Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,29

of rebellion-via-consumption so fascinating and got such a hoot out of them because he himself was so far out of the demographic (using the actual word demographic) for a campaign like Surge’s that even as an amateur he found himself disinterestedly analyzing the ads’ strategies and pitches and appreciating them more like pieces of art or fine pastry than like mere ads, then had (meaning the attorney had, right there in the sauna, wearing only plastic thongs and a towel wrapped Sikh-style around his head, according to Awad) proceeded casually to deconstruct the strategies and probable objectives of the Surge campaign with such acuity that it was almost as if the fellow had somehow been right there in the room at A.C. Romney-Jaswat’s MROP team’s brainstorming and strategy confabs with Team Δy, who as Mounce was of course aware had done some first-stage Focus Group work for A.C.R.-J./Coke on Surge six quarters past before the firm’s gradual emigration to R.S.B. as a Captured Shop. Awad, whose knowledge of small craft operation came entirely from a manual he was now using as a paddle, told Mounce that the idea’s gist’s thrust here involved what was known in the industry as a Narrative (or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept of making some new product’s actual marketers’ strategies and travails themselves a part of that product’s essential Story—as in for historic examples that Chicago’s own Keebler Inc.’s hard confections were manufactured by elves in a hollow tree, or that Pillsbury’s Green Giant-brand canned and frozen vegetables were cultivated by an actual giant in his eponymous Valley—but with the added narrative twist or hook now of, say for instance, advertising Mister Squishy’s new Felony! line as a disastrously costly and labor-intensive ultra-gourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by beleaguered legions of nerdy admen under the thumb of, say, a tyrannical mullah-like CEO who was such a personal fiend for luxury-class chocolate that he was determined to push Felonies! into the US market no matter what the cost- or sales-projections, such that (in the proposed campaign’s Story) Mister Squishy’s advertisers had to force Team Δy to manipulate and cajole Focus Groups into producing just the sort of quote unquote ‘objective’ statistical data needed to greenlight the project and get Felonies! on the shelves, all in other words comprising just the sort of arch and tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes Story designed to appeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined savvy about marketing tactics and ‘objective’ data and to flatter their sense that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprecedentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well nigh impossible to manipulate by any sort of clever multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. This was, as of the second quarter of 1995, a fairly bold and unconventional ad concept, Awad conceded modestly over Ron Mounce’s cries of admiration and excitement, tossing (Mounce did) another cigarette over the catamaran’s side to hiss and bob forever instead of sinking; and Awad further conceded that obviously an enormous amount of very carefully controlled research would have to be done and analyzed in all sorts of hypergeometric ways before they could even conceive of possibly jumping ship and starting their own R. Awad & Subordinates agency and pitching the idea to various farsighted companies—certain of the US Internet’s new startups, with their young and self-perceivedly renegade top management, looked like a promising market—yes to various forward-looking companies that craved a fresh, edgy, cynicism-friendly corporate image, rather like Subaru’s in the previous decade, or also for example FedEx and Wendy’s in the era when Sedelmaier’s own local crew had come out of nowhere to rule the industry. Whereas in point of fact none of what Robert Awad had brought his mentee four miles out onto the lake to whisper in Mounce’s big pink ear was true or even in any sense real except as the agreed-upon cover narrative to be fed to select Team Δy SRDs and Field Researchers as part of the control conditions for the really true Field experiment, which Alan Britton and Scott R. Laleman (there was really no §543-structured Dy2 Associates; that little fiction was part of the cover narrative that Britton had fed to Bob Awad, who unbeknownst to him [= Awad] was already being gradually eased out in favor of Mrs. Lilley, who Laleman said was a whiz on both Systat and HTML, and on whom [= Darlene Lilley] Britton had had his eye ever