Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  “I don’t hate Jesus.”

  “But you don’t love Jesus.”

  “Love of deity doesn’t come easily for me,” Dane said. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “But it is personal. Jesus loves you…And you know what it is to feel unrequited love.”

  “Jesus can handle it. Can we talk about endothelin-A receptors now?”

  A large female account executive with blue framed glasses walked in. Paula showed their new concepts.

  “The disease is a shark. See? It’s all dangerous and blue. We’re the skin-diver with the harpoon,” Paula explained, as she pointed at the salient features of the ad with a child’s exuberance.

  “You’re so brilliant,” the large woman with blue framed glasses told Paula, then shot Dane a dirty look.

  One afternoon, Dane walked in while Paula was proudly showing off their concepts to a pugnacious senior writer who greeted Dane each morning with, “Hey, Stupid!”

  The churlish writer was consistent. “Bye, Stupid,” he cracked before walking out.

  “What’s wrong, Sugar?” Paula asked, sensing Dane’s agitation.

  “If you show our work to people, they’ll steal it and we’ll be out of work,” Dane snapped. He was enraged and viewed Paula as a traitor.

  Tears filled her eyes. She reached for him with two bare arms and hugged him.

  “Oh, Dane! Do birds keep secrets? No, they sing every morning and the Lord finds them all the worms they can eat. You must believe.”

  Blockage and suffocation characterized pulmonary hypertension—and Dane’s and Paula’s creative process. They were stuck on artery metaphors—sewer pipes, sink-traps, rubber tubes. Dane even proposed rigatoni stuffed with cheese.

  “I am so empty!” Paula cried. She cranked the sound on her computer. An angelic choir of synthesized castrati blasted plainsong from her speakers.

  “I hear a rumbling in my brain,” Dane replied nervously, hoping to preempt her prayer and proselytizing. Too late.

  “We need the Lord’s salvation!” she cried. “Let us pray for inspiration!”

  Falling on her knees, Paula reached high to the heavens, seeking divine intervention for bad medical metaphors.

  “Oh, Lord, fill my mind and spirit with your never-ending creativity.”

  Agency staffers were drawn to Paula’s doorway as if the bangles that jingled on her wrists were church bells ringing. They witnessed Paula in a tight miniskirt, tan arms reaching skyward in voluptuous supplication, fusing church and state, science and faith in sparkinducing paradox. When Paula stopped humming her hymn, she opened her eyes as Pharmation employees applauded. She laughed, reached for the heavens, and cried, “Praise the Lord!”

  “Praise the Lord!” they responded.

  Dane wondered if he should pass a hat. When the crowd scattered, Paula declared, “See? People need to believe.” She clasped her hands and looked upward. “Please, Jesus, help Dane believe!”

  Perhaps her prayer was answered. Or Dane compensated for his lack of faith with a creative revelation of his own. Primary hypertension stopped women’s breathing, so Dane visualized a woman in a binding corset. He believed Paula would love this image since she often wore lingerie as business attire. Instead, she cried.

  “You’re leaving me!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t lie. God knows what’s in your heart.”

  “I have no plans.”

  Evidently, Paula did. Dane was soon relegated from his office across from her and to a cubicle at the far end of a vast, open space. The truculent writer who called Dane, “Stupid!” everyday was in and out of Paula’s office. He and Paula feasted on Dane’s headlines now while Paula turned every status meeting into a prayer service with one theme: “Believe.”

  Staff people avoided eye contact with Dane until a group surrounded him at the water cooler and fired paper clips, hissing, “Antichrist.” Paula came to Dane’s rescue. She warned his tormentors that the antichrist was not a person but a failure in all people to believe. Dane was saved but when the time came to present the pitch, Paula stayed on and Dane was discarded.

  He was starting to think freelance was a less stable version of fulltime employment—steady abuse without a steady paycheck.

  4. WHAT’S MY PRODUCT?

  It was uncanny. No matter how often Dane got the shaft he always fell into a new dumpster.

