My First

It was to be my first gangbang.

Sure, there would be more in the years ahead, but the first is so special.

The gangbang to which I am referring involved neither sex nor violence, although it did involve a group of somewhat twisted people.  It was a term used at the ad agency where I began my copywriting career, Sieber & McIntyre.

Gangbang was the desperate act of bringing the entire creative department together to brainstorm ideas for an account we were in danger of losing. With the array of corporate oddities that comprised our creative department, the process was bound to produce interesting results.

The act entailed a frantic messy group grope for ideas. Traditionally art directors and copywriters worked as teams, gaining familiarity with each other’s skills. But in this situation, regular pairings got tossed like a salad with the hope that different talent combinations would produce new ideas. Creativity en masse was intended to produce a wider array of ideas than a typical team would create on its own.

I had been hired a month before this particular emergency occurred. It was my first “real” job, meaning I would no longer have to rely on tips from grateful patrons for my income. I had graduated from the ranks of bar tending and waiting on tables, to working in an office, getting a paycheck and having healthcare insurance. I felt like the corporate equivalent of a made man, even though I was just a low-level copy thug.

I was such a novice I actually thought the gangbang would be fun. Then the Creative Director opened the meeting.

“We need some big ideas for this product or some of us in this room won’t be working here much longer.”

I looked around the room at the writers and art directors with five, ten and twenty years of experience, walls and shelves full of awards for outstanding achievements, framed reproductions of their business-building creations displayed throughout the agency’s hallways. Nobody in the room had less proof of their value to the company; I was the odds-on favorite for Most Expendable. My newly launched advertising career looked like it wouldn’t even reach cruising altitude before crash landing.

Losing this account had suddenly gotten personal.

The product we handled for this client had at one time been a prized showcase for imaginative and inspired work. The operative word in that sentence is “had”, as in past tense. For the past year or so there was little in the way of quality creative work done for the product. Sales were flat and the images and messages we had been giving them lacked enthusiasm. The client was within their rights to put us on the spot. Their ultimatum was for us to blow them away with compelling ideas, or they’d hire somebody who would. We had ten days.

The Creative Director laid out the ground rules.

“Any ideas are welcome,” he said. “Doesn’t matter who it comes from, or how off the wall the idea is. We’ll suspend criticism until later when we start picking the concepts that will be developed for presentation.”

The account team presented the product to us, explained the science behind it along with the marketing strategy. We took notes, asked questions, and made crude comments anytime a double entendre popped up.  I glanced at the notepad of an art director next to me and saw a disjointed page of doodling with random words written diagonally, vertically and every direction but the way the lines were printed. Art people are different.

I sat spellbound by what seemed one brilliant insight after another from these eloquent, informed account people. I had almost no scientific background, and only a vague understanding of marketing strategy. Only later would I come to realize these account executives were considered boneheads by much of the agency.

After the briefing all of us went back to our offices to think stuff up. Most of the veterans paired off with their respective art or copy mates, while I got together with my Selectric typewriter. This was the era just before computers, when the closest thing to playing with fonts was switching from lower to upper case letters.

The next morning we commenced the gangbang. All thirty of us piled into the conference room, and we were all invited to serve up ideas. Those with more knowledge and confidence than I, which was pretty much everybody, spoke up first. Some were eager to put forth their offerings, others did so with less gusto, and out poured a flow of concepts. The ideas ran the gamut from the conservative and expected to the whimsical and surprising.

One art person had a graphic idea but no copy. The graphic looked to me like it could work with one of my ideas. I tentatively suggested one of my less awful copy lines, and was surprised to find heads nodding. Senior heads. People who not only knew what they were doing, but were judged by all as the more talented among us. And they liked my line. The art director wrote it across the graphic.

That felt good. Real good.

I was torn between the desires to shut up and cash in my chips while I was ahead, or let my winnings ride and roll the dice again. I know, that’s how casinos make their living, but we weren’t in a casino and I felt lucky.

So I did it. I spoke up and suggested an idea for a graphic concept. There was a very brief pause in the ongoing conversations. The pause lasted about the length of time between the beats of a hummingbird’s wings. That is, not much.

The meeting surged ahead with my idea discarded out the window like a cigarette butt from a speeding car, blown off the side of the road.

Hey, I thought, I’m the new Prince of Creativity that came up with a pretty good idea just a few moments earlier. What about that last idea? It was good, or so I thought. Maybe I’m not ready for the advertising hall of fame yet. I slumped back in my seat and watched the meeting move on.

About five minutes later, after a bunch of other ideas were batted around, an intimidating art director named Bruno tossed his sketchbook onto the table in the midst of all the chatter. Bruno was one of the most highly regarded creative talents in the agency, if not in the industry, with more awards for his graphics than anybody. He was Swiss, lean and according to every woman who ever saw him, devastatingly handsome. He spoke sparingly and with very few words. When he did say something, it was with the distinctive Swiss-German inflection, usually tinged with expletives.

