Ac&D a Federated Company

By James Lawson

A top New York advertising agency is inhabited by gnomes – junior copywriters and art directors – ruled over by scumbags, rodents, weasels, hulking creatures and a resident genius.

Into this madhouse comes an idealistic young art director from Iowa who endures the patronizing disdain of his fellow gnomes and takes on the powers that be on their own terms.

When the agency gets a major new account, the stage is set for combat, with a dozen teams competing for prominence. Joel, the idealist, given no chance of reaching even the first stage, ignores all the rules and conventions and takes extraordinary risks to bring his concept to life.

AC&D a Federated Company is witty look at the inner workings of a top ad agency, by an author who was a creative director of a top agency himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663221452

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Copyright © 2021 James Lawson.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2144-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2145-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/18/2021

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgement

Introduction Of New Gnomes Into The Madhouse

Invitation To A Gang Bang

The Valley Of Incomprehensibility

The Road To Gibberish

Presentation To A Stumbling Block

Flirting With Humiliation

Fearing Evil In The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death

Celebrating Inanity

The Penultimate Insult

Joel Rents A Closet

The See-Saw Of Success

The Heeby-Jeebies

Nothing Works Before It Works

Grounds For Dismissal

Some Hail The Conquering Heroes

A Sudden Switch

Enter Annabelle

The Spitting Session

The Mix

The Wages Of Sin

The Kiss Of Death

A Kick In The Balls

A Funny Coincidence

What Happened To Everybody Afterwards

Books by James Lawson

XXX

Disconnections

The American Book of the Dead

Crimes of the Unconscious

The Girl Watcher

The Madman’s Kiss

The Fanatic

The Copley Chronicles

The Last Day of Petter Grenager

Forgeries of the Heart

The Reluctant God

Acid Rains of Fortune

Midway Through The Journey Of Our Life

211A West 57th Street

The Immortal

Dedication

To Helmut, Bill, Burt, Leon, Bob, Phyllis, Lester and the other

gods from the glory days of DDB

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Kathy, who has the uncanny ability to spot a

misplaced space or a clumsy adjective with equal facility.

I don’t know how she does it.

introduction of new gnomes into the madhouse

the innermost offices were inhabited by gnomes

so we had designated ourselves from the barren warren of cubicles we occupy under a vast fluorescent ceiling and because we toil for the task masters in the window offices surrounding us

the architect of our quarters faced with a large blank square in the middle of an otherwise interesting commission ran out of ideas or perhaps went comatose with boredom and simply filled the area with some kind of lightweight prefab metal he picked up at a discount warehouse in New Jersey

these he notched together into monastic cells dumped in metallic desks chairs and file cabinets from the same warehouse and pawned them off on a budget conscious management as action offices

we the gnomes were hired to fill them

[note: a few years later they did away with cubicles completely replacing them with long tables which were supposed to facilitate collaboration but which actually eliminated all thought whatsoever]

I’d like to go into something a bit complicated now so bear with me

the name of our agency is AC&D

it started as April & Wilson and after 20 years

merged with Scott Murray and Chan

which was bought by Cunningham Dillon Steinfeld and Cox

merged into the Delahanty Hayes Group

then split off into a new agency named April Scott Cunningham Cox and Delahanty

which was bought by the Sebring Group

need I go on …

several metamorphoses later we became AC&D

which together with our sister agencies KMJJ K&Y and forty satellite companies is owned by a holding company called Comco

which recently became a division of Federated Companies

there is endless speculation about who owns Federated and we hear that strange people show up at the Board of Directors meetings with large blocks of anonymous stock and make asinine decisions of global import

this was fueled by the appearance of two steely-eyed Japanese who wandered into our maze by accident and asked directions to the Board of Directors meeting

the fact is we don’t know who owns the people that own the people that own us anymore than we know who owns our brokers or lawyers or accountants

not that it matters that much

we’ve only had two changes of offices and there are still people here who were part of the glory days of April & Wilson thirty years ago in the sixties

as you may have gathered from the above advertising agencies no longer have names just initials or the kind of Orwellian corpname that large corporations delight in

which I suppose is why agencies do it

they so desperately want to be legitimate not just mouthpieces for giant corporations but giants in their own right

still it’s odd that an industry charged with personalizing products and making corporations accessible to the public should choose to depersonalize itself

but what does a gnome know of such things?

