Finally, we get around to introducing Dorothy Flinger, a major deal about to happen.
David rapidly became invaluable because he was very much faster than anyone else, and everything he did was very high quality. Even the roughs were usually better than market standard. No deadline ever began to bother David. Things were done. Tell him when you needed something and he had it done the week before. He did that specifically to allow consultation time with the clients. Nothing was ever last minute. David didn’t believe in trying to run his work like a train schedule, having realized even as a child that you had to arrive before the train did anyway, even if it was late itself. Al was also a good time manager, and appreciated the extra leeway this gave him with the clients.
During this Al learned a lot about copy and the production business. He’d managed, somehow, to get involved in production, which was theoretically nothing to do with him. He found himself doing spiels that translated into ads. It had never occurred to him that his sales pitch to the client was also a sales point to their customers. He told them how he’d sell their product, and behold, that was what they thought they were getting, and they insisted on his version. The agency agreed, and some copywriters got their noses out of joint, but eventually even they agreed that he was doing some good work. He just thought he’d picked up sales talk from his father. As a teacher David was invaluable. David actually had to point out to Al how the people-mechanics of his work translated into ads. He then gave Al several crash courses in the production side of the equation. Al learned how to write for broadcast speeds, use all the equipment, how to use fonts and colors, how to design sets, shop windows, why actors ought to be buried when not in use………
He even did a couple of formal courses on TV production and, ironically, marketing. The marketing course was funny because he’d already won awards for multimillion dollar campaigns before he did it. The firm running the course became a good client. They even asked him to help them revise the course. He also had to give a mini-lecture on his own experience.
Between them Al and David got through a lot of work, and they both got promoted above their peers. This gave them clout and their own accounts to manage, together, then separately, as the business grew. That actually didn’t stop their collaboration much, playing to each other’s strengths as required. The agency, having decided to go with their methods, figured that they saved several million in avoiding mindless procedures alone. Al and David seemed to give their accounts everything they wanted, often before it was asked for. The nature of the beast is accurately anticipating the client’s wishes.
Of course advertising isn’t as simple as that. There are all the other aspects of a business as well as the interminable supply of novelties which fate throws at the adman, laws, copyrights, deranged sponsors, contractual bitching sessions, egos, in-house lobby groups, and the rest of the human race. Al and David soon learned to delegate such weighty problems as whether to pick up the phone. Al figured that the amount of business left on hold by virtue of no more than five incoming phone calls a day wasn’t worth it, and got a secretary to handle his and David’s calls from a different office.
The other oddity of advertising is that your employer can be sold out from under you. This happened, as it generally does, when it’s the last thing on your mind, usually when you’re extremely busy. In this case it was in the pre-Christmas production season. Everything was being done at a sort of murderous gallop. They were so busy that people reacquainted at meetings and discovered they hadn’t spoken since a child was born, or some other memorable event. The buyout was quick, the results………staggering, if you’d had the time to think about it, which Al hadn’t, until then. David and Al arrived at the new owners’ first meeting to meet who else, but Keith and Saul.
Al emerged from this mental biography to find that his coffee was still very hot. He’d been with Parker’s for eight years when that happened. He wondered if his time-sense was adjusting to Australian time. It had all seemed so intense, surreal, nearly, yet he was pretty sure that even omnipotent hindsight wouldn’t change much about those years. Anyway, that explained something. He was sure David had been onto something when he came up with the idea of an Australian agency. In fact, he’d have to talk to him and hear out the higher developments of the idea in detail, and soon. Well, that’d be worth doing. They hadn’t actually spoken since the fracas began, and he wanted to hear David’s first hand account. David usually had him in hysterics in a few minutes.
Today, he had to meet Dorothy. He had no idea what to expect. He couldn’t even visualize a pet food manufacturer, for some reason. A Scottish Terrier? No, they wore moustaches. He realized guiltily that David would have laughed him to scorn for coming up with that image as an ad. Senility, conceptual and/or literal, he’d probably diagnose. Then there was Joe. The character references, such as they were, told him “rich kid”, but “vague” didn’t fit the stereotype plutobrat. This would be an interesting meeting. Al gathered that Joe’s father was about as close to deity as Australian businessmen got without going global.
But it was all so interesting, and exciting, and fun, and all his!
