Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  Dane was shocked by how many men worldwide were unable to pee or maintain erections sufficient for intercourse. Less surprising was the macho reaction. Hundreds of thousands of men reported groin pain, yet few admitted that it affected their virility. Retirees in their 60s and 70s, unable to maintain erections for twenty seconds, reported having sex five or six times per week. Dane also noted national differences. Men from Spain, France and Italy claimed the greatest number of copulations while American men admitted to more realistic numbers. Were American men sex-slackers or could they afford to be open about their impotence since they defined manhood in more ways than coitus—by golf, income, cars, hobbies and good cigars?

  Dane read with interest, even excitement. He had been handed a global health problem to write about. It could mean years of prosperity. By immersing himself in Europe’s strange horizontal charts and numbers with decimal commas rather than points, Dane mastered topics like amount of semen per ejaculation and frequency of maintained erection after penetration. He knew the data so well that it revealed patterns to him. Dane derived great intellectual satisfaction from delving so deeply into the lower urinary tract epidemic afflicting older men. Then it occurred to him that someday he might be one of the men afflicted by it.

  “No, this can’t happen to you,” Dane reassured himself. “Can it?” He urged himself to remain professional and detached. This should be no different than menopause, intermittent claudication or premature ejaculation. Yet Dane could not avoid a creeping apprehension. He knew he could never have menopause and premature ejaculation was in his adolescent past but a thick prostate, slow painful urination and impotence were in the waiting room of his life. Even while he worked, he felt a pain in his groin. For days, he fearfully monitored his urinary stream and counted his erections.

  “You’re getting personally involved! Don’t blow it,” he chided himself and continued to do his homework.

  When he had absorbed the study, he summarized it in a five page “backgrounder.” He spun the data two ways and wrote a version for each. His first variation was titled “Up and Down.” It reflected the insight that “When lower urinary tract symptoms go up, sexual appetite and performance go down.” The second concept was titled “The Other half,” referring to the 50% of men experiencing lower urinary tract pain and sexual difficulties. Dane was pleased. When asked to write one report, he wrote two. In America, it was always better to super-size.

  He emailed the two versions to Bevaqua a few days early and received an astounding response. “This is excellent. Bull’s eye! Exactly what we were looking for. This was why you were hired. Thanks for making me look so good! Bravo.”

  7. CUBE WORLD

  On his first day of work, Dane missed his exit and went ten miles out of his way before arriving at the office a half-hour late. He shrewdly phoned UNIHEALTH when he first lost his way to win sympathy for being new.

  The tactic paid off. Bevaqua greeted him with an ursine pat on the back and a fraternal laugh. “So, you missed that exit. I did that when I started fifteen years ago.”

  This boded well for Dane. Already he was stepping into the footsteps of his mentor. He reflected that doing the right thing was less effective than doing the wrong thing in the right way.

  After he settled into his cubicle, Dane surveyed the second floor.

  The most telling detail was how quiet UNIHEALTH was. Soon Dane learned why. When UNIHEALTH people chatted, their lips moved but they made no sound. Even when he was close to them, they were inaudible. It was cube-talk—the evolutional adaptation resulting from the need to communicate privately in a public place.

  In a cube-world, where space was shared, privacy was taboo. Only conference rooms and fishbowls had doors. Fishbowls were small glass-walled enclosures where small meetings took place. Awful things were presumed to happen in fishbowls since interactions there were visible but inaudible and passersby could only guess what they were. Being summoned to a fishbowl induced anxiety. It was a public pillory and an isolation chamber, a starting point and a terminus.

  8. EINSTEIN OF ADVERTISING

  The fishbowls were also sacred portals where major events, transitions and transformations took place.

  Such a transition befell Dane in his second week. An ice storm kept many UNIHEALTH employees at home but since Dane could ill afford another unpaid holiday, he braved the conditions and was nearly alone at UNIHEALTH. It was a great way to get noticed.

