Sally adjourned the meeting, and whisked the client off to another room to show more data. Dane drifted off to research a men’s room. When he returned to the research area, he opened a side room door by mistake. Sally was on the table with the client standing between her legs, gasping hard. Sally turned to the intruder and screamed, “Get out now!”
“It’s urgent!” The client gasped.
11. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING URGENT
After five research sessions in three cities, involving twenty subjects—twelve doctors and eight patients—Sally, the Grovil marketing director, and the research psychologist concluded that “medical emergency” was the message doctors and patients preferred and would be the platform for the Grovil re-launch.
“How bogus does it get?” Dane muttered. “In my notes ‘medical emergency’ came in fourth…Fourth! Out of five messages.”
“That was in Edison, New Jersey,” Ron adduced. “Maybe people felt differently in Houston and Milwaukee.”
“Doctors are the same everywhere. They don’t like people telling them how to do their job. Why do we bother with research?” Dane asked.
He knew the answer. Research resulted from the usual suspects: due diligence, hand-holding and covering your ass. If the campaign did poorly because of a flawed marketing strategy, the product manager blamed research.
However, in this case, research indicated a clear direction, which the Grovil marketing team deliberately ignored. If the data were interpreted correctly, the manufacturer would lower the drug’s cost, sell more units, heal more wounds, make more profit, establish a leadership role in the diabetes community, and everyone would be served.
But Sally’s urgency concept was in the way.
Dane coped with this frustration in his usual way. He made a short pilgrimage to the Adelman toilet to use the commode and read what his mentor, Ogden Adelman, had to say on the subject.
“What do I do now, Ogden?” Dane asked.
“Even the best creative can’t make a product do what it doesn’t. If you try, it will be exposed as fake,” the voice of Adelman spoke from page 70.
“Yes, I know,” Dane replied as his crisis deepened. He read one of Adelman’s adages on Page 90. “When you’re in a box, bring scissors.”
Dane was surely in a box. It was the essence of advertising. When people said, “Think out of the box!” it was no injunction to be original but a taunt, as in “Think out of this box if you can.”
Heal now or amputate was a good message. If doctors did not take a wait and see approach to cancer or heart disease, why would they wait for a foot wound to turn gangrene? The problem was that doctors would not listen. No one cared about giving poor patients quality care if Medicaid, HMOs and Medicare did not pay for it.
And even if amputation was a legitimate threat, the FDA would never let Grovil use it as a promotional message because there no clinical data to prove Grovil reduced amputations—and there never would be, since medical ethics forbade a clinical trial where participants risked amputation to test a claim.
Such obstacles aside, Dane relished the creative challenge because it was his alone. In most agencies, people swarmed on a project such as Grovil like garter snakes in a mating ball, but Dane’s bosses were in Canada and he was unopposed in New York. Ron knew cars, skateboards and breakfast foods, but nothing about drugs. He nodded passively at whatever Dane said. Dane believed Ron was his reward for every art director who ever domineered over him.
Dane and Ron perused the creative brief and brainstormed. How could Grovil’s faster healing be linked with lower risk of amputation without saying it? Dane imagined a closet full of shoes with only left shoes. Ron proposed a crossing sign whose man icon had a truncated leg. Such urgent visuals allowed headlines to be suitably vague. Dane considered a macabre testimonial: A ballet slipper, a photograph of a girl in a tutu. The headline would read: “Your left foot has done so much for you…how sad to see it go.”
Ron designed a time bomb strapped to a foot; a dynamite stick protruding from a diabetic ulcer.
Then Dane hit the message to incorporate urgency and cost. An elderly couple slow-danced; a dotted line circumscribed the man’s foot like a perforation for coupons. The dotted line around the foot implied amputation without stating it. It might also multi-task as a peel-off game. The reader would peel the strip off the foot and receive up to $50 off his next tube of $300 Grovil.
Advertising was fun again. The creative ideas were abundant and the Ron’s executions were superb. All was going well. So what had to happen next?