He spent a few minutes mocking his proprietary streak, and trundled to work down George Street, sneering at Queen Vic on principle as he passed. Absurdly he found himself pondering why he hadn’t had more girlfriends, and answered himself that if he kept sneering at every woman he met it was no wonder. He arrived laughing at his instant response that if they looked like that and wound up as statues that resembled Harvey White in drag, it was no loss.
He waved at Carla as she battled with a passing office-to-office salesman and buried himself in a phone call to one of David’s former clients. That done, it was 10 AM, he noted, then jumped out of his chair. Dorothy was due at…..? He normally remembered these things. He rushed out to the reception area to find Carla deep in conversation with some quietly, if well, dressed woman. This had to be her. No, there was another one sitting behind her! Also……stunning. He subsided into a demure canter.
“Carla?”
“Oh good, you escaped from the phone?”
This woman even makes the excuses for me, he thought.
“Yeah.”
“Al, I’d like you to meet Bill’s wife, Jane, and Dorothy Flinger, your appointment.”
“Sorry to drop in on you like a job lot, Al, but I discovered from Bill that Dorothy so rarely comes up to town that I thought I should at least make sure she found the office,” said Jane, who was dazzling.
“The Rocks can be confusing,” agreed Al.
Dorothy was blinding. Al was sure he wasn’t looking as stunned as he felt. Queen Vic was no longer in the running. A redhead, trim as a – was there a word? No. A smile, and he found himself muttering “Hi” and practically reverting to adolescence. He managed to get enough coherence to agree how nice Bill was. Bill fortunately came out of his office at that moment. Al felt he needed a chaperone. The exchange had taken about half a minute. Al wondered how he was going to talk business with this goddess.
“Al was just saying what a nice bloke you are, said Carla,” sweetly.
“Yeah, I like to spread rumors,” said Al. Well, he was a bit closer to himself than he had been. He tried to find something gauche or worth criticizing about Dorothy in self defence, and found to his horror there wasn’t anything. Worse. He noticed that she was wearing no makeup. She was real.
Bill shepherded them into Al’s office. Thankfully Dorothy came straight to business, which returned Al from wherever his brain had been hiding. Coward, he thought. If either of them had thought he was acting strangely, they didn’t show it. On the other hand, who knows when an American is acting strangely?
“Al, I need some advice on how to market this new range of pet foods. I’m a vet, as you know, and I’m only running the company because Dad left it to me in his will. I think I’m on to a good idea with this daily nutritional requirement thing, and a few others, and I think it will all appeal to pet owners. But I’m not a business-marketing person, not on this scale.”
“How’re your sales?”
“Pretty good. We’ve actually gone up in volume a bit. There is a market identity, if that’s what you mean.”
“That was exactly what I meant. You’re called Flinger’s Pet Foods, right? Established business? That’s good, because you don’t have to go through the misery of starting up with an unknown product. They’ll give you the shelf space.”
He paused, thinking that if there was one thing he didn’t want to be talking about to this woman it was definitely pet food. Fighting down a sub-dialogue with himself about the impossibility of falling in love on first sight, he went on,
“Strange thing about pet foods is that people tend to be brand loyal. They like to know what they’re feeding their pets. They will go for novelty, but they want something that’s good for the animal, be it canary or Siberian tiger. So they stick to the stuff they’re happy with. Probably because it hasn’t killed their pet, I grant you……If you sell a new product, it can also divert from sales of your existing lines. That is avoidable. I think from what Bill told me, and you can fill me in, that you can market a range of products as a package, and raise your sales values.”
She blinked. That was the first sign of humanity he’d seen. Al wondered where the choir came from when she smiled.
“Sounds right, from what my sales manager was saying. I brought some samples. These are mock ups of the packets, and the existing label.”
They were OK, but a bit neutral. Understated. Good label, though, a color collage picture of dogs cats, canaries…..maybe a water buffalo….but, he had to say, good quality graphics. That was a relief. (There is a school of thought in packaging that says the product must catch the eye by itself. This produces the noxious packaging in children’s sweets and TV commercials. Primary colors and lots of them, in various hues. Compound colors turned luminous. Everything but sequins).
“I wish David were here. He’s the expert on packaging and labels. I think you’re being a bit unambitious. Look, can I fool around a little with these? Thanks.” He scanned the label and began fiddling with the picture. He prayed he looked as competent as David did when he did things like that.
