Someone Could Lose an Eye

Antipasto

I did not intend to remain in America. Who would? I told my mum and sisters that I would give it three years, maximum. Slogging through a Neverland of poisonous food, giddy music, brain-damaging telly and dazzling teeth, I didn’t even think I’d make it that long. Then I met Anthony.

But let me step back a few years. I had just turned thirty and was firmly lodged as an associate creative director at a successful London advertising agency, Bartholomew & Milfenschanz. This was no mean feat. They were the first agency I joined after graduating from Sunderland School of Art and Design with a graphic arts diploma, one of about twenty million to matriculate with a similar certificate that year. My design chops were not great, or even good, if I’m being honest. I was decent at developing ideas (I think), but not so decent at executing them visually. What saved my career from the dustbin was the fact that I could spell, and had at least a passing familiarity with grammar, so creatives higher up the food chain could trust me with their work, knowing I would not break lines of copy in odd places, italicise the words gefilte fish, or simply lop off the end of a sentence if it didn’t fit properly. My facility with language and creative game gave me a fortunate leg up, so I was able to climb the agency ladder relatively quickly.

In one of those serendipitous events that occasionally redirect the tracks of your tram, I met Iain McAllister, a Scottish expat who was a partner at a New York agency, Ordonez, McAllister & Goodhue. He was in London as one of the guest judges at an advertising awards show. (Clients are always mesmerised by awards, so the industry puts on as many shows as they can to fill their cabinets with trophies, plaques and other badges of honour. The Chancery of the Exchequer prints money – we print certificates, but ours don’t seem to devalue as we print more, so we do.) I think he appreciated my calm demeanour, courage to develop ideas spawned in an alternate dimension and, oh yes, the fact that I could spell. In subsequent discussions, I learned that the remuneration was very attractive and I would have more creative autonomy than in my current position, so I thought, what the hell it won’t kill me, much. I sold my Vauxhall, packed my bags, kissed everyone goodbye and headed off to the colonies.

America (if New York could be called America). I had never been there. These were some first impressions, though admittedly they have tempered considerably the more Americans I’ve come to know:

They’re always in a hurry. We Brits are often in a hurry as well, especially in London, but we at least try to seem as if we’re not. The Yanks unapologetically run through life as if the Grim Reaper were swinging at their derrieres. I’ve since learned that the exact opposite is true if you go to a rural area, where it can take half an hour to order, receive and pay for a cup of coffee.

Food, if you can call it that, is simply everywhere. From the seemingly endless parade of restaurants on every avenue, to street vendors, to ubiquitous ‘drive-thrus’, the Yanks never allow themselves to get more than a few metres from their next meal. I recently read that the average American family spends 45% of its food budget on deliveries or out-of-home, which is more than double their out-of-home sex budget.

They’re so bleeding prissy. For those of you who may have forgotten your Key Stage 3 history, many of the New World’s original settlers were Puritans who felt that the C of E was far too loose with the uncompromising will of the Lord, so they sailed off to set up a buzzkill colony of their own. That was 400 years ago, and it still holds true today. From drinking to swearing, to shagging, to most of the other joys that make life worth living, a lot of Americans act like they were raised by a Victorian dowager from East Gwillimbury.

One thing that I’ll never cease to enjoy, and value, is the way Yanks are intimidated by what they call an English accent. Even if someone sounds like a docker from Newcastle, the Americans assume that, since he’s English, he must be educated, tasteful and a bit superior, which, of course, is true. I work this as much as I can.

I arrived to find that my new employer had sprinted from the starting gate as a young, dynamic, boutique agency somewhere in the mists of the last millennium. They won a few awards, parlayed them into a slew of new accounts, won a few more awards, and continued to just … hang in there. The partners – whom we affectionately refer to as the Three Wise Men – included the president, Benito Ordonez; colonel of the creative department, Iain McAllister; and financial guru, Ernest Goodhue, the only one who could do arithmetic. They were smart enough to keep replenishing the cupboard with good creative talent, among whose number I hoped to be counted, and salespeople who could always lure in fresh hope.

About three years into my expedition, I met the fellow who has since become my life partner for now, Anthony. Admittedly, the initial attraction was purely physical, for me at least; I suppose I shouldn’t speak for him. He was a fit, energetic, twenty-eight-year-old P.E. teacher with a head full of honey-hued curls (somewhat diminished by now), bronzed fur on his forearms, and a smile that was pure ‘get over here’. Early in our relationship, I started calling him ‘Your Nibs’ as an ironic term of endearment (because he is not at all nibby), and he seemed to enjoy it, so it stuck. Apart from the obvious, we found we had a lot in common. We adored Nina Simone, the Coen brothers, Idris Elba, Zadie Smith, Thai food, flamenco and not running. We loathed Keanu Reeves, golden oldies, people who say, ‘Have a great day’, odd socks and Republicans. So, we decided to move into Bag End and try our luck.