Case 6-C
THE GOOD FIGHT
12. THE BAD OLD DAYS
Nigel, the creative director, was going on a vacation cruise to Iceland to bathe in volcanic waters. Since his ship was leaving at the end of the week, he needed the concepts Dane and Ron were working on by Friday at 1 PM in order to review them before his departure. Ron and Dane were on schedule. Ron e-mailed Nigel PDFs of their concepts as they went along. Then on the eve of Nigel’s vacation, the creative director made an unexpected request.
He asked Ron to draw the concepts with markers on paper and fax them to Toronto. He said he wanted to see bare ideas without computer images and tasty fonts. It was how concepts were done twenty years ago, he said, when he was starting out.
“Why is he going nostalgic on us now?” Dane wondered. Creatives often whined about the good old days before computers made layouts so easy that clients expected finished ads before there were any ideas in them. The grousers were mainly copywriters who envied art directors for the uncanny powers computers rendered them.
How wickedly ironic it was that Nigel, an art director, wanted to turn back time. Ron was stricken.
“Nigel,” he pleaded, “I haven’t drawn anything since art school eight years ago.”
“Don’t worry, lad. I don’t expect a finished comp. I want thinking, not execution. You’ll find it helpful, too. Ay?”
“But it will take forever.”
“Trace the images or do stick figures,” Nigel suggested breezily. “Look forward to seeing them. Get them to me by noon so we can talk. I’m out of here before one.”
Nigel’s quest for purity of concept was laudable but if he wished to emphasize that ideas mattered more than pretty layouts, he might have chosen a better time. Was he making the New York creative team work twice as hard for laughs? He may have wished to humble Ron by exposing his poor draftsmanship or to test Dane’s ideas without an art director’s beguilement. Whatever Nigel’s motive, asking Ron to do computer-less comps was like Pharaoh ordering more bricks with no straw.
Dane reminded himself that drawing concepts by hand was as authentic as the building they were in. He tried to relive the excitement of De la Femina and Travisano creating a campaign at 8:30 AM, a half hour before the client showed up for a presentation. Dane should have been thrilled to have this classic advertising fire drill. Then why was it making him sick?
Watching Ron, the cocky click-meister, slowly move a marker over tracing paper and a magazine image agitated Dane. It was torture to observe someone competent in one respect look so hapless in another.
“How is it coming?” Dane asked Ron.
“I hate this.”
“Art directors are expected to draw.”
“It’s not the same,” Ron replied as he focused with dead eyes and a slack jaw on the tracing. “Artists specialize like doctors. Some guys illustrate comps all day. They’re fast and accurate. Me doing this is like an ophthalmologist setting a broken bone…He could do it but not like an orthopedic surgeon.”
“You’re right. It’s my nerves talking instead of my brain.”
“I like how you said that,” Ron laughed.
It was the first time in a month that the two men had had such a long conversation.
By 12:45 PM the next day, Ron had completed forty concepts. He knelt before the fax machine to supplicate it to work and faxed the traced sheets to Nigel. When no response came at 1:15 the partners
phoned Toronto but could not get through. At 1:30, Nigel phoned. “So, boys, where are the concepts, ay?” he demanded.
“I sent them at 12:45,” Ron said.
“I never got them.”
“OK, we’ll send them again.”
“Do it now. I’m leaving,” Nigel replied casually.
Dane and Ron faxed the concepts as fast as they could but Nigel left without reviewing their work. He would not return for two weeks and testing was in three. It was a first for Dane. Either Nigel was the coolest boss or the worst.
“We missed the boat,” Dane said. “I hope Nigel doesn’t miss his.”
13. A SURPRISING REVERSAL
Nigel was a cunning manager. Like an ace bombardier, he dropped his payload with precision from high above and blew creative peasants to smithereens. He found the weakness on this team and exploited it. By changing the concept format at the last minute and leaving before he reviewed his team’s work, he shut down the Grovil project until his return. Dane and Ron would be idle for two weeks and have themselves to blame.
