Good morning one and all. Personally I could use another few hours of sleep, but that is not in the cards today, so let us forge forward with the day. Shall we just jump into the morning prompt then? excellent. Set those timers for fifteen minutes and let’s see what shakes loose from the brain.
That was surprising. I wasn’t very thrilled with this morning’s prompt as I couldn’t see where I might go with it immediately. Usually I can see several pathways from each sentence. I didn’t see much of anything with this one when I started. Just goes to show, even the sentences you don’t like can do something.
Wednesday, July 13th: Be bold, or be forgettable.
“Be bold, or be forgettable,” He stated the tag line and paused to let the line land. He counted to three and then then smiled at the group. “We think that this campaign will be one of the best we have ever run.” He nodded to the table and then stepped to the side as the managing director took over.
“Thank you Craig, always good to hear from our creative team.”
Craig took his seat and shuffled his papers, surreptitiously studying the men around the table. They were, all told, not the most creative bunch in the land. They were sturdy, reliable and concentrated on moving money from one area to another, the second area mostly involving their own pockets.
He had been worried that the campaign might be a little over the top for them, but they seemed to respond well. He had several, less forward, less dynamic contingency plans in case they didn’t go for this one. They were a conservative group and he knew he was taking a risk.
He wondered if it was because the tag line hit so close to home with them. He spent enough time with this group to know that they thought of themselves as bold. However they were largely forgettable. Craig generally didn’t think of them as separated individuals. ‘More of a wall of suits,’ he thought.
He knew the head was Mr. Butterfield mostly because the name reminded him of the Mrs. Butterworth syrup his grandmother always put on the table for breakfast. Beyond that were just the men in suits. He knew they had individual names, but they all blended together into one forgettable lump.
Knowing they thought of themselves as bold they had actually inspired the tag line. The cologne and it’s campaign was designed specifically for this demographic. Men of this age and economic level were the prime target audience.
‘I wonder how many of them will buy it,’ he thought. Personally Craig believed the cologne was a bit too much. It was overly spicy, overly musky and made his eyes water. He was not there to redesign the scent though. ‘And bold is a good enough description for something that punches that hard,’ he thought.
The meeting had moved on from his creative presentation and whatever excitement he might have drummed itno the suit brigade faded under a swath of numbers and charts. Craig tuned them out. The numbers needed by him were already submitted. He checked to see that they were used appropriately and then let the person in charge of that end of things deal with them.
He tried to look attentive but saw the eyes of the suits glaze over. One of the junior suits was periodically glancing at his watch when he thought no one was looking.
‘Gotta give that up if you want to get ahead, junior,’ Craig thought. ‘Boring and pointless meetings are the name of the game.’
Because ultimately the whole meeting was more or less pointless. After the presentation, the paperwork would be taken back to the office and poured over by the experts on their team. Their facts and figures checked and even their marketing elements run past an in house focus group. The fact that none of the people here were the ones who would make the decisions was an annoyance he came to accept and even embrace under the term workplace irony.
He spent a great deal of his working life presenting things to people who had no power other than to take the paperwork to someone else.
Ten til Midnight 