This is to finish off the previous chapter and start the next, and to introduce the active agency in its early form. Romance is in bloom, but Al hasn’t noticed.
Al summarized. He got a screech from the phone on the “breach of contract” case, and great interest on the new partnership agreement with Joe. Ian, David had heard of, but hadn’t met. David had been told who Ian was, and that Stone Gold and Goldstein wanted business like that. He’d been told this by Keith, not Saul, interestingly enough, in the midst of Keith’s highly publicized falling out with Saul, during a briefing/brainstorming session on the Australian market. They’d been talking about what direction and what sort of local clients the agency would need after it had established its cash flows. David had thought that Ian was a worthwhile longer-term possible client, but he hadn’t been in a position to approach Ian on the basis of the bread and butter stuff they’d been doing at that point. The Joe/Nigel thing had happened after David had gone back to the States.
Al wanted to know what was happening in the real war with White. David said that he’d never seen so many auditors in his life. He was supposedly out of the loop, living back in Manhattan, but Saul had been very busy in his time in New York. Every single transaction since White had joined was under the microscope, and Saul had been discreetly feeding David a supply of some of the more mysterious transactions for David’s opinions and analysis. Some of the accounts just didn’t make sense, as accounts. They were tiny businesses doing relatively large scale transactions. Their ads cost more than they were worth.
“David, this is obviously a set up of White. Can I help?”
“You already have. You saved my credibility by doing that, you realize. Since White was the one against the idea, you’ve done him some damage, too. People felt that you wouldn’t risk your exit fee on something half ass.”
“Do I gather that there’s been a few discreet leaks?”
“Selective leaks, Al.”
“Oh. That’s much better. I think.”
Al returned to summarizing.
Yes, it really was a lot of fun, it was exciting, he’d always wanted his own agency………..Dorothy……scans….Dorothy…fonts……Dorothy. David interrupted, and Al could hear his grin on the phone.
“You’ve been in a sort of happy coma ever since meeting her?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what happened when I met Hannah.”
“Admen don’t fall in love. We’re too tough, too gritty, too macho.”
“But not stupid.”
“We’re not?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because telling people might make them suspect that under this vapid and shallow façade are actual people.”
“Actual people can be stupid, can’t they?”
“Yeah, but if they don’t think we’re actual people, nobody will ever suspect. To them (operatic voice) we are as gods, omniscient, omnipresent, (pure Bronx voice) depraved, all sortsa good stuff.”
“So if they don’t think we’re stupid, we’re not. That makes sense.”
“There are some things that Nature won’t tolerate. We may be crass, insincere, vulgar, and insular, but stupid would be overdoing it. All things must have balance, I say unto ye, Al, Altruist of the Antipodes.”
Al had perspective. He just wondered what it was. Especially when talking to David.
“I feel deprived, somehow, now.”
“Anyway, I wish both of you well, and particularly her. I assume you’ll be wearing White?”
“I thought Gold might be more appropriate.”
“With a few nice Stones?”
“Oh, inevitably.”
They rang off on the basis that Al would be kept informed. That proved to be an understatement.
WORK
The agency was to be renamed HA Advertising, for Hickey Arthurson. Carla pointed out that if Bill became a partner they could call it HAM Advertising. Bill added that they could call it JAM if she did, and Al was prepared to be anonymous. Joe said that if they wanted to really make the letterhead unfathomable they could run the words together, HAAdvertising. Al suggested that they use the A for alphabetical listings, so it would read AAHdvertising. So they tried all three, running the words through each other like a crossword, and using both names in their phone listings. It was that sort of session.
They also came up with a logo that made the heraldry of the British monarch look comparatively very subdued. Dorothy commented that nobody would be able to read their accounts, if they looked at the logo. The justice of the comment eventually penetrated through the glare of the thing. The “g” looked like a pouncing leopard, and it was one of the milder parts of the design. They still did a pretty flashy four color name with a lightning bolt coming out of left angle of the A’s and a really overdone Gothic H on a royal blue background. Compared to the original, that was positively ascetic.