I’ve been filling my shopping trolley in America for eight years now, though I have the budding sense that I’m nearing the check-out counter. Adding to the trans-Atlantic tribulations my dear mum has had to endure is the fact that my lovely and luscious sisters, Elaine and Zoe, also decided to emigrate to seek their fortunes in the New World, though not because of any glowing reports I sent from abroad. So now we are a colony of Templetons, not puritanical I can assure you, but still having to struggle with the treacherous weather, the hospitable yet bonkers inhabitants and the expansive nature of a land that still hasn’t learned to say ‘Whoa, that’s enough, thanks.’

I fully intend to return to the land of Shakespeare, Marmite and Harry Hill’s TV Burp someday, but for now I will continue to ply my brassy trade on this foreign shore, however rock-strewn it may be.

A Dog’s Breakfast

I get some of my most inspired campaign ideas while walking my neighbour’s black pug, Nora. They arrive out of the blue like a visit from your landlord while you’re trying to catch up on Graham Norton shows, except these are visits you want to happen. The moment that little spark occurs, it expands like the universe in the first nanoseconds after the big bang. Immediately, you can see the TV advert, the magazine ads, the bus shelters … taglines jump out at you … you start writing lines of copy in your head … endorphins are released, your breath is freer, your step lighter; it’s as if your whole body were smiling. It’s the same delicious shiver you get when someone hits on you, provided he’s not a bear.

Within about ninety seconds it’s over. I don’t mean you stop thinking about it, but the burst is over, mostly, I believe, because you’re so worried you’ll forget some of what you’re spawning that your brain starts to subconsciously transfer it into long-term memory. The creative train goes onto a siding to offload some cargo, and when you try to get back up to speed it’s just not the same.

Dogs, on the other hand, have an enviable ability to live in the present. It’s probably why they seldom get heart disease. From what I can tell, what happened thirty seconds ago could just as easily have been a year ago to them, and as for the future … There might be a squirrel around the bend, I bet there is! I bet there is! C’mon let’s go … Oh crap, nothing. What were we doing? I believe it’s this Zen-like state that rubs off during dog walking. You can’t force an inspiration any more than you can force a bowel movement; when the time is right it will arrive, and that makes you happy.

One crisp, late autumn morning when the leaves were crowing all their resplendent earth colours, I received a brilliant, if I may be so immodest, idea for the Last Bites dog food campaign. (You notice how the colours we normally call ‘earth colours’ are actually tree colours? The earth is essentially brown, or grey if you happen to be standing on a rock. All of those russets, ambers and ochres that you see on not-for-profit websites and brochures are the colours of trees – dying trees, to be precise. Similarly, campaign ideas sometimes need to decompose a bit to show their better hues.)

Last Bites was a new offering from Peppy Pooch, a purveyor of specialty foods targeted to dogs at specific times of their life cycle. So, there was a puppy formulation called Puppy Love, for example, and post-sterilization recipes called, Spay It Forward for the (former) gals, and Grrritality for the newly nutless, and for bowsers recovering from a serious illness or injury, Heal! Last Bites, the newest addition to the doggy menu, was specialised fare for very old dogs who were fast approaching the Pearly Kennel. Peppy Pooch was one of Ordonez, McAllister & Goodhue’s most loyal, and lucrative, clients so I put some of our purer creative breeds on the account. The team had been working on the campaign for about two weeks with some edible morsels emerging but no pièce de résistance, yet.

As soon as Nora had finished her business and presented her olfactory credentials to a sufficient number of canine passers-by, I dropped her off and headed to the agency.

Tribulations abound in Agency World, and a minor one – or so I thought – presented itself before I headed off to the Last Bites brainstorm. It concerned a key visual we had created for one of our campaigns, and would turn out to be a major hassle for our next one.

The most important element of a great ad campaign is its iconography: the spike words and images we blast into viewers’ minds like pieces of shrapnel that no surgeon can excise. Just as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour helps us remember the lines on the treble clef, all of the personae, critters, jingles and icons we see and hear in ads are the strings we bind on the fingers of consumers. Some of the iconic ones are the PG Tips Monkey, the Churchill Dog, the Michelin Man, and the Duracell Bunny. Notice how many of them are animals? This is because animals are race neutral so, hypothetically, no one ethnic group will be excluded from identifying with them, or worse yet, be offended by one. My personal theory is that animals are cheaper than actors, and they are also less prone to sue, although I hear there was a bit of a dust-up between the Coca-Cola Polar Bears and Cadbury’s Gorilla a few years back.

