Truth in Advertising by John Kenney Read Free Book Online

film.
    MAN 1: The thing.
    MAN 2: What thing?
    MAN 1: The thing. This is what the man said.
    MAN 2: The man said the thing?
    MAN 1: This is what I’m saying.
    MAN 2: What thing? What did the man say?
    MAN 1: He said Bounty is the Quicker Picker-Upper.
    Still others are simply too good for advertising. We have a couple of guys (every agency does, and they’re always guys) who fancy themselves “real writers,” guys who are always starting commercials by quoting Hemingway or Kafka or some deep thought of their own, lines that sound great when read in a really deep slow voice but that don’t mean anything ( If life is about living, then maybe living . . . is about life . . . long pause . . . Introducing new Stouffer’s Cheesy Bread. ). The problem is it’s a commercial, not literature, and at some point you have to get to the product. These guys are always working on a novel. And God love them for it. They’re better (and certainly more driven) men than I. They can’t quite believe that they’re forty-ish ad guys, when the plan twenty years before was to be on the third novel, the previous two having been optioned for screenplays, which they themselves would have written. They also use the phrase selling my soul a lot. They say this in a poor-me kind of way. It’s charming. Not to me. But it’s charming to the young account girls, who are often wooed by these grizzled writers, men who carry books and sometimes read them, who drink too much, who bed these impressionable lovelies. But here’s the thing with the selling-your-soul business. People who work for tobacco companies and hide proof that cigarettes cause cancer sell their souls. Pharma companies that test drugs on African kids sell their soul. Oil companies who cut safety and environmental corners sell their soul. But ad guys? People who make cereal commercials? Client changes that ruin your art ? Grow up.
    And finally there is the silent majority, the daily grinders. They have grown tired of advertising’s early allure and are now restless. Unfulfilled. Despondent. They want to be doing something else.But they don’t know what to do. Work on the client side? Start a café? Run drugs for a Mexican cartel? They possess that hybrid of confusion and sadness at having awoken, well past their prime, married (or just as often divorced), with two children and a mortgage on a house in Larchmont/Wilton/Montclair and thinking, How did this happen ? They never really figured out what it was they wanted to do with their lives, and so life took over, marriage came along, children, a home, massive amounts of “good” debt, and, after mediocre sex on Sunday night, they lie awake and think about how much damage it would cause if they left their wife and traveled around the south of France for the summer fucking twenty-one-year-olds. And as they are thinking this, their child awakens from a bad dream, calling out. They go to their child, walking naked through the quiet house with the new Restoration Hardware furniture, tramping quickly through the hallway to their perfect daughter’s room, pulling on a pair of boxer shorts and almost breaking their neck doing it.
    â€œWhat is it, pumpkin?” they coo.
    â€œA dream, Daddy. A bad man chasing me.”
    â€œThere’s no bad man, honey. You’re here with Mommy and Daddy and Chuckie,” they say, referring to the filthy dog who farts and slobbers all over the furniture, bought on credit. They hold her, this three-year-old bundle of loveliness, caress her silky-soft downy hair, pat her tiny back, and say, “Shhhh. Shhhh. Do you know how much Daddy loves you?” as they lay her down and pull the covers up to her chin. They kiss her cheeks again and again and hear her say, laughing, “Stop it, Daddy, you’re silly,” and know that she is all right, know that she will sleep, know that she will wake in the morning