suffice it to say we are loyal to AC&D Comco and Federated proud of our association with KMJJ and K&Y and jealous of GGB which wins all the awards although our philosophies are identical and our personnel are interchangeable

GGB is where we long to be like Chekhov’s Moscow

GGB is where we go when we’re good

things are always better at GGB the copy brighter the art more startling

GGB is where we can sell our jokes our stand-up routines where we can create anything be anything where clients like us where everything’s perfect

we compete ferociously with Deltacom which believes in research above all else

we habitually lose out in competitions with TMV/L&C which works its people to death

and we are openly contemptuous of MBR which believes the client knows best

strange to say the dullest most ordinary most offensive most banal most impersonal advertising in the business is done by an agency called Sidney Greene Associates

the stuff of recurring nightmares Kafkaesque and perpetual

nobody has ever seen a copywriter or art director from Sidney Greene nobody has ever heard of one

come to think of it nobody has seen any employee of Sidney Greene perhaps they don’t have them

we have occasionally speculated about a large exceptionally moronic computer set up in a magnificently appointed corner office which churns out clichés by the yardful and gets computerized images of Ken and Barbie to mouth them to Musak

while not the largest agency Sidney Greene is one of the most profitable agencies in the country

there are thirty gnomes in our maze all junior copywriters or art directors and we occupy a special place in the agency

we are the scum of the elite

let me explain

since we create the product of the agency the ads and commercials (an ad is print a commercial is TV or radio) we are more or less indispensable as a group

as juniors we don’t get the expensive TV productions we don’t deal with glamorous directors and share coke with rock stars in the Beverly Hills Hotel  famous photographers and libidinous models are not inviting our notice

those are the carrots at the end of the stick that keep us in the business or at least some of the carrots

for now

we do the ads in Supermarket News telling grocers to stock up on our breakfast food

we do the coupon ads in Family Circle offering 25¢ off on our toothpaste

we write the one-day-only sale commercials on radio

we sell feed grade urea to farmers

accounting software to information service managers

light bulbs to motels

special deals to used car buyers

urinary incontinence pills to doctors

disposable douches to pharmacists

lipstick to department store buyers

we offer our undying friendship and support to bartenders fleet owners shoe salesmen air conditioning repairmen barbers plumbers governmental purchasing agents pipe fitters tire dealers construction supervisors tobacco merchandisers

the backbone of America the heartbeat of the nation people we wouldn’t be caught dead with

we do all the writing and art directing jobs nobody else wants to do

if we get awards for our radio commercial our black and white trade ad our small space newspaper ad our painted billboard

if they elicit even faint praise from the client

if they amuse our bosses

if they appeal to the ephemeral whims of a Creative Director (our boss’ boss)

if they stimulate a pained alcoholic grunt of acceptability from one of the agency’s creative gods

we may be permitted to create larger ads four-color spreads in Fortune or Newsweek full page newspaper ads whole print campaigns and eventually television! the key to fame and fortune

but I digress

obviously the agency couldn’t get along without us

as such we are ritualistically petted by the yuppie MBA’s of the account group our equals in power if not in prestige

we are spared most contact with non-creative departments like media and research

we are courted by headhunters and frequently eulogized by top management

we take care of our creatives chairmen boast to one another which usually means they pay their creative directors inflated salaries

naturally we are despised by every other department in the agency

the account group considers us spoiled childish irrational egotistical and unprofessional

the media people who buy space in magazines and newspapers and time on radio and TV consider us bohemian amoral prima donnas

the research people consider us scientifically unsophisticated arrogant and antagonistic

and the accounting department knows for a fact that we are spendthrifts and cheats

the support people office services print production paste-up people traffic people who keep track of what work is being done when and by whom the mail room clerks the data services people (in short everyone who lives in Queens and New Jersey) consider us yet one more example of how rich college kids get all the breaks while they get the shit end of the stick

we have to get in at nine o’clock sharp while those fuckers can get in whenever they like is their usual way of putting it

for some reason I’ve never felt any hostility from the personnel department at least it’s not