  He received a last-minute assignment to write copy for Info Med, a small agency with a unique method to sell drugs, titled Informational Promotion. Dane’s challenge was to figure out what Informational Promotion meant, since no one told him.

  Dane hoped the Fed Ex parcel from Info Med would explain, but the materials featured sultry close ups of sensual women with twoword headlines like “Invigorating Information,” “Hard Facts,” “Dynamic Data,” and “Influence Interest.” After careful analysis, Dane concluded that Informational Promotion was for erectile dysfunction. He created ten new headlines and body copy to incorporate this theme.

  Dane met the men of Info Med to give them their $500 worth of creative.

  Cedric Mann-Dingus, the creative director, a large-boned Englishman with a rosaceous nose, introduced Dane to his associates, Gino and Lance. Cedric was from the celebrated Mann-Dingus family that once amassed and bankrupted an advertising empire. Gino, the marketing director, was short and nervous, with craving eyes. Lance, the data manager, had black framed glasses and spiky hair, like a dad in a Disney movie.

  The Info Med brain trust faced Dane across a table. With dour gravity, they stated that his work was outstanding but did not convey their novel idea.

  “Out of ten copy platforms you couldn’t use one?” Dane asked dejectedly.

  “The abundance was lovely,” Mann-Dingus replied. “But none were quite, mmm, right.”

  “Can you describe your product?” Dane asked.

  “We have to ladder up to that,” said Lance.

  “First we put a stake in the ground,” Gino said.

  “What makes your method unique?” Dane asked.

  “Don’t go there,” Gino said.

  “That’s the ‘Ah hah!’ moment!” Lance added. “We serve it up with sex.”

  “If we tell you the Ah hah for shits and giggles,” Gino said, “you’ll go, ‘Huh?’ It’s that brilliantly simple.”

  “Like the bloody wheel!” Mann-Dingus brayed after clearing his throat.

  “What’s like the wheel?” Dane asked.

  “The Sumerian sod who invented that was a bona fide bloody genius,” said Mann-Dingus. “But he didn’t make a shekel because he had no patent.”

  “What would friggin’ Hammurabi say ‘bout that!” Gino pounded his fist in his hand.

  Like a Chilean tree that harvests moisture from fog, Dane’s mouth gaped to help his brain absorb meaning from these words. Yet even this novel adaptation did not help him understand Info Med’s method.

  Gino squirmed like he was gagging a fart.

  “Here’s the problem. When I present our informational promotion modules to clients they tell me…Yeah! So you do ads, brochures and newsletters differently…is that it? No, damn it, that’s not it.”

  “Do you produce ads, brochures and newsletters?” Dane asked.

  “Yeah, but you’re missing the point! He’s missing the point!” Gino repeated convulsively.

  “What is the point?” Dane pleaded.

  The three men pelted him with buzz-words.

  “It’s drive acquisition.”

  “Ramped up to motivate conversion.”

  “Then we deliver on it with relationship through subtraction.”

  “And sexy it up with brand magnetism.”

  “Are the naked women part of your method?” Dane asked.

  Lance pointed excitedly at Dane. “That’s the Ah! before the Ah hah! Like Niagara before the falls.”

  Dane yanked at his hair follicles but pounding his head on the table was faster and more effective.r />
  “Will nobody tell me what this is about? Please?” he supplicated.

  An hour passed and nobody explained the meaning of informational promotion. It was as if the men from Info Med expected him to know. Dane regurgitated key phrases. “DNA? Free radicals? Serotonin between synapses?”

  “Bigger. And remember: sex,” Gino said.

  “Is it the Pharmasutra?” Dane guessed.

  “You’re miles away,” Richard said.

  Dane slumped. Digging for metaphors gave him a mental hernia.

  Maybe knowing the product and what it did were irrelevant. Maybe he had lost his gut instinct.

  “Do we tell him?” Gino asked. The others nodded.

  “Thank you,” Dane responded gratefully.

  “It’s sperm fertilizing the egg,” Gino said.

  The three men stared at Dane in suspense: would he get it?

  “A million ideas swim to the brain but only one gets in,” Lance added.

  “The women in your ads…the sperm is for them?” Dane asked unsurely.

