I had always been told--and always thought--that I would be good at advertising, because it's one of the few professions with a real, direct creative outlet. I also thought advertising would be a good way to make some money, as opposed to teaching, which seemed to be my only other option.

So I sent out my resume and pounded the pavement and shit, and nothing really came of it. I just didn't have the right background, or whatever. Advertising is a tough field to break into cold when you're twenty-nine years old. In fact, I probably wouldn't have made it at all except this old friend of mine eventually set me up with a guy he knew from college. This guy was at a very small firm--just two people--but he was willing to take a chance on me. So now, for two years, I've been a senior account executive at this place. But my title is actually a bit of a misnomer. It was given to me more as a way to get new clients into the agency, you know, so when I talk to people I sound more important than I actually am. Basically, what I do is I write copy and discuss concepts relating to our various campaigns. Sometimes I also deal with the printers and service people on the phone, you know, the guys who are executing the jobs for us. So I'm really more of a creative guy than an account guy, but so what, right?

When I started here, I didn't know anything about advertising except what I had seen on TV. I was an education guy. I was talking about post-modernism, and, like, the good feelings engendered by education. (Laughs) And now I'm a "businessman." It's been a huge transition for me. I've lost all my idealism. I mean, whatever shreds of idealism I had left, after having been in Nigeria and graduate school, were lost. I've become jaded. I'm, like, telling people to go fuck themselves on a daily basis. And that's because being in this job, you realize that money is the bottom line in almost everything. In almost all affairs. I think it's a message driven home to me every day. You know, what's the bottom line? How much does it cost? How can we produce it? It's just really serious. And maybe it explains why there's a lot of really bad, shitty advertising.

It's amazing if you just look at ads, and then you see how people talk about them in the meetings. Amazing. There are actually guys in meetings sitting around, going, "Well, Jim, I think the reason she should hold the scrubbing brush at this angle is...yaddah, yaddah, yaddah." They're so careful about everything, like is this woman a couple of years too old? Or is she too fat? Or too thin? You know, they worry and they worry and they worry, and they get it fucking wrong every time. Every time.

The meticulous inspection and dissection of every ad means that everything gets watered down. A good idea, a funny idea, an idea with the slightest bit of a new way of thinking about something, or just a little twist, gets dumbed down and killed. Because everybody thinks the American public is dumb. Time and time again, that idea is driven into my head. It's because people are scared. "The American public is dumb"--that is the overriding thing, the overriding law of advertising--as far as I can tell. And as a result, everybody involved with this business is scared. Everybody is scared about their job. Everybody is scared that Tom in the front office is, like, looking over them. (Laughs) And they're right, too. I mean, Tom will take away the job if the profits aren't there.

But there is so much bullshit that goes on.

We've been doing a print ad for a credit card company. And in the course of three weeks, this ad has gone through 200 different revisions. Half the time you're just trying to find out where you were last week on it. We're talking about the thickness of an underline--it's been changed twenty times. Should it be an underline? Should it be a box? Should it be a black box? Should it be a gray box? Should it be white type on a black box or should it be yellow type on a black box? This is a print ad, okay? It's going to be in a stupid bathroom-type national magazine. (Laughs) It's absurd. I mean, the saddest part of it all is that our first idea--the first way it looked--was the best. But we didn't go back to that first idea because the guy that's managing the ad at our client, the guy who makes the ultimate decisions, he has his own view.

So maybe those 200 revisions were really just a fight between a client and an ad company. Who's to say? There's just so much bullshit.

You know those brochures that come with your credit card statement? Well, they are called "statement stuffers" in the advertising industry. And that statement stuffer is something we design. And it is an extraordinarily rigorous process, too. I mean the amount of work that goes into one of those damn things that you simply look at and immediately throw away--it's scandalous.

I've never seen somebody hang onto one of them. Never. And we've put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars and stress and suffering and pain into them. (Laughs) And I don't even know what the client spent. I mean, I don't have any clue. But a lot of money. For a statement stuffer. It's absurd. And you know, it's somewhat disappointing in terms of feeling good about your job.