After six weeks, Dane saw the first threat to his autonomy as the senior medical writer in the New York office. Because he and Ron failed to deliver the work on time to Nigel, they might be perceived as incompetent numbskulls in need of micromanagement. They handed Nigel a pretext for seizing control of their creative output. Ron’s lack of formal art training had snuffed Dane’s best shot at advertising stardom.
But in advertising, failure could be as fickle as success. Dane’s and Ron’s second chance came swiftly since Sally, the account director, and Julien Pellicule, the vice president of client services, were not playing Nigel’s game. They could not wait for his return to evaluate concepts. They needed to see what they had in advance of the important client review, and asked Dane and Ron to show their work without Nigel’s input.
Sally was skittish. She needed Nigel to tell her a concept was good. Since he was in Iceland she was lost. And when Sally was lost, she was more demanding and critical than usual.
“I don’t get this one. I don’t get this one, either!” she screeched. Despite her caviling, Rupert McTavish, the head of the New York office, and Pellicule were impressed by the work Dane and Ron showed. They agreed that everything could be better on a computer. “I know!” Ron blurted, “I’m sorry for this but Nigel insisted on drawings.”
Account people were once again Dane’s unlikely allies, putting him back in control.
He and Ron executed the ten concepts the top account people wanted by week’s end. Everything was working perfectly. The concepts would be done before Nigel returned from Iceland and he would be too late to change them before the client meeting, two days after his return. Then there would be only two days to refine the concepts before research.
Dane and Ron braced for Nigel’s return, sensing he would be unhappy about being bypassed. They also expected him to review their work immediately and overhaul everything. However, the first day of Nigel’s return passed without comment. Had he forgotten them? The next day Dane had a personal day off, scheduled weeks in advance and signed off by ten people. He and Becky were going to Iris’s day camp to see her in a musical production. If Nigel wanted to put his imprint on the work he had apparently run out of time. Or had he?
Dane and Becky had to leave at 10:30 to make it to Iris’s performance by noon. At 10 AM, Nigel phoned Dane at home to discuss the concepts. Becky stared at Dane while Nigel held Dane on the line. Dane explained to Nigel that he was on the way out and had to cut the call short but Nigel was oblivious. Finally, Dane blurted, “Nigel, I have to leave now.” He reminded Nigel that he had signed the form that granted him a day off.
Later that afternoon Nigel phoned again. After reviewing the concepts he wanted to change everything. He had rewritten headlines and inserted new visuals. Dane felt doomed—again! He and Ron would have to work all night to make Nigel’s many changes before the client presentation—and there would be mistakes.
Dane and Ron had misinterpreted Nigel from the start. When the creative director absconded for Iceland without reviewing their work, they thought he had confidence in them. But he only let them think they were free so he could make them do everything his way at the last moment.
However, Nigel also miscalculated. He expected the creative team to flounder for two weeks so he could enter at the last moment to rescue the account from disaster. Only he ran out of time to make his big play.
“You’re meeting the client tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM so you can’t change everything tonight,” Nigel conceded. “We’ll see what can be done later to add ideas.”
Dane relaxed and smiled to himself at this rare victory. Maybe he was The Chosen One and this was the Chosen Job. Dane was savoring the moment too much to assess whether this was a legitimate battle for independence, a freakish anomaly or another mythic hallucination.
14. WHILE THE MOUSE IS AWAY
After a successful presentation in which the client liked all that he and Ron presented, it was Dane’s turn to take a vacation. Before he left, he finished and reviewed with satisfaction the concepts to be submitted for research. He knew his concept would win since they were all his. He was a monopoly like cable TV and would soon take his place among advertising geniuses he admired as the creator of a landmark campaign.
With such an unassailable position, he gave no thought to research while on vacation. When he returned, he scanned his emails for the research results, more from sporting curiosity than an urgent need to know. Which of his creative children had won? He didn’t care because he loved them all. Dane opened the file titled “Research Results” and stared in disbelief at two concepts he had never seen. No one was there to explain this puzzling turn of events until Ron sauntered in after ten.