  “Bingo!” They boomed in unison.

  “Now here’s where it gets tricky,” Mann-Dingus brayed. “How do we say this without animated sperms!”

  “That is so last year,” said Lance.

  “Been there, done that,” Gino said.

  After extended foreplay, the men from Info Med had injected their proprietary idea into Dane’s mind. Now they watched his face to see if he “got it” while they popped Altoids to prevent the possible taste of defeat. Dane’s eyes widened. He had it and everyone felt it. They pumped their fists and cheered before he opened his mouth.

  “Life starts with conception!” Dane proclaimed.

  Their mouths opened. They seemed to taste the idea. Then they puffed their cheeks as if swishing it around, only to purse their lips to spit it out.

  “That’s not it,” they said.

  “See? Conception: it’s a double-entendre…It’s perfect. It ties your sexual theme with your creative theme,” Dane pleaded.

  The more energetic his sales pitch, the faster Dane sank into their unreceptive grimaces. They wanted to love it, but couldn’t. It was Dane’s turn for despair. He saw himself forever spewing words inadequate to an ineffable idea.

  “How about this?” Dane snarled. “Tell your clients to jerk off for more ideas. You’re experts in that!”

  The Info Med men stared at him in astonishment. Dane had the imploding sensation that he had blown his fee.

  Mann-Dingus wagged his clubbed forefinger.

  “That’s it! I’ve been trying to say it for years!”

  Dane had solved the impossible problem of creating a message for a product he did not understand. It was a shame that he was too demoralized to experience satisfaction at the feat. He had brainstormed before but was never hit by one until now.

  He staggered to the parking lot. It was dark and he had no idea where he was. As he made his way slowly home on secondary roads through a long string of small suburban towns with their stop signs and traffic lights, his mind raced over the incessant talk, the unspeakable product, the irrelevant sexual imagery. It led him to one conclusion: he couldn’t do this anymore. His advertising career was over.

  Case 7-B

  FREELANCE VS. STAFF: COMPARATIVE PATHOLOGIES

  5. DOMESTIC REHAB

  Dane retreated to domestic safety. He helped Becky with groceries. He moved on to cleaning the house. When he had a taste of housework he wanted more. Cleaning and straightening gave him a sense of control and achievement.

  He thought Becky would be pleased and he was right. At first, she appreciated her husband’s willingness to do chores, since it relieved her of the drudgery. But Dane’s restless domesticity, always seeking new dirt and clutter to remove, became a nuisance. She had to take swift, decisive action.

  “You’re not doing it right,” she scolded. “You’re vacuuming without dusting. So you’re only half-cleaning.”

  ‘It’s better than nothing,” Dane replied. “You’re getting all procedural on me. Just like advertising.” Dane clasped his head as if it were that simple to wring out the bad memories and feelings.

  Becky had limited sympathy for Dane’s angst. She viewed his strange passion for housework as a pathological waste of talent that could destabilize the family. If he believed he was the better homemaker, how would they survive? She sat with him as he blew on his soup and stared in his eyes.

  “Is housework how you want to spend your life? She asked earnestly. “Then hire yourself out as a maid.”

  Dane received the message. When put in professional terms, housework lost his interest. His ultimate fulfillment would never come by eliminating dust-bunnies and cooking French onion soup. He was an amateur. If advertising no longer satisfied him creatively, at least it paid.

  He considered all that he had learned in his three freelance jobs: work was good but he should expect no lasting reward or security from it; faith was important; and he could solve problems in a state of ignorance. Why should he quit now? He was on a roll! He made calls and someone called him back.

  6. RELAPSE

  Form Icon was a young New York agency teeming with energy and people. Every square foot of converted loft space was cluttered. Roaches poised on walls like ornate thumbtacks as rats sniffed and bellied among the wastebaskets brimming with day-old take-out.

  Work stations with low partitions signified the egalitarian décor of Form Icon. Privacy was effaced by communal voyeurism. Colleagues stared at colleagues when they looked up from their monitors. At venerable agencies like Green, prestige was marked by the number of tiles in your office ceiling. At Form Icon, two planks of counter-space signified as much status as you were likely to get.

