smacked one page excitedly. “There!”
Dane stared at the page: it was “Release the load!” all over again.
“I can’t believe it!” Dane protested. “They laid me off and used my concept—for a laxative ad!”
After losing the “greasy stools” and premature ejaculation accounts—along with half its workforce—Integrimedicom scored Evacumab, the world’s first biologic laxative. It was a gift from the parent agency and Sheldon and Nadine thought Dane’s “Release the load” was a perfect concept to launch the genetically engineered stool softener.
If Dane had received credit, his grinning mug would have been on the cover of Pharm World magazine. Instead, he looked like a plagiarist.
Bevaqua accelerated through the rest of the book before closing it with a thwop.
“I’ve seen enough!” he exclaimed.
“You have?” Dane stammered. Bevaqua would now dismiss him as a creative rip-off artist.
“This work is excellent. You’ve captured a world of pain. You’re a genius!”
“It is? I have? I am? I mean, thank you.”
Bevaqua’s ten seconds of praise reversed months of self-doubts. Dane’s work meant something again.
The chief creative officer of UNIHEALTH pursed and relaxed his lips several times like he was warming them up to say something special.
“Dane! I’m from Chicago. There are no hills to hide behind. I see the forest and the trees, and never waste time beating around bushes. So this is what I’m thinking. You are one big paradox. Freshness and experience, creativity and logic, wit and insight, age and youthfulness, strangeness and familiarity, all rolled up in that special compound called you!” Bevaqua brought his blue-collar hands together as if pressing elements into one compound, “You think out-of-the-box…but you haven’t thrown out the box. That’s good…because you never know when you have to send back the product!”
Bevaqua’s finger twitched in the air. It appeared to transmit a coded message. The executive creative director stared at Dane with his head tilted as if guiding a pinball in his brain out his ear.
“I have two positions to fill,” the creative director said. “But I have one in mind for you. I think you’d be perfect for prostate cancer. You have the fresh voice we’re looking for.”
“I do? Yes, I do. Great!” Dane stammered. The prospect of earning thrilled him after months of unemployment. Even “cancer,” which made Dane shudder—with images of careering green and white Sloan Kettering vans—sounded beautiful.
“You made premature ejaculation sexy. That’s not easy to do. I want you to bring your passion for ejaculation praecox to prostate cancer! Of course, it wouldn’t just be prostate cancer,” Bevaqua continued, “You’d have the entire prostate franchise…We’re also launching a drug for benign prostate hyperplasia. Ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“God, you’ll love it!”
Bevaqua grinned at Dane like a man who found a brother in a strange land.
“Dane, my gut tells me you belong here. You’re not happy just doing a job. You want to own the job. That’s how we are here. We believe in ownership. We don’t have employees. We have job owners.”
“I’ve always want to own my job,” Dane stammered. “So far I’ve been just a renter—and sometimes just a squatter.”
Bevaqua’s large eyes bulged with hypertensive excitement. If words were pinballs, Dane would have earned a free game.
“Thing is, we’ve got to move fast. The client is nervous. So…okay!” Bevaqua snapped his fingers like his mind was obediencetrained. “I’m totally sold and ready to order one Dane Bacchus for UNIHEALTH but we have horizontal management. Each hire has to be one size fits all. Stretchy, heheh! I want you to meet the associate creative directors. Can you come back?”
“Of course,” Dane replied.
“So we’re on,” Bevaqua said. “Ecstatic!”
5. MEETING THE TEAM
Dane returned to UNIHEALTH at the end of the week to meet the cadre of associate directors. The temperature was 25 degrees warmer, snow and ice were melting everywhere and it felt like spring in January. Dane was full of hope until slabs of ice flew off the top of a truck in front of him, nearly smashing his windshield.
He read it as a sign, nature’s interactive billboard, for the meeting ahead, but he was determined to overcome whatever awaited him.
Four associate creative directors faced Dane across a conference table. They were smiling. Three of the four had not seen Dane’s résumé and would not be working with him. A Russian art director with blond ringlets and a silver goatee looked up from Dane’s CV and flashed a mischievous smile.
“So! Says here you write novels, poetry and publish many articles. You write music, sing your heart and soul in clubs and radio. You even invent your very own art form. So…why are you here?”
Dane smiled cautiously. Was this a trick question?
“I’m here for a job,” Dane replied.
“Of course you are!” the Russian let out a short laugh and brought his hands together in a loud clap. His smile was blunt as a fisherman’s knife, scratching at Dane’s psyche to open it like a mollusk. “My point is this: if I did half as much as you, I would not look for job. I would be rich.”
The remark opened a fissure in Dane’s mind from which scalding anger had been known to overflow. With playful insight, this stranger had located a conundrum of Dane’s existence before which he was a stammering idiot.
But Dane contained his rage. He recalled an anecdote from his teaching days. A student described how his homeboys observed July 4th on the Jersey Shore by feeding Alka Seltzer to seagulls and watching them explode in midair when the tablets detonated in their guts. “I’m no seagull,” Dane reassured himself.
“You’re perceptive,” Dane replied. “I am a bad businessman to make so little of what I’ve done.”
His rational self-deprecation fell like a gavel over the proceedings. The associate creative directors adjourned the meeting. They had their fun with Dane, though not as much as they would have liked.
For an excruciating week Dane awaited news from UNIHEALTH. On a Friday morning, as he pushed a cart down a supermarket aisle, his cell rang. It was Bevaqua. “You must have paid your references well because they all gave you high praise. Can you come in this afternoon? I’m making you an offer.”
Driving 35 miles in snow and fog did not dampen Dane’s euphoria. It felt like an excursion. Bevaqua greeted Dane at his fishbowl office with
an envelope. Dane was so moved that his economic free-fall was apparently over that he could not bear to open the envelope and read its contents. When he brought himself to unfold the letter, he went no further than, “We are pleased…” to avoid bursting into tears. Bevaqua assured him with a paternal smile how glad he was to have Dane on board.
6. LOTS OF LUTS
Before Dane could gather his thoughts in a few sentences of gratitude, the creative director handed him a 300-page, ten-nation study about the link between lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and older male sexuality.
“I need you to write a background report on this by your first day,” Bevaqua said.
Dane was stunned. The hiatus between being hired and showing up was the best part of a job—anticipating income without working for it. How could Bevaqua revoke this precious prelude? Was Bevaqua giving Dane an entrance exam to predetermine if he qualified for the position? At UNIHEALTH, Dane not only owned his job; he pre-owned it. Yet rather than protest, Dane immersed himself in his work. After so long on the outside, Dane needed to belong. He told himself that being put to work before his starting day meant he was needed. He wanted to impress Bevaqua and make UNIHEALTH his home.
The multinational study Dane was given to evaluate and summarize was based on data from hundreds of thousands of questionnaires. It provided compelling insights about male urology and psychology. Once Dane perused the findings of this seven-nation survey, he had no doubt about his new job—lower urinary tract syndrome (LUTS) was his destiny and benign prostrate hyperplasia (BPH) was a relevant illness worthy of his study and creativity.
For years, Dane had witnessed older colleagues belly up to urinals with grunts of frustration and resignation in their eyes. It was different than “micturition inhibition”—a term Dane coined for the stage fright men had during public urination. This multinational study data explained why many older men had discomfort while seeking relief.
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