“Where are the concepts we worked on?’
Dane had been in the business long enough to forget what could happen when one goes away for a week.
“It was terrible,” Ron said quietly. “After testing in North Carolina, three concepts did well—the bomb strapped to the foot, the guy in the wheel chair and the dancing couple. But the client wasn’t comfortable.”
“They weren’t comfortable! What does that mean?” Dane yelled. “They had hemorrhoids?”
“Sally said they weren’t comfortable. That’s all I know,” Ron stared at his monitor.
“Sally!” Dane shouted. “I bet she made them comfortable.”
“Nigel made me go with him to Toronto to brainstorm. He said we needed five new concepts. When we got there, Nigel, a writer and I went to a Starbucks. They talked a mile a minute and ignored me. They came up with five ideas and I spent the day and a night finding pictures and doing layouts for them.”
Ron showed Dane the ideas Ron and the other writer created: a man with pencil points for feet; another with feet severed from his legs; and a wheel-chair-bound woman with a stump for a leg. The worst was a contortionist holding a foot with four amputated toes next to her face.
“It’s a freak show,” Dane growled. “I’m gone for a week and this happens…and you let them do it?”
“What could I do, Dane? Nigel’s our boss,” Ron said sadly. “I was their slave.”
Dane suspected that Ron was too good a sycophant to be a passive victim but he could not accuse him. Half an ally was better than none.
“Do they think this inflammatory advertising will be approved by the FDA?” Dane asked rhetorically. Ron was silent.
“This is how they view us. We’re second-class,” Dane said. “They’re getting even with America for taking most of their hockey teams.”
Dane took a week off believing he could not lose; when he returned, he learned he could not win. He understood how Haile Selassie must have felt when Ethiopian soldiers hurled spears at Mussolini’s tanks, or how people in Guernica felt when the Luftwaffe bombed them. Or how heads of state felt when they were ousted in a coup d’état. Dane understood everything but what it meant to be an employee of an advertising agency.
/> “We still have one concept in the mix,” he told Ron. “We’ll win this war.”
“You think so?” Ron asked doubtfully.
“You’ve got to believe it, Ron,” Dane said. “Did you spend all that time and money in advertising schools so people could hijack your opportunities? Are we together on this?”
“Sure,” Ron said, nodding tentatively. We’re partners.”
15. BORDER WAR
So began the Grovil Concept War between the Toronto and New York offices. Over a two month period, this regional conflict would be waged in offices, conference rooms, and hotels; in memoranda, emails and text-messages; in bars, restaurants and corporate cafeterias; and in various echelons of Grovil’s pharmaceutical company and Georgian Shield. It would be characterized by fierce backstabbing, silken threats, and ruthless innuendoes. In the end, one concept would remain, in the front section of endocrine magazines everywhere.
Nigel still had two concepts in the mix. His first-string idea was a massive, red circular ulcer on the sole of a big foot. The client titled it Pepperoni foot. Nigel’s second concept was a tasteful variation of the first. It depicted a foot with a small wound and a large exclamation point. Dane’s and Ron’s Dancers came in as the third entry. It showed an elderly couple waltzing in their den. A dotted line circumscribed the man’s foot to imply potential amputation.
Early reports that trickled into the New York office had pharma executives choosing the New York team’s Dancers to Toronto’s Pepperoni foot by two-to-one. The clients viewed the concept of two old slow dancers as a touching evocation of the target audience performing an activity that required feet. Meanwhile, the perforation encircling the foot conveyed a subtle warning of amputation without scaring anyone or besmirching the drug company’s tasteful reputation.
Each affirmative update sent Dane into internal transports of fistpumping exultation, while Sally and the other Canadians reviled the client and defied Dane to show emotion.
One Friday afternoon Nigel and Sally held a telephone conference call regarding the Grovil concepts. Sally sullenly announced that the client decided to pass on Pepperoni foot.
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