Truth in Advertising (5 page)

I say, “‘Do I dare to eat a peach?'”

The kid says, “Um, I don't think we have any peaches. But I could make you a fruit smoothie.”

I hear Raphael shouting, “I want to film something! Ms. Paltrow and I are waiting!” There's a pause. “Why is this child black?”

D
id I mention that I am a copywriter at a Manhattan advertising agency? I am. You might recognize the name. Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen. It's been around for decades. We have offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, and, as of January of this year, Tokyo. We were acquired many years ago, like so many once-independent agencies, by a multinational PR firm. That firm was acquired earlier this year by a Japanese shipping company, though I have no idea why a shipping company—or a Japanese one at that—would buy an American ad agency, except that I've heard rumors that the shipping company owner's son, apparently a spectacular moron, was given the agency as a pet project by his father. Anything to keep the kid away from large vessels holding millions of dollars' worth of cargo.

Why did I, Fin Dolan, choose advertising, you might ask? Why not law or medicine or the fine arts? Because of bad grades, fear of blood, and no artistic talent of any kind. Was it a passion, something that simply overtook me, the way famous people on television speak of their careers as a passion? No. Did it dawn on me at a young age that advertising was my life's work, the way it dawned on Mohandas K. Gandhi, after he was thrown off that train in South Africa, that wearing a dhoti, carrying a stick, and changing India would be his life's work? No. Was it more of a calling? Did I try the priesthood first, spending several years in contemplative study with the Jesuits/Mormons/Buddhists before coming to the realization that God wanted me to serve Him by creating television commercials for
Pop-Tarts? No (nor have I worked on the Pop-Tart account, though I would be open to it). Did I do it because I was kicked out of the Morgan Stanley training program after three days, the recruiter saying these words to me with a contorted face: “It's as if . . . I mean . . . seriously, pal . . . it's as if you have no understanding of mathematics at all.” Yes. Definitely yes.

And what is it that I actually do? How does one find oneself on the set of a fake bedroom that is not attached to a real home on a soundstage in Queens with a group of people who are bizarrely serious about a diaper?

It starts this way. A small office, a cubicle, a place of unopenable windows and bad lighting. People with colds. A cafeteria that smells of warm cheese. An assignment. Let's make a TV commercial! Teams of people trying to come up with ideas that will resonate with a mother holding a child whilst on the phone preparing dinner with the TV on. Get to work, Finbar Dolan! Maybe I work. But maybe I don't. Maybe, instead, I search the Web for information on Pompeii or hiking boots or the Tour de France or the history of the luge or Churchill's speeches or why people have dermatitis. I write down a terrible idea for a commercial that seems like a great idea at the time (its terribleness will make itself apparent in a day or two), then write down an equally terrible idea for a screenplay or TV pilot that I will never write. I leaf through a magazine. I go out for coffee. I call Air France and put a hold on a ticket I will never buy. I wonder if anyone would catch me masturbating. I enter the word
assface
into the search bar just to see what comes up. I play air drums to Barry White songs playing on my iTunes. This is my job.

Indeed, this is also the job of the other fifty-four creatives at the agency. Copywriters and art directors. They are artists. They are misunderstood. They are impulsive, brilliant, difficult, short-tempered, divorced, heavy drinkers, smokers, recreational drug users, malcontents, sexual deviants. It is the land of misfit toys. Every one of them deep believers in their individuality, their Mr. Rogers “You-Are-Special”-ness. And yet so very much alike in wardrobe, attitude, world view, background, humor; readers of HuffPo, Gawker, Agency
Spy, people who quote
Monty Python, Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman,
who speak in movie-line references over and over, who like Wilco, Paul Westerberg, Eddie Izzard. Fast talkers, people who no longer tuck in their shirts, overly confident people with low self-esteem, people with British friends, people who know about good hotels and airport business lounges, people who are
working on
a screenplay/novel/documentary, watchers of HBO and
The Daily Show
, politically liberal, late to marry, one-child households, the women more than likely to have had an abortion, to have slept with their male copywriter or art director partner, the men having had sex with at least one coworker and probably more, half having once experimented or are now experimenting with facial hair. Everyone wears blue jeans all the time.