  Bevaqua summoned Dane to the executive fishbowl to discuss a special project. Sounding his usual apocalyptic theme, Bevaqua warned that there were few new drugs in America’s drug pipeline, which meant fewer launches and promotions. ““If we’re going to stay ahead of the unemployment curve we have to act now,” Bevaqua said with blue-eyed, rock-jawed resolve. “Or we’ll be selling drugs—on street corners.”

  Bevaqua told Dane that UNIHEALTH hired a firm to market itself to prospective clients. “They know how to sell products. We’ll become the product they sell,” Bevaqua said. The marketing firm, headed by a dogmatic eccentric named Bozenfeld, would help the agency formulate an effective marketing campaign. First, the agency would create an offering—a prize, program or object to attract prospective clients’ attention and demonstrate the agency’s creativity.

  Dane assumed that Bevaqua counted on him to create this offering to save the agency. Why else had the chief creative officer briefed him a day in advance? Others might have balked at the pressure but Dane felt that his training, temperament and talents entitled him to this pivotal role. Bevaqua had identified him as the creative stud he was and Dane embraced his destiny as the Copywriter Messiah.

  An agency meeting was parleyed. The finest minds of UNIHEALTH across all disciplines struggled as one to comprehend the assignment. These canny professionals, who had imbued countless chemical compounds with metaphors, personalities and animal features, such as faces, bodies, wings and fiery breaths, had to give character to advertising, whose function and effect were less tangible than the drugs it promoted. They had no vocabulary for this and the result was an uncomfortable silence.

  While his colleagues grimaced in dumbfounded pain, Dane was inspired. Rather than formulate a metaphor for advertising, Dane posed two questions: What was advertising supposed to do and why did it fall short? Answering both questions would help define the agency’s mission and create their unique offering.

  Dane reviewed the advertising in which he had been involved. Much of it came from ideas conceived elsewhere. Once adopted, an idea had to accommodate other ideas—from the agency, the client, regulatory and creative research participants. By the time a concept found its way to an audience, it was a monstrous hybrid of communication—a sphinx or harpy.

  Ironically, a process intended to produce effective advertising had the opposite result. The most effective advertising was original and pure, forming a coherent impression and creating one recognizable brand, but was this possible in a hodge-podge of compromise and a capricious marketplace?

  This question had perplexed Dane since he started in advertising. Now it occupied his every thought. In his car, his cubicle, and his bed, ideas, images and equations tumbled in his mind like lottery balls. One morning in the shower, he had a pure and simple vision—the acorn.

  “How strong is your acorn?”

  A strong concept was like an acorn…it would grow into an oak. The key was to find that acorn and to let it grow.

  But Dane could not stop here. He needed a logical basis for his creative insight, a scientific theory with cool-looking formulas to ground his intuition in the world of observable phenomena. A torrent of new ideas poured out of him. These concepts were so complex and bizarre that they could not be expressed in English sentences, or even in existing mathematical concepts and symbols. Dane had to devise a new math to address the problems of advertising. He drew symbols, gave them values, and scrawled equations to express his theories.

  He wrote an equation to describe advertising: Let M=Message and A=Audi
ence. Message=Statement+Graphics. Audience=People+Market conditions. M is separated from A by line (/R), the “Resister.”

  The objective of advertising was not to create a relationship between message and audience but to remove the “Resister,” a value comprised of incomprehension, indifference and noise. If he raised the numbers of the M and A values, through mutual incorporation (Message clarified and made relevant; Audience educated and informed), until the values on both sides of the equation were equal to or greater than the number of the Resister, he could remove the “Resister”—resulting in the perfect advertising message.

  Creating a science on the fly exhilarated Dane. He scribbled equations and proofs in mathematical notation, scratching them out, only to replace them with others. He devised theories, symbols, rules and operations to support his proofs as he proceeded. It must have looked like gibberish but the more he wrote, the more sense it made to him.

  He made an effort not to be too grandiose. He did not wish to behave like an art director he knew, who disappeared in his office for days during a pitch. One afternoon Dane looked in and asked the fanatic what he was up to.