  Last-hired staff and freelancers were issued desks abutting boilers and restrooms or obstructing aisles like plaques and tumors. In deference to his experience, Dane sat behind a rolling cart near a lady’s room, like an attendant without towels. When he made eye contact with women seeking relief, he felt like a contestant on his own private game show, What’s Her Business? Monte Hall would ask, “Is it number one or number two?” One female employee’s dour look implied she read Dane’s filthy mind; he blushed and did double penance when stench and disinfectant wafted through the open door.

  Dane’s cart was eventually given to a new full-time employee while he was relocated to a small conference room with six other temporary creatives.

  There was no room for Dane, yet somehow he fit in. His personality offended no one, and his writing was respected—and routinely dissected. At Form Icon, Dane had a career-defining insight: people changed his writing because they liked it. Advertising’s cruel affection was better than the alternative: If your work was despised, they made you rewrite it—or fired you.

  As a freelancer, the workday was easy but getting jobs and being paid for them were not. Dane was diligent about having timesheets signed and tracking his paycheck. The burden of a full-time job was replaced by constant change. The job was not stable but cyclical with identifiable emotional phases—anguish (no work), gratitude (gets work), resentment (works too hard), disgust (work gets trashed) and anguish (assignment over, looks for work).

  After a month, Form Icon offered Dane a staff job. The Los Angeles office needed a New York writer. Dane would replace a young man who wrote excellent bullet points but who disappeared for half of every workday. The creative director, Michael Moran, a garrulous, blue-eyed Ivy graduate with the shifting focus and feline reflexes of a bartender, told Dane he had the perfect blend of talent and experience to nobly discharge the duties of New York writer for the LA office.

  “Such as—?” Dane asked.

  “The usual,” Moran said, stroking his jowls while previewing his words. “But instead of 9-5, you’ll work 12-8.” Dane knew no one in the industry worked eight hours. He would rise in the morning, take his daughter to school, wait until noon, and work until midnight.

  “I’ll never have dinner with my fami
ly,” Dane lamented.

  “Have breakfast,” Moran guffawed.

  “We don’t have time for breakfast,” Dane muttered. “I’ll never sleep.”

  “You can do this job in your sleep,” Moran insisted. “Look, don’t bust my balls. I’m giving you a golden opportunity. There’s no travel but you’ll cross the great divide between day and night, where darkness is visible.”

  Moran observed a moment of silence to appreciate his soliloquy. He knew the middle-aged freelancer had no better offers. Dane accepted the staff position—three months after renouncing full-time employment forever. Yet in his heart he remained a freelancer.

  7. STAFF INFECTION

  When Dane deliberated over taking the staff job, everyone said it was a “no brainer.” With a permanent position, he would “own” his job and be respected. When he accepted the offer, he was congratulated. An hour later, he received an email to appear at dawn outside a homeless shelter to pose for the agency’s edgy Christmas card. Attendance was mandatory.

  After completing his human resources paper work, Dane had his first fringe benefit—he returned to his cart outside the lady’s room.

  This was just an appetizer. The main course of Dane’s full-time position was a tripled workload. Within a week, Dane had familiar staff symptoms: tight deadlines; late nights; endless rounds of picayune changes. Normal quitting time—6 PM—was his midafternoon. The end of his workday was midnight—or later. Six o’clock meetings occurred like a parody of a family dinner; the black phone console on the conference table was a plastic roast in effigy. Projects were added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, grafted, amputated, resurrected and reconfigured for the morning after. Dane was sucked into the vortex of full-time pharma.

  Once again, Dane worked for long-distance supervisors whose faces he never saw. The account people in Los Angeles were distilled into voices barking demands. Dane was a writer with five critics. His copy came back to him with five sets of changes in a web of lines, hash marks and word balloons. “Track Changes” must have been invented by a computer software genius intent on driving wordsmiths insane. Dane tried to sort out the revisions but after hours of text-forensics, he concluded the changes were arbitrary and accepted them without comment.