From a really socially inept, shy, empty desert to a crowd scene from the original MAD magazine isn’t quite as far as it sounds. The vast silent spaces of the empty offices were some dream of a fabled and slightly gruesome past. Good Old Nigel’s office was used as a set for shooting a few scenes from Carla’s friend Sally’s dress ads. Sally, a charming, savvy and attractive little dark haired tornado, had decided to go for the jugular with office wear, and cutthroat prices. Dorothy’s new lines were in various stages of frenzy in the course of making up promos and shop displays, with Joe, Bill and/or Al emerging from the depths to worry. They all independently arrived the same ideas, then wondered what was wrong with them, and had to convince each other that they were right.
Both new clients had wanted a full-on sales campaign, and Al had happily gone into overdrive. Both were also experts in production costs, and some intense research by Carla with Al’s tutelage had established that Sally could blitz the market pretty thoroughly with a good rap for prices. The quality of the clothes was obvious, largely thanks to Sally’s disdain for the sweatshop motif, and a design sense which apparently liked to destroy the idea of limits in fashion. To Al’s astonishment, the TV ads, costed with an electron microscope as they were, were lapped up by the networks.
He’d just suggested a 25 second short with an intro about boring office clothes. (“Dress Like You Mean It” was the hook, following up the drab competition with rapid fire shots of the clothes and prices, then the word, “Sally’s” in bold font and spoken by someone who sounded as though she was born to enthuse about things, with a savage sort of techno music behind it). The time slots were a bit expensive, but they only had to do Sydney and Melbourne, so it wasn’t wasted. Sally had decided it was worth making a real effort to break through, and was prepared to pay for it.
It worked. She got offers from several franchises almost immediately, and, surprisingly, a few from the very-much-more-difficult-to-get-big retailers. They’d decided they needed a line of office wear in the lower price ranges. The top end of the market is a turkey if nothing sells. They benefited from respectable turnovers, too, for once. A good earner was born. Al learned of the success by virtue of Carla and Sally holding hands and dancing around the office singing “We did it we did it we did it……WE DID IIIIIIIT”, and terrifying one of the cleaners in the process.
The larger office, the one intended for the copywriters, had been turned into a corral for market research, and was Al’s domain, with Bill and Carla brought in for training in the field. Dorothy’s stuff was their major research subject. This was going to be interesting, from even the most obscure marketing and sales perspectives. Dorothy had managed, somehow, during the furor, to achieve a truly stunning profit per unit of 120% on costs, after tax, and was still retailing cheaper than the competition, except the generic brands. Good industrial design pays, and it pays big when you get it right. She’d reworked her production line on a suggestion from Bill, who said he’d just reinterpreted one of her ideas. Al was getting used to this degree of unconscious competence by now.
They researched. Vets were interviewed, given questions which Dorothy wanted answered, and supermarkets were researched from her existing clientele. Al personally ferreted out a fair series of sample consumers, about 50 of them, by using up a couple of weekends. These people were closeted with the new products for a few hours, and asked to speak their minds on the pet foods they bought.
Pet food buyers range from the can-opening fraternity to the gourmet diners, the very young to the very old, the birdseed connoisseurs to the koi stick addicts. Dorothy’s range covered all of these, and the people were the sort able to say clearly and intelligently what they liked and disliked about pet food generally. There’s no point in asking idiots who wouldn’t be able to find a cash register. Dorothy sat in on these sessions as technical advisor and counselor, and was able on a few occasions to solve a few problems some of the people were having.
One interesting discovery was that people had reservations about feeding their pets things they thought were smelly or too bland. Stenches were a big issue. Food they wouldn’t ever consider eating themselves, based on its appearance, really. Presentation of the product was a close second. Some pet foods were really pretty gruesome, especially the canned stuff, was the general opinion, and it stuck to everything if it didn’t go in the bowl. To Al’s surprise, even the innocuous dried biscuits came in for criticism, being very monotonous even for the pet owners.