Bruno’s sketchbook was open to a page upon which was a pencil rendering of an idea. My idea. I couldn’t believe it, but he had taken my handful of words and brought them to life with a vivid drawing. Everybody stopped and stared because the graphic was arresting. They asked him for the thought behind it, and Bruno nodded his head towards me and said, “Ask de new guy. It’s hiss idea.”

I was stunned. I repeated what I had said earlier, only now everyone heard the words while looking at an illustration. The very same words that nobody had bothered to listen to a few minutes before now had the room buzzing with excitement.  I must have had a dumb expression on my face because Bruno just looked from across the table, unlit pipe in his mouth and smiled.

The process went on for a couple more days, ideas put down on paper to varying degrees of finish, taped up on the walls until the room was literally wallpapered with concepts.  It was time to turn off the spigots and narrow the choices down to the most promising.

The creative director and a couple of the most seasoned pros began critiquing the work. The most obviously inappropriate, off-target, rehashed versions of used ideas and just plain dull were immediately retired.

The four walls of ideas narrowed to three, then to two, and finally brought down to one wall. Of the dozen or so good ideas, a few raised strategic questions not easily answered, and were eliminated. A few more claimed or implied promises the product could not deliver, so they came down. The account team was brought in to review the remaining choices, and they found reasons to do away with several more.

Finally, it was down to the three most promising concepts. To my surprise, and that of everybody else in the department, two of the remaining three were ideas I had a hand in creating. The one with my copy line, and the one based on my graphic suggestion.

The creative director looked at me and said, “If we keep this account, its’ yours.”

The concepts were brought to a high degree of finish, and then developed into mini-campaigns to show how the ideas would translate into the variety of media called for by the marketing plan.  As The Day approached, it was decided by the owner of the agency that only the most senior personnel from each department would be in the room to do the presentation. That left me out.

Along with everybody else, I was nervous on The Day. None of us would be in the room to see how it played out, but this much I knew.

The clients arrived on time that morning. They filed out of the elevator looking grim and serious. The six of them were the ranking marketing team from the division responsible for the product, along with the guy in charge of agency contracts. This was not to be one of those fun, mirth-filled meetings with lots of backslapping and doughnuts. These guys looked like a firing squad.

Judging from their decidedly somber demeanors, those of us who happened to see them walk towards the conference room had a sinking feeling. Perhaps the decision had already been made, and they had given the ten days to distract us while they hired another agency.

I began thinking of which bar or restaurant I’d be working at next week.

The conference room doors closed with our senior executives inside, along with our creative concepts. There was a hushed cloud of gloom permeating the department, as all of us went behind closed doors to quietly speculate on who would soon be walking the plank.

The presentation went on for about ninety minutes, with nary a sound coming out of those sealed doors. Here is what I learned later from our Creative Director who was in the room.

The atmosphere was tense and cold. The presentation went smoothly with no interaction save for the occasional question from the clients. A few minor points of clarification were called for, but otherwise they were quiet. Too quiet, as if they had agreed among themselves in advance to neither smile, shake or nod their heads, or give any indication whatsoever as to their reaction to our presentation.

At its conclusion, around the hour and a half point, the senior brand manager said, “Thank you. It’s apparent you’ve been busy these past ten days. If you would leave the room, we need to discuss your presentation among ourselves. We’ll let you know when we’re ready.”

Not a good sign.

As if the lack of any reaction during the previous ninety minutes hadn’t been a clear enough signal, they now told our top executives to leave our own conference room.

Consideration was given to locking the doors from the outside, and not let them depart with the account, but that probably wouldn’t work. They would just call the police or someone, press charges, and fire us anyway.

After about ten long minutes the brand manager came out and motioned that they were ready to meet.

The agency execs nervously filed back into the room with all the enthusiasm of the condemned. Would they get blindfolds before getting executed?

The clients were seated on one side of the table, and our people said it felt as if they were across the ocean on the other shore. The brand manager spoke.

“When we pay an agency as much as we have paid yours, we expect to get our socks knocked off.” With that he stopped talking and looked across the table.

Nobody said a word, as if it might ignite flammable gases.

The Creative Director said he felt butterflies and nauseous.

With that, the brand manager abruptly put his hands against the side of the conference table and pushed his chair back. What happened next was something not to be forgotten by anybody in that room.

The brand manager bent over in his seat, reached under the table, perhaps to get some papers from his briefcase. A corporate divorce decree? He fidgeted silently for a good thirty seconds, then sat back up with something in his hands. He stood up with a flourish but not a spoken word, reached out and dropped his socks on the middle of the conference room table.

“Congratulations, gentlemen, you did it.”

Joe McIntyre, owner of the agency, had the socks framed and hung on the wall, instead of the scalps I had imagined. The client got the work they’d been looking for even if it had cost him his socks, and I won my first account.