  “I’m branding the biggest thing there is,” the conceited art director boasted. “I’m branding life!”

  Dane wished the art gnome could see him now. Branding life was child’s play compared to what Dane was doing—which was nothing less than revealing the unifying principle for all advertising.

  All morning, he worked out his theory, which he titled “Promotional Equilibrium.” He was so engrossed in his calculations that he almost forgot to breathe and had to pace the office to stop hyperventilating. When he had solved his equations and doublechecked his work—as if anyone could understand such computations well enough to detect accuracy or error—he wrote his theory and proof as a short paper and rushed to the meeting.

  During the creative review, Bevaqua and Karen presented programs with acronyms, such as ROI (Return on Investment), which would include information about UNIHEALTH. Their ideas were dry and business-oriented and Dane worried that he had misunderstood the assignment. But when his turn came, he was intoxicated with adrenaline.

  “Programs with acronyms are great,” Dane said, “But there are so many of them that they all sound alike. And acronyms are hard to figure out and even harder to remember. We have three to five seconds to overcome the audience’s impulse to toss the offering. How do we accomplish that?

  Dane scribbled his mathematical formulas on a flipchart. He stepped away from his squiggly notations occasionally to check his work, nodded, then continued to write frenetically, explaining his steps, until he finished the proof for “Promotional Equilibrium.” He turned to his audience.

  “Any questions?”

  Other proponents of mystifying theories might have collapsed under the weight of their colleagues’ silent astonishment but Dane was unfazed. He had planned this presentation carefully. Promotional Equilibrium was just his opening act. He had his audience where he wanted them—in utter confusion and receptive to any alternative they could understand.

  “I propose that we take this concept titled, How Strong is Your Acorn? and turn it into a children’s book, like Are You My Mommy? or Green Eggs and Ham. We’ll write the ideas in pithy passages with superb illustrations. If it’s cute and has a nice cover, it might be seductive enough not to get tossed. Our prospective clients might even read it to their children. But along with the fun stuff, we’ll give our prospective clients something unexpected…nothing less than the unified theory of advertising on which our children’s book is based, which they can use to produce an acorn of perfect advertising—anytime! Do you see? We capture our audience between childlike simplicity and the highest order of conceptual sophistication!”

  The silence was back. This time it might have engulfed most thinkers and buried their ideas. Only Dane’s hyperactive inspiration protected him from the prospect of professional ruin. A strong, youthful voice broke the hush.

  “It’s brilliant,” said a young, female copywriter—one of the rising stars of the agency. “It’s like Einstein meets Dr. Seuss!”

  The executive vice president swiftly agreed that it had possibilities.

  “I’m so glad you said that,” Bevaqua said, “It’s deeply profound. Every time I think about it, I get a new thought. It’s like replicating in my brain…in a good way.”

  Dane was ecstatic and relieved. In the ruthless environment of UNIHEALTH he knew that at least he would not be fired for another week. His acorn concept and the “science” behind it were sent to Bozenfeld, the marketing consultant, that evening. He would have final say over which idea was developed into a marketing offering.

  The next afternoon Bevaqua called Dane into the fishbowl and handed him the email he had received from the marketing guru moments before. Bozenfeld, the marketing maven, had selected “The Acorn” concept and the theory of “Advertising Equlibrium”; he wrote that he believed this was a unique offering, with definite appeal to both sides of the perspective client’s brain, and would differentiate UNIHEALTH in the marketplace.

  After only eight days Dane was the creative genius of UNIHEALTH. It was a triumph he could ride for at least a few months. His rapture was so acute that he could barely tolerate it. With his theory of “Promotional Equilibrium” Dane believed he had done more than reach his creative apex; he had made an important contribution to the field. He went to the local Taco Bell to celebrate with a brace of bean burritos.

