Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,21

and graphs and helped facilitate R.S.B.’s MROPs and Creative and Marketing heads’ brainstorming on the research’s implications for an actual campaign that in truth R.S.B. was already at this stage far too heavily invested in to do anything more than modify some of the more ephemeral or decorative elements of. (Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had ever been selected to assist Bob Awad in these PCAs*, for reasons that in Schmidt’s case seemed all too clear.) Meaning, in other words, without anyone once ever saying it outright, that Team Δy’s real function was to present to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around and present to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC† that R.S.B. had already billed Client in the millions for and couldn’t turn back from even if the actual test data turned out to be resoundingly grim or unpromising, which it was Team Δy’s unspoken real job to make sure never happened, a job that Team Δy accomplished simply by targeting so many different Focus Groups and foci and by varying the format and context of the tests so baroquely and by facilitating the different TFGs in so many different modalities that in the end it was child’s play to selectively weight and rearrange the data in pretty much whatever way R.S.B.’s MROP division wanted, and so in reality Team Δy’s function was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which in the present case the Mister Squishy Company itself was already so heavily invested in that it couldn’t possibly turn away from and would in fact have fired R.S.B. if its testing had indicated any substantive problems with, because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very strict normative ratios for R&D marketing costs (= RDM) to production volume (= PV), ratios based on the Cobb-Douglas Function whereby RDM must, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing, be , a textbook formula which any first-term MBA student had to memorize in Management Stats, which was in fact where North American Soft Confections Inc.’s CEO had almost surely learned it, and nothing inside the man or at any of the four large US corporations he had helmed since taking his degree from Wharton in 1968 had changed; no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud—not even Team Δy’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone—what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it. One R.S.B. Senior Creative Director with his little gray ponytail had been at one upscale café someplace and had ordered one trendy dessert on the same day he was making notes for one Creative Directors’ brainstorming session on what to pitch to the Subsidiary PD boys over at North American Soft Confections, and had had one idea, and one or two dozen pistons and gears already machined and set in place in various craggy heads at R.S.B. and North American’s Mister Squishy had needed only this one single spark of C12H22O11-inspired passion from an SCD whose whole inflated rep had been based on a concept equating toilet paper with clouds and helium-voiced teddy bears and all manner of things innocent of shit in some abstract Ur-consumer’s mind in order to set in movement a machine of which no one single person now—least of all the squishy Mr. T. E. Schmidt, forgetting himself enough almost to pace a little before the conference table’s men and toying dangerously with the idea of dropping the whole involved farce and simply telling them the truth—could be master.

Not surprisingly, the marketing of a conspicuously high-sugar, high-cholesterol, Shadow-class snack cake had presented substantially more challenges than the actual kitchenwork of development and production. As with most Antitrend