Hallway Beast #6 isn’t a person. It’s a thing. The Meeting. If you see one, run.
Run, little pony, run, and never look back.
If the wheels of capitalism ever grind to a halt, the agenda of a meeting will be found caught in the gears. And in the advertising business, meetings thrive like mutant weeds, making actual work impossible.
There are meetings with doughnuts and meetings without dough- nuts. Meetings to talk about ads you’re going to do and meetings to talk about the ads you just did. All these meetings will be held in small, windowless rooms heated to forehead-dampening tempera- tures by overhead-projector bulbs and all held during that torpid postlunch lull around 2:30.
As a junior, you probably should just shrug and show up for any
meeting you get memo’d on. But as your radar develops, you’ll start to be able to detect which meetings are important—where big plans are made and things get done—and which aren’t.
The ones I’m talking about are those meetings that are called because somebody needed something to do. “Background” meet- ings. Or “touching base” meetings. These aren’t called because deci- sions need to be made. They’re just called. And oh, how they go on.
I was in one of these Hour Gobblers once, and I swear time actually stopped. I’m not kidding. Swear to God, as plain as day, the second hand on the wall clock just stopped. No more tick-tock. Just . . . tick. . . . and that was it.
It was a particularly useless meeting and three hours long. Just when we thought we were going to get out, someone raised his hand and asked a question—the kind of tired, lifeless query I call a
“meeting extender.” A meeting extender is a question like: “Well, Bill, how do those figures compare with the results from Chicago?”
That’s when the clock stopped and began to sag like a Dali painting.
Speakerphone meetings are the worst. And the worst of the worst is the three-way speakerphone, client-on-a-car-phone confer- ence call meeting. There you are, eight nervous people all huddled around a little black box, listening to an art director in L.A. describe a picture nobody can see, to a client nobody can hear.
Ending a meeting is an art it pays to develop. When the business at hand seems at an end even though the meeting is not, start stacking your papers together, evening up the edges, the way news anchors do at the end of their broadcast. It’s body language that says, “Well, nothing interesting is going to happen anymore in this room.”
I hate it when I get sucked into an Hour Gobbler and have no work I can sneak into the meeting. I usually start writing jokes to myself to pass the time. In one meeting, I remember trying to make my buddy Bob Barrie laugh and instead blew my own cover. I started writing a joke: “Bob’s List of Things to Do.” I thought I’d just slip it under his nose. Try to crack him up. So I started scribbling:
BOB’S LIST OF THINGS TO DO:
1. Ointment on rash??
2. Rotate bricks under car in front yard.
3. Apologize to that kid’s parents.
4. Wash blood out of clown suit.
5. Peek under scab.
When I wrote “Peek under scab,” I did one of those bursting laugh-out-loud kind of explosions, and the whole room stopped thinking about Chicago and glared at me for an explanation. I sim- ply had to fess up: “Hey, I’m sorry, I just thought of something funny, completely unrelated to these proceedings. I’m very sorry.
Please continue.”
But the image of Bob Barrie peeking under a knee scab finally did me in. I just collapsed, boneless, and had to excuse myself from the room.
But it got me out of the meeting.
Yet as much as I try to avoid meetings, all the really important stuff in this business ultimately happens in one meeting—the client presentation.
This is where all the hard work you’ve done lives or dies. And where the future audience of a storyboard is decided. Will it be mil- lions of people seeing your TV commercial on the Super Bowl? Or a janitor who glances at the big board with funny drawings before cramming it into the rolling garbage can?
It’s an important meeting. Be prepared.
Figure 11.1 In focus groups, bad things happen to your storyboards.
Very bad things.
11
Pecked to Death by Ducks
Presenting and protecting your work
ABOUT 20 PERCENT OF YOUR TIMEin the advertising business will be spent thinking up ads. 80 percent will be spent protecting them. And 30 percent doing them over.
A screenwriter was looking out on the parking lot at Universal Studios one day. It occurred to him, said this article, that every one of those cars was parked there by somebody who came to stop him from doing his movie.
The similarity to advertising is chilling. The elevator cables in your client’s building will fairly groan hauling up all the people intent on killing your best stuff.
When word gets around the client offices that the agency is here to present, vice presidents and assistant vice presidents will appear out of the walls and storm the conference room like zombies in Night of the Living Dead, pounding on the door, hungry arms reach- ing in for the layouts, pleading, “Must kill. Must kill.”
I have been in meetings where, after the last ad was presented, an eager young hatchet man raised his hand and asked his boss, “Can I be the first to say why I don’t like it?”
I have been in meetings surrounded by so many vice presidents, I actually heard Custer whisper to me from the grave, “Man, I thought I had it bad. You guys are, like, so dead.”
You will see ads killed in ways you didn’t know things could be killed. You will see them eviscerated by blowhards bearing charts. You will see them garotted by quiet little men bearing political agendas. A comment from a passing janitor will pick off ads like cans from a fencepost and casual remarks by the chair- man’s wife will mow down whole campaigns like the first charge at Gallipoli.
Then there’s the “friendly fire” to worry about. A stray memo from your agency’s research department can send your campaign up in flaming foamcore. Your campaign can also be fragged by the ill-timed hallway remark of an angry coworker.
War widows received their telegrams from ashen-faced military chaplains. You, however, will look up from your desk to see an account executive, smiling.
“The client has some issues and concerns about your ads.”
This is how account executives announce the death of your labors: “Issues and concerns.”
To understand the portent of this phrase, picture the men lying on the floor of that Chicago garage on St. Valentine’s Day. Al Capone had issues and concerns with these men.
I’ve had account executives beat around the bush for 15 min- utes before they could tell me the bad news. “Well, we had a good meeting.”
“Yes,” you say, “but are the ads dead?”
“We learned a lot.”
“But are they dead?”
“Wellll, . . . your ads are, they’re with Jesus now.”
When you next see your ads, they will be lying in state in the account executive’s office. Maybe on the desk. Maybe down in between the desk and the wall. (So thoughtless.) Maybe they’ll bear crease wounds where they were crudely folded during the pitch team’s hasty medevac under fire.
But you’ll remember them the way they were. (“They look so . . . so natural.”) Say your good-byes. Try to think about the good times.
Then walk away and start preparing for the next attack. I hear the drums.
What follows are some quixotic arguments that may help protect your loved ones in future battles. If you find any of them useful, I recommend you commit them to memory. Go into meetings armed
and with the safety off. It’s my experience that what a client decides in a meeting stays decided.