Disclaimer: Some of these characters are owned by Joshua Ferris and Hachette Book Group and are Derived from the work Then We Came to the End
Chapter One – The Beginning of the Beginning
What Was Lost – What Was Gained – What Was to be Done
Our story is not unlike others you've read before. We go through the daily routine of creating the "creative" and meeting the capricious demands of our clients. We love the swag that comes from doing a job well done and we gossip too much. We suffered at the loss of Lynn, but deep down know that we're just as good with Joe Pope as our leader.
Sometimes we have a hard time believing the stories—the "legends"—of the previous near-death of the agency brought on by those idiots who didn't know how good they had it here. Barry probably should have stopped fawning over his own ability to tell a story and make some creative story boards, Tom was seriously tweaked (God rest his soul), Marcia never really knew her own creative potential—she was too determined to keep up the façade of her tough exterior, Amber and Larry needed to get their heads out of their pants and their eyes on the ball, and Chris Yop and Jim Jackers were… well, they were Chris Yop and Jim Jackers. What more can you say about those two?
After we had to clean house, leaving only Joe, Genevieve Latko-Devine, and Karen Woo to re-build the agency, we were delighted that we were hired. We saw ourselves as prodigies, the future, the hope, the white knights of advertising. We'll never forget our interview when we were required to pitch ideas for a campaign that would make breast cancer patients laugh. We still talk about that, we've never been put on the spot like that, they never even asked to see our portfolios, just to pitch ideas about funny aspects of cancer. Heather was easily regarded as the hands-down winner with a concept that included a photograph of a woman looking in a mirror, a concerned look on her face, with the tag line "Does this wig make me look bald?" at the bottom.
With the future of the company resting firmly on our shoulders, shoulders that were overly-confident because we were fresh out of college and had no real expertise to speak of, only enthusiasm and an ability to drink Red Bull until we came up with a good concept, we were poised for success. Within 6 months of the "Second Coming" of the agency we had contracts from a big box hardware store, a department store's expansion into the click-and-mortar strategy of online retailing, a biotech start-up, and a company specializing in alternative fuel sources. We told ourselves we were going green for the sake of advertising. Apparently, we had no idea that green companies probably didn't use countless reams of heavy-bond paper every day, and that green companies probably recycled their toner cartridges and batteries. In any case, we were heady with the sense of do-gooding that can be dangerous for creatives.
We were no longer nervous about staff meetings or follow-ups on new projects. We had no reason to be apprehensive, we didn't have the sword of down-sizing doom hanging over our desks. When Joe gathered us all together in his office to give us the specifics of the deliverables for a new campaign we were excited; primarily we were excited because they had opened a new coffee kiosk in the lunch room and the caramel macchiatos were to die for. Joe passed around the packets to everyone and went through the bullet list of the details of this new online campaign for a fund-raising event. The client asked us to develop banner ads and a website for a series of rock concerts for the environment that they were hosting—apparently the hypocrisy of rock concerts for the environment was as insignificant to our clients as it was to us. Nobody had any real questions for Joe—you never had questions for Joe.
We were given an hour to ruminate and then collected back in Karen's office for round two of the meeting. This meeting started the way that every round two meeting started. Dana asked, "Who ever heard of doing a concert for the planet?" Seemingly every idea that a client came up with was a novel business strategy to Dana, which probably allowed her life to be a series of new and exciting experiences because no original thought or plan had ever occurred to her. I'm sure when her husband asked, "Do you want to eat at Red Robin for dinner tonight?" her reply is, "Who ever heard of eating at Red Robin for dinner?" Luckily Dana wasn't the art director, she edited copy and had an eye for grammar and type-face that put many to shame. How she could determine the exact perfect size of font to ensure that every word on the page was read, but the visual impact was still preserved was unheard of. We speculated that she probably practiced some sect of eastern religion that cleared her mind of other "unnecessary" details like how to come up with her own ideas in order that she could be single-minded about how to arrange elements on the page.
We always knew that Karen hated Dana's questions, but she had learned well from Joe and did a good job of never directly addressing Dana's ignorance. Karen said, "Our client is very novel, very forward-thinking in their ability to create out-of-the-box concepts to raise global awareness for the climate crisis." We all hated the phrase "out-of-the-box," but secretly hoped that Karen used her favorite pet phrase to describe us to our superiors when she updated them on our project status. Sue was likely to be described as having an out-of-the-box approach to dressing herself, but that was probably the best she could ever hope for. The typical types of follow-up questions that went with any electronic campaign were lobbed at Karen, and then we broke up into teams to begin the work that would bring our agency to its pinnacle—the summit before the descent.