A few months prior to the Last Bites pitch, we had hit upon the perfect mnemonic image for a hand cream called Trinity. The cream had a very specific purpose: to be used just when you have come in from a cold, wintry environment. Your hands are freezing, dry, and stinging with pain. The product has a warming component to counter the cold, a moisturizer to take care of the dryness, and a mild analgesic to thwart the pain – hence the name, Trinity.

The image we used to convey the pain of cold, dry hands was a giant nail piercing each hand. Applying Trinity immediately relieved the discomfort, and the nails retreated and disappeared. Admittedly, we knew what the obvious issues might be, but the nails were a stylised computer graphic; there was no mallet, no blood, and no crown of thorns. Sure, we could have used a thistle or battery acid, I suppose, but the key to good iconography is that it needs to be extreme – you have to take it to the limit, and we felt that big, sharp nails in each hand would achieve this excruciating sensation.

The Trinity advert hit the airwaves, sales went up, the client was happy, and the agency partners were ecstatic; it was an ace serve, until we met the LORD.

The LORD (League of Righteous Delivery) was, no surprise here, an evangelical Christian organisation headed by a disciple named Simon Peterson. Their search and destroy mission was to sift through our cultural wasteland and ferret out transgressions that might, in any way, sully the image of the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost. It kept them busy. When Trinity hand cream came into their crosshairs, they were even more self-righteous than usual; it was a perfect storm of product name, imagery and inanity (okay, they had a point there) that needed to be stoned to death with the greatest possible urgency.

Weekly church attendance in the UK is at an all-time low at approximately 10% according to polls; in the US, that number is four times higher. Sure, a lot of them are lying, but still, the difference is staggering. Those who know me will readily attest that I place religion somewhere between country music and skin cancer on the list of life’s curses, due in large measure to their enmity, verging on hate in some quarters, toward the LGBTQ+ community. And then there’s the hypocrisy. If ever you want to see a church full of wife beaters, cyber currency scammers, Spurs fans and addicts of every stripe, just go to a Christian fundamentalist service. Of course, they’re all finished with that now. With a plea deal from the Lord, they’ve achieved a blissful state of redemption, though some of their victims are less sanguine about it.

The LORD’s campaign started with a strongly worded letter – Christians are very good at this – to Trinity, who immediately handed it over to us. We wouldn’t normally be that concerned with push-back like this; everybody has something to whine about, and our agency receives a few bad reviews for all our campaigns from the filbert fringe. Besides, the product was selling well, and better yet, it did provide the promised relief. But Peterson had the backing of a large and highly motivated organisation with the tacit support of sanctimonious Christians across the nation. His threats included a boycott, blasts on the blogosphere (though these, we assumed, would mostly be preaching to the choir), and possible legal action, invoking what ordinance it was difficult to imagine. At this point, the ability of the LORD to significantly impact the success of Trinity hand cream seemed slight at best, so I was as pleased as an Asda greeter when our president suggested that we just ignore it.

The biggest challenge of working on the creative side of advertising is offering up your newborn ideas to fellow creatives and suits for evaluation, criticism, and possible euthanasia. Ideas are very much like babies: when they are spawned you immediately fall in love with them, you care for and nurture them as they develop, and you can become fiercely protective of them. If you think they’re special (and what babies aren’t?), you can’t help but imagine their future. Will they change people’s perceptions of this brand … forever? Will they win awards, garnering your agency accolades, new clients, higher revenue and earnings, and perhaps even a pay rise for you?

The flip side of this coin is that some babies are hideous. While the besotted parents are standing proudly beside their issue of Caliban, you’re struggling to hold down your cookies. Let’s face it, some babies are so ugly they could stun a moose, but their parents can’t possibly be objective about this. Likewise, every creative secretly fears that his or her progeny are knuckle-scrapers, and their colleagues are just too polite to say so. They needn’t worry; gentility is in very short supply at most agencies, so you can usually count on getting the straight goods from your adjudicators.

When we convened to try to nail the Last Bites caper, the account director, Mayleene begged us to put humour aside this campaign. Mayleene is a forty-year-old veteran of the agency wars who always looks and dresses the part of the consummate businesswoman. I have never seen her neatly coiffed, jet-black hair cut below her shoulders, her clothes are invariably tasteful and sensible, and she wears a perpetual don’t-even-think-of-fucking-with-me scowl that most of us find quite intimidating.

We’re talking about dying companions here, she pleaded. Can’t we have some respect for the soon-to-be departed?

Look, I countered, I realise that nobody wants to think about their canine companion in a terminal way – it’s just too depressing – so if we can give people a chuckle while hitting on the key point: that it’s a special formula that will provide Bailey or Jasper, or Disraeli some needed energy on their way out, then we’ve got a winner.

