Truth in Advertising Page 0,27

I believe I can be seen as cool.

Ian says, “Come over if you want lunch. I doubt I’ll be back. Or call me later if you need. Also . . . I’m hearing rumors of another round of layoffs.”

Phoebe says, “I’ve heard them, too.”

“All rumors are true,” I say.

“Who said that?” Phoebe says.

“I did. Just now.”

“I thought so,” she says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know. But it sounds good.”

Ian says, “Did you hear about Tom Pope?”

We nod and Ian shakes his head and leaves.

I turn to Phoebe and say, “So wait. She’s deaf and she’s a receptionist? She answers phones?”

“No. Just greets people. She speaks. Like Marlee Matlin.”

“We hired a person who can’t speak well to greet people and we’re a multinational communications company?”

“Well, now that you put it that way.”

I say, “Is she beautiful?”

“Who?”

“Miss Deaf Black America?”

“Gorgeous.”

“Does she look deaf?”

“You’re an idiot.”

“The blind look blind,” I say. “I’m just wondering if she appears particularly oblivious to sound.”

Phoebe has stopped listening. She’s leafing through an Us Weekly while I casually scan CNN.com.

I say, “So, you heading to Boston?”

Phoebe says to Us Weekly, “Yeah. Taking the train Thursday.”

“You excited?” I say to my computer screen, which is currently displaying a story about the Fox channel premiering a show called Naked Housewives.

“I love Christmas. On Christmas Eve, if it’s cold enough, we all go skating. There’s a pond at my dad’s country club with a hut and they build this big fire and there’s hot chocolate and, because it’s all WASPs, there’s also gin and beer. And then we have dinner at the club and go to midnight mass. In the morning my mom and I go to a women’s shelter in the city and hand out gifts, help serve breakfast. Then later we have dinner at our house and open presents.”

“Same here. Almost exactly. But without the skating. Or the family part. Or the dinners. Or the volunteering. Or the getting-together parts. But the gin and beer is identical.”

“Did you call your brother?”

“Yes.”

“You lie.”

“Only to clients.”

• • •

Late in the afternoon, Jill, the Snugglies account exec, calls.

She says, “There is a serious problem with the Old MacDonald animatic.”

She and Alan have me on speakerphone. They ask if they can come down to my office. I call Ian. Fifteen minutes later we all sit in my office. Jill closes the door.

An animatic is one of the last stops along the long, painful conveyor belt to approval—from brief to creation to internal review to client presentation to revisions to re-presentation to additional presentation to more senior clients to additional revision based upon senior client feedback to animatic to focus-group testing. In an animatic, a voice-over reads the idea as the focus group looks at hand-drawn pictures. It’s the kind of thing you might have seen in a high school phys ed class in the sixties about avoiding syphilis or the dangers of Western culture as told by state agencies in Pyongyang today. An animatic has about the same relationship to an actual commercial that Orangina has to orange juice.

I say, “What’s the problem?”

Jill looks to Alan. Alan says, “The problem is cock.”

Ian says, “I’m all ears.”

Alan says, “This isn’t funny.”

I say, “Ian doesn’t joke about cock.”

Jill says, “You guys. Seriously. The client is really upset. And the Young MacDonald launch is a huge deal for them.”

The Young MacDonald launch is a new line of diapers that have animals on them. This may not seem like a big deal as there are plenty of diapers with animals on them. In fact, it’s unlikely that you can buy diapers without animals on them. But these aren’t ordinary animals. Our client signed an exclusive deal with Pixar (translation: Snugglies paid Pixar an exorbitant fee for the right to use the cartoon animals) and is launching the animal diapers in concert with the opening of a movie using the same characters in January. We were awaiting focus group testing and footage from Pixar before editing the spot. The movie is about a cartoon teenager who grows up on a farm (his grandfather is Old MacDonald, his father is simply MacDonald) and who doesn’t want to be a farmer—he wants to be a hedge-fund manager. Though he eventually realizes he wants to stay on the farm. Throughout the spot we’d see babies (wearing only Snugglies diapers) crawling around, playing with cuddly stuffed animals, as we hear children singing “Old MacDonald,” which Pixar has contracted with Beyoncé to re-record. The challenge was finding a way to seamlessly integrate