Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (20 page)

 

 

It used to be the token black at a big agency was very safe because he always had to be there. Now I’m definitely the token woman. In the current economic climate, I’m one of the few writers at my salary level getting job offers. Unemployment is high right now among people who do what I do. Yet I get calls: “Will you come and write on feminine hygiene products?” Another, involving a food account: “We need you, we’ll pay you thirty grand and a contract. Be the answer for Such-an-such Foods.” I’m ideal because I’m young enough to have four or five solid years of experience behind me. I know how to handle myself or I wouldn’t be where I am.

I’m very secure right now. But when someone says to me, “You don’t have to worry,” he’s wrong. In a profession where I absolutely cannot age, I cannot be doing this at thirty-eight. For the next years, until I get too old, my future’s secure in a very insecure business. It’s like a race horse or a show horse. Although I’m holding the job on talent and responsibility, I got here partly because I’m attractive and it’s a big kick for a client to know that for three days in Montreal there’s going to be this young brunette, who’s very good, mind you. I don’t know how they talk about me, but I’d guess: “She’s very good, but to look at her you’d never know it. She’s a knockout.”

I have a fear of hanging on past my usefulness. I’ve seen desperate women out of jobs, who come around with their samples, which is the way all of us get jobs. A lot of women have been cut. Women who had soft jobs in an agency for years and are making maybe fifteen thousand. In the current slump, this person is cut and some bright young kid from a college, who’ll work for seven grand a year, comes in and works late every night.

Talk about gaps. In a room with a twenty-two-year-old, there are areas in which I’m altogether lost. But not being a status-quo-type person, I’ve always thought ahead enough to keep pace with what’s new. I certainly don’t feel my usefulness as a writer is coming to an end. I’m talking strictly in terms of physical aging. (Laughs.) It’s such a young business, not just the consumer part. It’s young in terms of appearances. The client expects agency people, especially on the creative end, to dress a certain way, to be very fashionable. I haven’t seen many women in any executive capacity age gracefully.

The bellbottoms, the beads, beards, and sideburns, that’s the easy, superficial way to feel part of the takeover culture. It’s true also in terms of writing. What kind of music do you put behind the commercial? It’s ridiculous to expect a sheltered forty-two-year-old to anticipate progressive rock. The danger of aging, beyond touch, out of reach with the younger market . . .

The part I hate—it’s funny. (Pause.) Most people in the business are delighted to present their work and get praise for it—and the credit and the laughter and everything in the commercial. I always hate that part. Deep down, I feel demeaned. Don’t question the adjectives, don’t argue, if it’s a cologne or a shampoo. I know, ‘cause I buy ’em myself. I’m the biggest sucker for buying an expensively packaged hoax thing. Face cream at eight dollars. And I sell and convince.

I used Erik Satie music for a cologne thing. The clients didn’t know Satie from Roger Williams. I’m very good at what I do, dilettantism. I go into my act: we call it dog and pony time, show time, tap dance. We laugh about it. He says, “Oh, that’s beautiful, exactly right. How much will it cost us?” I say, “The music will cost you three grand. Those two commercials you want to do in Mexico and Nassau, that’s forty grand. There’s no way I can bring it in for less.” I’m this young woman, saying, “Give me forty thousand dollars of your money and I will go away to Mexico and Nassau and bring you back a commercial and you’ll love it.” It’s blind faith.

Do I ever question what I’m selling? (A soft laugh.) All the time. I know a writer who quit a job equivalent to mine. She was making a lot of money, well thought of. She was working on a consumer finance account. It’s blue collar and black. She made this big stand. I said to her, in private, “I agree with you, but why is this your test case? You’ve been selling a cosmetic for years that is nothing but mineral oil and women are paying eight dollars for it. You’ve been selling a cake mix that you know is so full of preservatives that it would kill every rat in the lab. Why all of a sudden . . . ?”

If you’re in the business, you’re in the business, the fucking business! You’re a hustler. But because you’re witty and glib . . . I’ve never pretended this is the best writing I can do. Every advertising writer has a novel in his drawer. Few of them ever do it.

I don’t think what I do is necessary or that it performs a service. If it’s a very fine product—and I’ve worked on some of those—I love it. It’s when you get into that awful area of hope, cosmetics—you’re just selling image and a hope. It’s like the arthritis cure or cancer—quackery. You’re saying to a lady, “Because this oil comes from the algae at the bottom of the sea, you’re going to have a timeless face.” It’s a crock of shit! I know it’s part of my job, I do it. If I made the big stand my friend made, I’d lose my job. Can’t do it. I’m expected to write whatever assignment I’m given. It’s whorish. I haven’t written enough to know what kind of writer I am. I suspect, rather than a writer, I’m a good reader. I think I’d make a good editor. I have read so many short stories that I bet you I could turn out a better anthology than anybody’s done yet, in certain categories. I remember, I appreciate, I have a feeling I could . . .

 

POSTSCRIPT:
Shortly afterward she was battling an ulcer.

 

I am what is called a creative supervisor. Creative is a pretentious word. I have a group of about six people who work for me. They create radio commercials, print ads, billboards that go up on highways, television commercials too. Your purpose is to move goods off the shelf (laughs): your detergents, your soaps, your foods, your beers, cigarettes . . .

It’s like the fashion business. There’s a look to advertising. Many techniques are chosen because they’re in vogue at the time. Then a new look will emerge. Right now. a kind of angry stand-up is popular. A guy who’s all pissed off up there and he says, “Look, other products are rotten and ours is good—buy it or I’ll kill you.” The hortatory kind is in fashion now.

