Truth in Advertising Page 0,13
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