These are my people. These creators of oft-times indelible images for massive, far-reaching corporations. We are so much alike, sitting in a cubicle, in an office that is rarely large or impressive, the copywriters most likely working on an Apple PowerBook, typing in Palatino or Courier or Helvetica twelve-point, the art directors staring at comically large screens, who, from God-only-knows where, find an idea that will define a company, that will reach millions of people.

There are three kinds of creative people in advertising, according to my exceptionally unscientific point of view. There are the remarkably talented, the people who create the commercials you see and think,
Holy
shit,
that's cool!
They create the commercials everyone talks about: the sneakers, the computers, the high-end cars, the soft drinks, the fast food. Then there are the pretty darned talented who take the seemingly bland accounts and make them interesting: your credit cards, your energy companies, your insurance firms. Smart, solid work from smart, solid people who could easily get jobs writing speeches or managing a political campaign. Then there's the rest of us. Me and my coworkers. We do diapers. We do little chocolate candies. We do detergent and dishwashing liquid and air fresheners and toilet paper and paper towels and prescription drugs. Our commercials have cartoon animals or talking germs. It's the stuff you see and think,
Blessed mother of God, what idiot did that?
That idiot would
be me. I make the commercials wherein you turn the sound down or run to the toilet.

If there is a hierarchy in advertising products, surely a small plastic bag that holds poo and won't degrade for hundreds of years is well toward the bottom. You might think my colleagues and I would be discouraged by this. You would be partially correct, but only partially, as I myself find the idea of working on Nike or Apple or BMW so daunting as to be frightening. Whereas diapers, to my mind, are a tabula rasa. (I try to share this thought with the troops from time to time but it often falls on deaf ears.)

Within these three groups are various factions.

Some love it. They love the work, love talking about it, thinking about it, being friends with other advertising people. They love the exciting travel, the five-star hotels, the expense-account meals and expensive wine. And they have a point. It's tough to beat. But more than that, they are believers (like the senior partners at my agency, whom you shall meet in a moment). They believe advertising matters, that it is important, that it can be a force for good. Depending upon the day and my mood, I dabble in this camp.

Some merely like it, as it beats most jobs, but feel a sense of . . . longing. Longing for something better, more substantial, more important. True, advertising helps drive the economy, but, these people sometimes ask, “Is this the best I can do?” This sometimes colors their view of others, so they often feel a need to crap on any work they or their friends haven't personally done. (Except for the crapping-on-other-people's-work part, I can also be found in this camp at times.)

Some see advertising as a path to Hollywood greatness. They feel that they are as-yet-undiscovered scriptwriters and budding directors and that if someone at CAA or UTA would just take a careful
look
at their new Taco Bell/I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter/Tampax Light campaign they would
see
. As such, they are often frustrated (bordering on angry), eager to emulate Hollywood movies/scripts/dialogue, hire famous directors for spots. I once worked with a man who was obsessed with David Mamet dialogue. Every commercial he wrote sounded like a bad Mamet film.

MAN 1: The thing.

MAN 2: What thing?

MAN 1: The thing. This is what the man said.

MAN 2: The man said the thing?

MAN 1: This is what I'm saying.

MAN 2: What thing? What did the man say?

MAN 1: He said Bounty is the Quicker Picker-Upper.

Still others are simply too good for advertising. We have a couple of guys (every agency does, and they're always guys) who fancy themselves “real writers,” guys who are always starting commercials by quoting Hemingway or Kafka or some deep thought of their own, lines that sound great when read in a really deep slow voice but that don't mean anything (
If life is about living, then maybe living . . . is about life . . . long pause . . . Introducing new Stouffer's Cheesy Bread.
). The problem is it's a commercial, not literature, and at some point you have to get to the product. These guys are always working on a novel. And God love them for it. They're better (and certainly more driven) men than I. They can't quite believe that they're forty-ish ad guys, when the plan twenty years before was to be on the third novel, the previous two having been optioned for screenplays, which they themselves would have written. They also use the phrase
selling my soul
a lot. They say this in a poor-me kind of way. It's charming. Not to me. But it's charming to the young account girls, who are often wooed by these grizzled writers, men who carry books and sometimes read them, who drink too much, who bed these impressionable lovelies. But here's the thing with the selling-your-soul business. People who work for tobacco companies and hide proof that cigarettes cause cancer sell their souls. Pharma companies that test drugs on African kids sell their soul. Oil companies who cut safety and environmental corners sell their soul. But ad guys? People who make cereal commercials? Client changes that ruin your
art
? Grow up.