It’s an odd business. It’s serious but it isn’t. (Laughs.) Life in an advertising agency is like being at a dull party, interrupted by more serious moments. There’s generally a kind of convivial attitude. Nobody’s particularly uptight. Creativity of this kind flourishes better.

They’re aware that they’re talking about little bears capering around a cereal box and they’re arguing which way the bears should go. It’s a silly thing for adults to be doing. At the same time, they’re aware the client’s going to spend a million dollars on television time to run this commercial. Millions of dollars went into these little bears, so that gave them an importance of their own. That commercial, if successful, can double salaries. It’s serious, yet it isn’t. This kind of split is in everybody’s mind. Especially the older generation in advertising, people like me.

I was a writer
manqué,
who came into advertising because I was looking for a way to make money. My generation is more casual about it. Many will be writers who have a novel in the desk drawer, artists who are going to quit someday and paint. Whereas the kids coming up consider advertising itself to be the art form. They’ve gone to school and studied advertising. There’s an intensity about what they do. They don’t laugh at those little bears capering around the cereal. Those little bears are it for them. They consider themselves fine artists and the advertising business owes them the right to create, to express themselves.

And there’s a countertendency among young people. The other day I was challenged by someone: “I find this commercial offensive. It’s as if you’re trying to manipulate people.” This kind of honesty is part of it. But he’s in the business himself. His bread is in the same gravy. Though the older ones start out casual, they become quite serious as they go along. You become what you behold. You turn into an advertising man.

My day is so amorphous. Part of it is guiding other people. I throw ideas out and let them throw ideas back, shoot down ideas immediately. In some ways it’s like teaching. You’re trying to guide them and they’re also guiding you. I may sit with a writer and an art director who are going to create a commercial—to sell garbage bags, okay? A number of ideas are thrown out. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? Last year we tried this. Don’t make it that wild. We stick, say, to a family situation.

Let’s have a big family reunion, right? We’ll use fast motion and slow motion as our visual technique. A reunion right after dinner. They’re outside, they’re at a picnic, right? Grampa’s in the hammock and so forth. Everything’s in slow motion. But when it comes time to clean up, things go pretty fast if you use these garbage bags. Everything begins to move in fast motion, which is a funny technique. Fast motion tends to distance people from what they’re watching. I didn’t like it. I thought it lacked focus. You have to set things up. You have to characterize everybody, grampa, uncle . . . You don’t have the effective relationships clearly marked in the beginning. You have to do this in a commercial that may be only thirty seconds. Sometimes you’re writing a play, creating a vehicle. You begin with a human problem and then you see how it’s satisfied by the product.

The way you sell things is to make some kind of connection between the attributes of the product and what people want, human needs. Some years ago, there was a product called Right Guard, an underarm deodorant. It was positioned at that time for men. It was not going anywhere. A copywriter noticed that it was a spray, so the whole family could use it. He said, “Let’s call it the all-family spray.” There was no change in the product, merely in the way it was sold. What any product is selling is a package of consumer satisfactions. A dream in the flesh or something.

A Mustang is a machine that was designed with human fantasies in mind. It’s not just a piece of machinery. Somebody did a lot of research into what people wanted. That research went into the design, very subtly into the shape. Then the advertising came along and added another layer. So when a person drives a Mustang, he’s living in a whole cocoon of satisfaction. He’s not just getting transportation. With detergents people are buying advertising. With cigarettes they’re buying an image, not just little things in a box.

They’re all very similar. That raises the question: How important is advertising? Is there a justification for it? It’s a question people are asking all over the country. I myself am puzzled by it. There’s a big change going on right now. The rules are becoming more stringent. In another five years you’ll just have a lawyer up there. He’ll say, “This is our product. It’s not much different from any other product. It comes in a nice box, no nicer than anybody else’s. It’ll get your clothes pretty clean, but so will the others. Try it because we’re nice people, not that the other company isn’t nice.”

I enjoy it actually. I think any kind of work, after a while, gets a kind of functional autonomy. It has an intensity of its own. You start out doing something for a reason and if you do it long enough, even though the reason may have altered, you continue to do it, because it gives you its own satisfaction.

It’s very hard to know if you know something in this business. There are very few genuine experts. It’s a very fragile thing. To tell somebody they should spend ten million dollars on this tiger that’s gonna represent their gasoline, that’s quite a thing to sell somebody on doing. Gee, why should it be a tiger? Why shouldn’t it be a llama?

The way, you see, is by being very confident. Advertising is full of very confident people. (Laughs.) Whether it’s also full of competent people is another question Coming into a meeting is a little like swimming in a river full of piranha fish. If you start to bleed, they’re gonna catch you. You have to build yourself up before you’re gonna sell something. You have to have an attitude that it’s terrific.

I say to myself, Isn’t it terrific? It could be worse—that’s another thing I say. And I whistle and skip around and generally try to get my juices moving. Have a cup of coffee. I have great faith in coffee. (Laughs.) There’s an element of theater in advertising. When I’m presenting the stuff, I will give the impression of really loving it a lot.

It’s amazing how much your attitude toward something is conditioned by what other people say about it, what other people’s opinions are. If somebody who is very important starts to frown, your heart can sink. If you’ve done this a couple of times, you know this may not be the end of the world. He may have noticed that the girl has on a purple dress and he hates purple. Meanwhile you have to continue. You get yourself up. Some commercials require singing and dancing to present. It’s like being in front of any audience. When you begin to lose your audience, there’s cold feet, sweat.