Truth in Advertising Page 0,12

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