And finally there is the silent majority, the daily grinders. They have grown tired of advertising's early allure and are now restless. Unfulfilled. Despondent. They want to be doing something else.
But they don't know what to do. Work on the client side? Start a café? Run drugs for a Mexican cartel? They possess that hybrid of confusion and sadness at having awoken, well past their prime, married (or just as often divorced), with two children and a mortgage on a house in Larchmont/Wilton/Montclair and thinking,
How did this
happen
?
They never really figured out what it was they wanted to do with their lives, and so life took over, marriage came along, children, a home, massive amounts of “good” debt, and, after mediocre sex on Sunday night, they lie awake and think about how much damage it would cause if they left their wife and traveled around the south of France for the summer fucking twenty-one-year-olds. And as they are thinking this, their child awakens from a bad dream, calling out. They go to their child, walking naked through the quiet house with the new Restoration Hardware furniture, tramping quickly through the hallway to their perfect daughter's room, pulling on a pair of boxer shorts and almost breaking their neck doing it.

“What is it, pumpkin?” they coo.

“A dream, Daddy. A bad man chasing me.”

“There's no bad man, honey. You're here with Mommy and Daddy and Chuckie,” they say, referring to the filthy dog who farts and slobbers all over the furniture, bought on credit. They hold her, this three-year-old bundle of loveliness, caress her silky-soft downy hair, pat her tiny back, and say, “Shhhh. Shhhh. Do you know how much Daddy loves you?” as they lay her down and pull the covers up to her chin. They kiss her cheeks again and again and hear her say, laughing, “Stop it, Daddy, you're silly,” and know that she is all right, know that she will sleep, know that she will wake in the morning with no recollection of what has gone on here tonight in these two minutes, know that they themselves will never forget it, know that they will never leave this child and go to France, know that they will never again fuck a twenty-one-year-old, know that they will show up for work bright and early at the job they hate because of this girl.

I should admit that some of what I just wrote in the previous paragraph was from a spot I did for life insurance a few years ago.
I apologize. I get carried away sometimes. But that's my job. And Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen is one of the premiere agencies in the world to do that job. At least, that's what we always say in our press releases and in our presentations. We use the word
premiere
because it tested well with focus groups.

Let's meet the team.

FRANK LAUDERBECK (SENIOR AND JUNIOR)

“I want to die on my way to a client meeting,” Frank's fond of saying, usually to the horror of his audience. Frank's father, Frank Sr., started the agency in the late forties. Apparently Frank Sr.'s war duty (due to flat feet and horrendous vision) included a stateside posting to the War Department, where he wrote and edited newsreels on the war's progress. They say he was a whiz. There he met Walter Kline, an MIT grad who was an early adopter of market research, number crunching, unearthing trends through the sifting of massive amounts of data. They built an impressive agency during the post-war boom years. Frank Sr. groomed his oldest son for the job. Groton, Yale, summer internships at the agency. The man-boy showed zero aptitude for the creative side of the business, but took to account service like a Swiss to fondue. He loved the schmoozing and the golf and the martinis and the pleasing. But he wanted the keys. He had his own ideas. It would be years before the old man finally ceded control, which he did one summer afternoon, the office half empty, the old fellow at his desk, apparently concentrating hard on a memo in front of him. It would be several hours before the cleaning staff found him dead at his desk, a number-two pencil frozen in his gnarled hand, halfway through editing a print ad for Froot Loops.