There’s nothing funny about dying.

"It’s not about dying, it’s about living happily until you die. Anyway, not to worry, I’ve got it nailed." Trumpeting your ideas before presenting them is generally bad form, but I was alpha enough at the agency that I could cheat and fertilise the ground a little before planting my seed.

"Here’s the concept: grandma and grandpa come for a family dinner with mom and dad and a couple of kids. Suburban house, nondescript furniture and décor, the usual ad schlock. They sit down to dinner and one of the kids pipes up: ‘Mom, what are we going to feed Nana tonight?’

Mom replies, ‘It’s a special night so we’ll put some of our scraps in her bowl.’ Cut to grandma’s face in shock.

‘But she’s getting old,’ says the kid, ‘she should have her special food.’ Now grandpa is alarmed.

‘That’s true,’ says mom, ‘she won’t be with us much longer.’ Grandpa stands and says, ‘Now, just a minute –’

‘Go and open her special can.’

The other kid joins in, ‘I hope Nana lasts through the summer.’

Dad says, ‘We’ll do the best we can to help her along.’ We keep cutting to grandma and grandpa who are looking more and more indignant.

‘When Nana dies can we bury her in the back yard?’

Cut to the first kid in the kitchen who is scooping food into a dog’s bowl. ‘Come here, Nana,’ she says, and an old dog ambles over to eat. In the final tableau, the girl is hugging the dog while in the background grandma and grandpa are putting their coats on in a huff. Voice-over announcer: ‘Last Bites. When the end is near.’"

Mayleene, as usual, was the first to speak. That’s very amusing, she said, oozing condescension. Offensive, but amusing.

It’s not that offensive.

Not unless you’re over seventy.

You should know. Then it got nasty. I had to take up arms to protect my baby. Now, it’s important to remember, in these circumstances, that almost all great campaigns start with ‘no’. If you check out the most breakthrough, award-winning, brain-tickling adverts of the past generation, you can bet that when those concepts were presented, the initial reaction of the suits, and the clients if they managed to get that far, was: ‘Are you nuts?!’ Great campaigns need to be distinctive to break through the clutter, and better yet, a bit dangerous to turn people on to your shill. But if there’s one thing that most agencies, and all clients, abhor, it’s danger. Oh, the suits talk a tough game, to be sure: ‘We want to break out of the mould … tear apart current perceptions … titillate people … shock them … scare them even.’ This is their cant, but whenever these kinds of ideas are presented, they soil themselves faster than a Conservative stumbling into a gay bar.

After fifteen minutes of wrangling, with Mayleene entrenched, and the rest of the creatives waffling between camps, we decided to work up some storyboards and present them to the client along with a ‘safe idea’ featuring a terminal terrier being lovingly cared for by a saccharine family. It was the best I could have hoped for under the circumstances.

Dismayed that we were not trembling at the foot of Mount Sinai, Simon Peterson invoked the power of the LORD in the next step in his campaign against Trinity hand cream. His threats included: a severely worded letter-writing campaign that would see the rank and file of the LORD sending vitriolic missives (To whom, we weren’t sure. Is there a worldwide mailing list of hand cream users?); a social media campaign imploring people to avoid Trinity (This was more worrisome; Christians are nothing if not networked. Might there be a holy social media site called Scripturegram?); and finally, demonstrating in front of major drug stores, and possibly defacing the product at point-of-sale. It was hard to say where this might lead. Would we need to hire security personnel? Better yet, we could create a women’s motorcycle gang, the Skanks of Satan, to patrol the aisles where trouble may be brewing. With any luck, it would escalate into the mother of all eye gouge wars in cosmetics sections across the nation, driving Trinity sales to the very gates of Elysium.

Garth Bewick, proprietor of Peppy Pooch dog foods, was an enormous man with a booming voice and an explosive smile. Standing a good six-foot-eight inches, he had a habit of slapping his gigantic paw on the table whenever he wanted to make a point, or found some part of the proceedings particularly agreeable. Like many entrepreneurs I had encountered, he was simply bristling with positive energy; it was easy to see where Peppy Pooch got its pep. Before starting the company, he had all the fuel to be a big success but had never found the right vehicle for his ambitions. His portfolio of failed enterprises included a USB thumb drive in the shape of a penis, a solar-powered running shoe deodorizer, a vending machine for lox and cream cheese, and others of this ilk. Garth stumbled on the Peppy Pooch proposition when a previous endeavour, supplying gourmet chitlins to fast food restaurants across the southern US, failed to gain the necessary traction to vault him into entrepreneurial orbit. Having to honour his contract with a supplier of the intestines of slaughtered livestock, he naturally turned to pet food. He had found his métier.

Ordonez, McAllister & Goodhue had