BANNED BY AGENCY CEOs NATIONWIDE! "I'll fire anybody at my agency who I see reading this book" -Agency CEO "Dull. Dull. Dull. Put me to sleep" -Agency CEO "DON'T READ THIS BOOK" -Agency CEO "This book sucks" -Agency CEO "Let me be clear. No one at our agency has ever slept with a client" -Agency CEO Halliday & Vine, once the greatest ad agency in New York, is now an agency on the brink. Peter Vine, their creative genius, has disappeared. Now, they've got one last chance to save themselves when they make the final round in the pitch for the largest fashion account in the world. But Drew, the new Chief Creative Officer, is going to blow it with an absolutely horrible pitch. That's when agency peons Ryan Simmons and Rachel Weiss decide to take matters into their own hands. Their only problem? They've got no team, no budget, no research, no place to work, no way into the pitch, and to say that Ryan is fashion-challenged is an understatement. What ensues is pure mayhem as the latest technologies, outsized egos, nasty clients, and supermodels all clash as a lovable but motley crew try to save their agency and their jobs.

Ad Asylum

By Dan Wald

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Dan Wald
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-8284-6

Chapter One

Pitch Minus 11 Days-Sunday

I'm watching my poor cell phone. I think it's become schizophrenic. I've programmed it with so many different ringtones for so many different things that it's lost its identity. One tone for my clients, one for my boss, one for my work friends, another for my creative director. Then there's the buzz for when I get e-mails, another buzz for text messages, and of course another one for incoming Tweets. Sometimes three different incoming transmissions hit at once, and the poor thing just kind of has a seizure. The most pathetic thing is when it's on vibrate and I've put it down on a table or something-it sort of flails around like a bug on its back on a hot sidewalk. I think it may actually be trying to kill itself. I swear it's trying to get to the edge so it can jump off and put itself out of its misery.

I'm sitting inside my cubicle watching my phone's attempted suicide so I don't stare too hard at Rachel. I hate it when she catches me staring. She's off-limits. She has rules. But she's practically sitting on my lap at my desk and opening the files from the flash drive she just inserted into my computer. It's Sunday afternoon and the place is deserted, otherwise we wouldn't dare look at what she's about to show me right here in my cubicle. They're the initial ideas for the upcoming Leary pitch, which is completely hush-hush.

She opens the files and clicks around to show me the concepts. I'm dumbstruck by how bad they are.

"These are horrible! I mean they really, truly, god-awfully suck! Please tell me you're kidding. You're kidding, right? I'm getting punk'd, right?"

Rachel just shakes her head. "I know. I'm embarrassed to be working on this."

It is now, right here and now, that the conspiracy is formed. Our own secret plan to save the venerable thirty-year-old agency that provides us with meager paychecks, emotional abuse, and fourteen-hour days. No words are exchanged, but we both know. We aren't going down without a fight.

Let me back up.

Our employer, Halliday and Vine, is in the midst of a major pitch for the mother lode of accounts-one of the biggest pitches likely to come up in what has been a dismal year. We're talking over $150 million in global billings. More importantly, it is our chance to redeem ourselves after losing two big pitches in the last quarter, not to mention an airline client that went bankrupt and a banking client where the CEO and CFO were both recently indicted.

But this is all common knowledge. What is less known is that two other large accounts are teetering on the brink. Duke Owen Pollard, our master at IMH, the holding company in Paris, is ready to unleash the hounds of hell upon us should we screw this one up.

And it is clearly ours to lose. Our CEO and half namesake, Jack Halliday, went to college with Mitchell Leary, the philandering founder of House of Leary, the multibillion-dollar eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the fashion world. When Mitchell sneezes, underfed models around the world catch cold. Boutiques on Rodeo Drive and factories in China hold their breath. And the bitchy editrex of the fashion magazines scramble to provide $200 handkerchiefs.

House of Leary has decided after decades with the same agency that it is time to take a "fresh look." Everything is of course all air kissy kissy and "You're welcome to join the review," but the writing is on the wall for the incumbent agency. (Their office furniture is already for sale on eBay.) Sales are sliding and the once-impregnable brands of H of L are beginning to seem old and shabby against the popping-up-like-Whac-A-Mole designs of hip-hop artists, rappers, tattooed convicts, and American Idol winners.

And the reputation of Halliday & Vine, until recently that is, has been that of brilliantly unconventional, creative approaches. So this pitch should have fallen right into our sweet spot. But that was before the untimely disappearance of Peter Vine, the other half of our letterhead, who delved deep into his own psychosis to create ads that truly stunned and amazed. He went off his medication, and suffice it to say that his dramatic and very public demise was not a pretty scene. He's been missing ever since.

We all figured that our current chief creative officer, Drew Reed, must have graphic video tapes of both Jack Halliday and Duke Owen in order to keep his job. Saying he is a dullard is an insult to dullards. But he defines the agency political operative. He can send you to agency purgatory with a single look, e-mail, text message, IM, or Tweet. He cares more about power than creative. And he is an absolute master at leaving others holding the bag - he has fall guys all lined up for his scapegoats. Worst of all, he has one of those little sorta-goatee things hanging under his lip, and he always dresses in black and talks with a fake British accent.

Which brings me back to what Rachel has just risked life and limb to show me-the initial creative concepts for the pitch. I truly hope that this is a joke, but the look on her face tells me it isn't.

We're down on my floor because it's too dangerous for me up on the creative floors, even on a Sunday. It's basically open season on account people up there. We're the enemy, plain and simple, despite all the efforts at integrated teams and information sharing. The silos are worse than ever, even after years and years of trying to break them down.

And now, on top of the age-old tensions between the Account, Creative, and Media departments, each agency has piled on Interactive, Experiential, Mobile, and something called Social Networks, each with a team of "experts" vying for client budget dollars, awards, prestige, power, resources, and hair gel.

Yup, we're just one big, happy family.

And that brings me to yours truly, Ryan Simmons. I'm the account exec, or AE, on the world's second-largest dandruff shampoo account. An AE is the lowest of the low-worm food, pond scum, tooth fuzz, absolute dog crap. And best of all, we do all the work and take all the shit. The only ones who treat us worse than our clients are our own colleagues. I spend the bulk of my day lying to my client, begging my fellow agency "teammates" for the stuff they owe me, and being yelled at by the media people and ridiculed by the creatives.

And I fought to get this job. I was one of ten interns who worked here for free for two summers during college only to find out that only two of us would be hired upon graduation. At a sub-sub survival salary. I have three roommates, 2,587 if you count the roaches and mice. My subway commute to the outer reaches of Brooklyn takes me an hour each way.

I started in research. Spent two years trying to make sense of focus groups and consumer research reports so that our creative gods can base their ideas on actual consumer data. I'm not sure they even read it. The better ones do, but most of them get their ideas when they're drunk out of their minds or naked in the shower.

The fun part is then watching them fall in love with their ideas regardless of their merit. Better yet is when they die on a sword to defend them. This of course gives them an excuse for at least a week of pouting and hissy fits, not to mention an inability to get any other work done.

Which means that I'm coming up with yet more excuses for my client as to why their storyboards for yet another exciting dandruff shampoo commercial are late.

But back to the pitch...