All Is Bright Read Online Free PDF Page B

and the business side of our accounts. If you wanted to succeed at Richards, Dunne & Krantz, you had to be able to do both. Of course, that also meant all the responsibility for this presentation was mine alone.
    The worst part, the part that gnawed at my stomach and jolted me awake at 3:00 A.M. on nights when I managed to fall asleep, was that all my work, all those marathon stale-pizza weekend sessions and midnight conference calls, might be for nothing. If the owner of Gloss rejected my ads—if something as simple as the perfume I was wearing or a splashy adjective in my copy rubbed him the wrong way—hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission for our agency would slip through my fingers like smoke. Once a Japanese tycoon who owned a chain of luxury hotels sat through a brilliant, two-months-in-the-making campaign presentation our agency’s president had personally overseen—I’m talking about the kind of creative vision that would’ve won awards, the kinds of commercialseveryone would’ve buzzed about—and dismissed it with a grunt, which his assistant cheerfully translated as “He doesn’t like blue.” That was it; no chance to tweak the color of the ad copy, just a group of stunned advertising execs with the now-useless skill of saying, “
Konnichi-wa!
” being herded like sheep to the exit.
    I gulped another Advil from the secret stash inside my desk drawer, the one Donna didn’t know about, and massaged the knot in my neck with one hand while I stared at the mock-up ad my team had created for Gloss.
    After Gloss Cosmetics had approached our agency last month, hinting that they might jump from their current agency, our agency’s president—a forty-two-year-old marketing genius named Mason, who always wore red Converse sneakers, even with his tuxedo—called our top five creative teams into his office.
    “Gloss wants to kick some Cover Girl ass,” Mason had said, swigging from a bottle of Lipton iced tea (they were a client) and tapping his Bic pen (ditto) against the top of his oak conference table. Mason was so loyal to our clients that he once walked out of a four-star restaurant because the chef wouldn’t substitute Kraft ranch for champagne-truffle dressing.
    “Gloss’s strategy is accessible glamour,” Mason had continued. “Forget the Park Avenue princesses; we’re going after schoolteachers and factory girls and receptionists.” His eyes had roved around the table so he could impale each of us with his stare, and I swear he hadn’t blinked for close to two minutes. Mason reminded me of an alien, with his bald, lightbulb-shaped head and hooded eyes, and when he went into his blinkless trances I was convinced he was downloading data from his mother ship. My assistant, Donna, was certain he just needed a little more vitamin C; she kept badgering him to go after the Minute Maid account.
    “What was the recall score of Gloss’s last commercial?” someone at the other end of the table had asked. It was Slutty Cheryl, boobs spilling out of her tight white shirt as she stretched to reach a Lipton from the stack in the middle of the conference table.
    “Can I get that for you?” Matt, our assistant art director, had offered in a voice that sounded innocent if you didn’t know him well.
    Matt was my best friend at the office. My only real friend, actually; this place made a sadists’ convention seem cozy and nurturing.
    “I can reach it,” Cheryl had said bravely, tossing back her long chestnut hair and straining away as Matt shot me a wink. You’d think that after a few hundred meetings she’d have figured out an easier way to wet her whistle, but there she was, week after week, doing her best imitation of a Hooters girl angling for a tip. By the purest of coincidences, she always got thirsty right when she asked a question, so all eyes were on her.
    “Cover Girl’s last commercial, the one with Queen Latifah, hit a thirty recall, and Gloss’s latest scored a twelve,” Mason