Another disappointing thing is the incentive stuff that we do for consumer electronics companies. This is not really advertising in the strictest sense of the word, it's more like promotion. Or, to tell the truth, it's more like a very organized and regimented and legal type of kickback. What we do is help electronics companies convince retail salespeople across the country to sell their products, as opposed to you know, the products of their competitors. So we're not advertising to the general public, we're only targeting salespeople at these big retail stores--Circuit City, for instance, or Nobody Beats the Wiz. And we're not really telling these salespeople that our client's stuff is so great or anything, we're just offering them money to push the products.

When you buy a stereo, or a camcorder, or whatever, the salesguy that sells it to you is getting an incentive payment--say ten bucks--from the manufacturer as a result of that sale. And the reason the salesguy knows he's gonna get that money is that we sent him a brochure saying, "Hey, you sell our clients' camcorder, we'll give you ten bucks." That's how an incentive program goes.

Do these programs work? Of course they work. And everybody has to do it. The guy that isn't doing it will not be selling. A lot of these salespeople in these stores are counting on these incentives. They're called SPIFs, which stands for Special Incentive Fund. It's a kickback, like a real questionable, scummy thing, but it's totally legal. A hundred percent.

Is it worse than anything else? Probably not. But the next time you go into, like, an electronics store and the salesman says, "You should get the Toshiba or a whatever," well, you know, that salesman is probably getting money from Toshiba for selling it.

Anyway, I'm running the SPIF programs for our clients, which means that I write the brochures that we send to these salespeople. The brochures are very simple--they explain the product a little bit and then they say how much the incentives are--and that's pretty much it. Really basic, simple stuff. And it's a side of the job that I don't love so much. But for our agency, it's the most profitable thing we do. This SPIFing is like the core element of our business, really. These sort of unseen things are sort of the cogs of the machine down in the engine room. (Laughs) And running these programs has given me this very bottom-up education in the business. You know, this is advertising--bare knuckle advertising. Because, you see, if our client is offering a ten dollar incentive on camcorders and then another company starts offering a twelve dollar incentive, well we gotta get a brochure out with like a fifteen dollar incentive ASAP. So, it can get pretty down and dirty, you know?

Now these incentive campaigns, they aren't all bad--they're giving people nice Christmases and stuff. They are very good for the manufacturers and the salespeople and the advertising companies like us. But they're also, like, lying to the public. I mean, you're sort of encouraging salespeople to lie and not really do their job correctly and not be honest. And if you really take it to an extreme, this is definitely helping to break down American society, and you could start going nuts thinking about it. I sometimes really worry about what I'm doing. I mean, like, what values do I have? Values is a stupid word sometimes, and it's a word that annoys me. But when you start doing incentive campaigns and statement stuffers and it starts causing stress in your life, that can be kind of upsetting. To go to work every day and think about that--it sort of brings me down.

But in two years of work, I've never missed a day. I've been sick, but I've never taken a sick day, and I probably will never take one, unless I think I'm really going to infect somebody. There's nothing worse than when you have something that you need done, no matter what it is, and the person that you need to speak to is out sick. That kills me. That's something that I feel very strongly about. I can't miss work. If I have a job to do, if I have to lay out an ad, or get pictures, or put a campaign together, I'll stay as late as it takes. I'll do whatever needs to be done. We're just a three man company, and I'm the junior guy, so I work hard for the other two. They're paying me for nine-to-five, but I work much longer than that. And maybe they don't pay me exactly for what I do. But it goes beyond that for me. I mean, I can't just, like, walk away from something. I'm very devoted to my job. I'm very loyal to the other two guys at my firm.

And of course, we also laugh a lot here. There are a lot of good times. I mean, we have this joke that goes, "You know the first rule of business is: who do I have to fuck so I can kill her baby to get this job?" (Laughs) They make me say that over and over again. (Laughs) So there are good times.

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