  Did success go to Dane’s head? How could it not? Success is a drug not administered orally, topically or by injection. It enters the brain directly through the eyes and ears and creates insidious craving. Rather than savor his coup, on his ninth day at UNIHEALTH Dane prowled the cubicled halls, stalking his next opportunity. He was addicted to success and craved more. He should have asked himself this: After reaching his zenith, where else could he go?

  Case 4-C

  FOUR MEN AND A FISH

  9. PROFESSIONAL PROSTATE

  He received his answer at 9:30 AM Monday morning when the Prostate Team convened. The Prostate Team had three women and Dane. The account director was Sylvia Befunkawicz, a fast-talking, fast-moving woman. The art director was Karen Long, a small, pale woman with large glasses and a perpetual scowl. Karen was one of the associate creative directors who had met Dane during his second round of interviews. The third woman was the traffic coordinator, who was taking a personal day to plan her wedding.

  “Welcome, Dane. We’re thrilled to have you on the team!” Sylvia Befunkawicz said with a brassy voice that made “thrilled” sound like “irritated.”

  Immediately, Sylvia launched into a litany of projects. She expected Dane to help with them all.

  “Do you have any questions?” she asked.

  Dane knew it was important to ask a zinger or at least to make a semi-astute observation.

  “There was something in the study that puzzled and intrigued me. Men who had genital discomfort claimed to have sex several times a week.”

  “Yes. We noticed this discrepancy,” Sylvia replied briskly, “A doctor I interviewed called it sexaggeration and warned that it might compromise the study. It’s unlikely that most men over forty have any sex when half have erectile dysfunction. Nice point, Don! It’s great having a prostate on board. You can give valuable insight.”

  Sylvia’s smile implied that impotence was Dane’s personal expertise. She asked him if he had further questions. Apparently expecting none, she stood up to leave. But Dane was dissatisfied. He could not let everyone leave that meeting with the idea that he was impotent and had stale insights.

  “I have one more question,” he said. “Prosbar induces chemical castration. But its concept has four geezers on a boat holding a fish. What does this mean?”

  “Doctors love that image. It tested extraordinarily well,” Sylvia said and briskly walked out of the fishbowl.

  “I was hired to bring fresh creative ideas to this brand. Was that an over-promise?�
� Dane cracked.

  “You’re experienced. What do you think?” Karen Long, the art supervisor, replied.

  10. FOUR MEN AND A FISH

  Dane received his first creative assignment that morning. It was to write copy for a breakfast invitation card to be distributed at the upcoming national urology meeting.

  As copy supervisor of the Prostate Team, Dane was responsible for two drugs. One was Contruro, for benign prostate hyperplasia, marketed in Europe and a year away from FDA approval. The second drug, Prosbar, treated prostate cancer. Rather than kill cancer cells, Prosbar (luprolide acetate) deprived them of the testosterone on which they thrived. It was bluntly titled “chemical castration.”

  Without testosterone, prostate cancer cells could not replicate, so they died. However, without testosterone, men could experience humiliating side effects—breast development, hot flashes and a loss of sex drive. The aftershock was worse. The testes might shut down the testosterone factory forever, leaving the man a cancer-free eunuch!

  Reading about chemical castration made Dane’s groin ache. His thighs tingled and shook like he had spontaneous nervous leg syndrome. His flailing leg kicked out the computer power cord, prompting one more visit by the IT guy, who pegged Dane as an annoying freak.

  Dane tried to submerge his queasiness in work. The breakfast invitation card he was assigned to write would be slipped under urologists’ hotel room doors in the evening. It would invite doctors to attend Prosbar’s breakfast seminars where paid experts would tout the benefits of chemical castration. Karen said the card copy should be catchy and appealing because every prostate drug would compete with Prosbar for urologists’ time and attention.

  It was a small, yet agonizing assignment. What would draw a crowd of world-weary urologists to a breakfast meeting about chemical castration, which they already understood in detail? Dane thought hard with no immediate result. He tried every one of his inspiration-inducing techniques. He pulled his hair, boxed his ears, smacked his face, and bit his fingers—to no avail. Then he resorted to a last, desperate measure—he started to think.