Everything is Advertising 3

 

The boardroom was a refrigerator. Hard surfaces. Clean lines. A table with weird ornate details. Someone had turned down the thermostat to “keep the mind sharp.” It was probably Mark. The room smelled like sesame oil and lime vape. Empty takeout containers and Diet Pepsi. Just like the cop shows. 

 

Mark wore a ripped college sweatshirt over dress pants, the compromise uniform of a man who believed in form and had run out of it. His pomade was failing. His hair slumped like the fins on those orcas who murder their trainers in captivity. He stood in front of the projector, hands in motion, repeating a sentence that he already loved.

“Søren Kierkegaard said, when you stand on the edge of a cliff, you’re not anxious you might fall, you’re anxious you could jump.”

 

“Which we absolutely cannot open with.” Kevin the Copywriter stated plainly without looking up. He had that agency look. Too much black layered over black, not enough sun. He pressed his fingers into his temples. Hard.

 

Marie, the Strategist, had gone past tired all the way to overly positive. About everything.  She rolled back in her chair. “I think I’m following,” she murmured. “It’s like Thelma and Louise, except for old men and trucks.”

 

“That is the customer, I guess. Men. Trucks. The American dream, but somehow without any guns. Oh, and the damn thing is electric,” sighed Kevin

 

Georgia, the Art Director, and Mark’s right hand sat across the table, laptop open, face lit with blue light. She was twenty-something, new enough to still be amazed by Mark’s ideas. On her screen, she slowly penciled in crows feet on the stock image of a young man. The Photoshop had a particular wrongness, where the smile lines are a few millimeters off the mark.

 

Kevin leaned over. “Anyone with eyes will know that’s bad photoshop.”

 

“We’re working with what we have,” Mark said, which was his motto for every deck, every year. He leaned over Georgia's shoulder, forced a small smile, then motioned in the air to show her. “Look where they would naturally form. Soften here. Drop the opacity.”

 

The projector threw a slapped together slide onto the slightly textured white wall. A cliff’s edge with a man as tiny punctuation at the top, the horizon big and comically vast. 

 

Mark paced. “Ford sells quality vehicles that help get the job done.” He stated to himself, rehearsing the lines robotically. “When you ask people to buy into an electric vehicle, you’re asking them to jump into the unknown.”

 

They moved in loops: from table to screen, from sentence to sentence, from the image of a cliff to the glossy image of a truck. The F-150 Lightning Electric Truck beamed from the slide like a prize on a game show nobody remembered entering. “Electric vehicles have started gaining traction among males thirty-five to fifty,” Kevin recited. “So there's a real opportunity for Ford in this space,” Mark followed. “Not flashy. Not preachy. Reliable.”

 

“I wouldn’t buy one.” Kevin quipped.

“Neither would I,” followed Mark.