“I have an idea for this, and I think now is probably as good a time as any to spring it on you. Bill told me about this some days ago, so the idea’s had time to grow a bit. Can we get some coffee in here……for Dorothy? You’re from out of town? So am I…….”
Bill grinned at the altruistic desire to feed coffee to Dorothy, and decided to leap on this statement.
“Not for long. We’ll make an Aussie of him in another fortnight or so,” said Bill.
“That long? Tea for me, if you can, Bill,” said Dorothy.
“An ideological war in the making. Tea vs. coffee. You realize, Al, that tea is the drink in Waltzing Matilda?” Bill was prepared to try it on.
“I’m sure there’s something about coffee in the Star Spangled Banner,” said Al, looking thoughtful.
“Defect to us now. Save yourself,” said Dorothy, grinning.
“Leave that land of predatory delis and their sinister roasts and join us,” said Bill, making praying motions.
So Al found himself having a cup of very strong tea, which he had to admit he liked. Dorothy was actually proposing a full pet-care regime, more than health food for pets. There were therapeutic food-toys, skin care, a range of posture and invalid beds for dogs and cats, a thermal blanket of some sort which Al found irresistible.
“Bill, take over. I’ve decided to become a cat.”
“Become?”
Dorothy was enjoying her visit. She’d more or less expected that her lack of marketing expertise would be a terrible liability in talking to Al. Bill’s presence was the main reason she’d felt able to do this at all. It occurred to her that was pretty absurd. She was a vet, and did know her subjects. But the business angle was still “Dad’s” to her. It was hard to do, because it was supposed to be him doing it.
Bill was aware of her position. They were good friends, and he’d picked up her doubts early. One of the reasons he’d suggested that she talk to Al was to get her out of that perspective. It seemed to be working. The jokes were becoming more like a three sided squash game.
“Dorothy. You have patents for all this stuff?” asked Bill.
“I didn’t think it was necessary. Generic product types, you know.”
“Maybe. But for a few bucks you could find yourself the owner of a good export. Intellectual property. Manufacturing overseas under license can be very profitable, too. It might not be worth sending shiploads of food, but the ideas can be valuable. I thought of that after I spoke to you.”
Al grabbed that one.
“Great idea. I know some people that can look at that for you, in the States, but they’re not charities. You would need product protection. Er……This going too far?”
“Yes and no. Hadn’t actually thought of it. Do you think it has a chance? It’s a huge market, over there.”
“That’s why it has a chance. Demand often goes beyond what’s on offer. New ideas generally get a workout, for that reason. You could do a sales pitch on the savings on unnecessary pet health problems, say. By the way, don’t you vets have an association or something? Can they do endorsements? Or the SPCA?”
“RSPCA, here. Tricky. I don’t know if they do, and if they do the product would be put through pretty stringent testing. I’m not worried about the tests, but I have no idea what sort of time frame is involved.”
“I mentioned that because it is a selling point. There’s a big emotional component in it. The dog or cat isn’t a washing machine or a car. Reassurance helps.”
Al wondered if he was getting too businesslike about the wrong topic. He moved on. He’d finished playing with the scanner. A bit of fiddling with the computer graphics followed, Al being fairly certain he looked like a complete idiot.
“Anyway, I have a name for you. Friends. You keep the logo, and the name Flinger’s for recognition. So in the vacant area you put the word Friends. Flinger’s Friends, like so.”
He turned the screen around thinking that his life depended on it. That helped. Dorothy looked. Bill looked. Al looked nervous. For one awful moment he worried that he might need to explain the usage of the word Friends and go through the “market psychology” treadmill, that pathetic process of patronizing expertise that nobody needs yet everyone seems to find so impressive. He really hoped Dorothy wasn’t the sort that was impressed with things like that.
“Love it. Says everything,” said Dorothy, who smiled and nearly killed Al, again, in the process.
“I thought you wouldn’t want to fool with the original too much. That style dates to about 1970.”
“It does. My father got a friend to make it up for him. You’re quite right, I couldn’t bear to part with it.”
She paused and looked him straight in the eye. He got lost.
“You also saved me a fortune in not redoing the label, didn’t you? Flinger’s Friends it is.”
There wasn’t a lot to say to that. The verbal squash continued.