The Chest That Launched a Thousand Slips and Other Stories by Frank Meronk

Author:Frank Meronk
Format: epub

I told Dr. Olsen only that I had established a connection with a well-placed insider at the studio and he seemed interested. As expected, he demanded a name. I declined and told him that in my profession long-term business relationships were so invaluable that confidentiality was always more important than the success of any given project. I assured him, however, that my source was well-known to me and had envious ties within the television and film industries.

Before bringing on another professional, however, I told him I needed to know exactly how committed he was to the project.

He said very.

I told him that’s not what I meant, that what I needed to know now was how much cash was in his piggybank and exactly how much of it was he willing to part with to market his idea to fruition. When he hemmed and hawed, I reiterated that a new product launch required burning the brand’s name into the public’s consciousness.

“No,” he shot back, “into the public’s subconscious, into their very concept of taste and so deeply that it becomes a compelling force driving collective behavior.” For a moment, he sounded like Adolf Hitler dreaming of a Fourth Reich.

“That’s going to be expensive,” I said to him, and then rattled off a list of possibilities like magazine spreads, billboards, radio time, direct mail, telemarketing, infomercials, social media, and half minute TV spots.

He told me to forget it, that a little skywriting and a few bumper stickers were more consistent with his budget, that he’d already exhausted most of his life’s savings and pension fund getting to this point, that he was going to have a hard enough time just paying me, that the public was already ad-saturated and suspicious of all the traditional hard sell gimmicks I’d just mentioned, and ‘besides, for crissakes!, don’t you have any fucking imagination?’

While the vulgarity of his reply caught me off guard, I realized he was right. After all, he was not a typical client like IBM or the Republican Party, and everything I’d just suggested if employed even in moderation would quickly impoverish him. I felt suddenly nervous and put on the spot. From out of nowhere, I blurted out a thought that was off-topic, anything to break the silence, some lamebrain utterance about how asking a young woman to de-boob herself was likely to cause a lot of suffering.

“So what?” he said. “Women are used to suffering in the name of fashion, like starving and overexercising to fit into new jeans. It’s expected of them, by the people around them and even by themselves.”

“But trying to convince a pretty young lady to cut off her breast just to obtain a 50% reduction in her chance of breast cancer twenty years hence is going to be about as easy as hawking stiletto high heels to seniors.”

He looked frustrated with me. “You still don’t understand what’s going on here. That’s where the movie comes in, and it won’t cost us a cent out of our own pockets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.