You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can't Make It Scuba Dive) by Robert Bruce Cormack

Author:Robert Bruce Cormack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yucca Publishing
Published: 2013-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 42

My dreams come in Technicolor these days, like those old Alfred Hitchcock movies: everything bright, crisp and clean. Ever noticed how good they all look, even when birds are pecking the hell out of them. The guy that really drives me crazy is Cary Grant. Look at him in North by Northwest. Two days without a bath, crop dust all over his clothes, and he’s still fresh as a corsage.

I spent most of the night tossing and turning, getting an elbow from Mary. I don’t dream until the sun starts coming up, and then it consists of flashbacks, usually going back to my agency days. I guess it stands to reason. I spent more time there than anywhere else. This morning, I remembered an incident back in the seventies. We’re sitting in Frank’s office, working on the new campaign. The client is a local department store, one of those old five and dime chains. They’ve been replaced by the dollar stores today, but it’s basically the same concept. We’d been working on this campaign for weeks but Frank wasn’t happy. So this account guy comes up with We make people happy. “What do you think, Frank?” the account guy says. Frank looks around the room at the rest of us. “What do the rest of you think?” he asks. “Is it campaign or not?”

“It’s interesting, Frank,” Reynolds, the creative director, says. “Do you want us to do something up?”

“I want to know what you fuckers think,” Frank says. “What about you, Sam? You’re the copywriter.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if we make people happy,” I say.

“Why not?”

“The stuff’s cheap.”

“Watch your mouth. That’s our client.”

“All I’m saying is, people go there because it’s cheap. They get a bunch of stuff without spending a lot of money.”

There was this song on the radio that morning, a stupid disco hit where the singer kept going, “More, more, more.” I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I say to Frank, “What if we used a song. Something that’s out there now. I heard one this morning that just keeps going, ‘More, more, more.’” Frank sits up and twists the cap off his tortoiseshell pen. “Yeah, so what’s the angle?”

“Low prices mean you can have more. That’s what the store’s all about, isn’t it? You want more, we’ve got more.”

“Not bad,” Frank says. “What do the rest of you think?”

“Everyone could dance around the store,” Reynolds says. “Maybe bring in one of those disco balls.”

“We’re not selling disco balls, for fuck’s sake,” Frank says.

“What if we had contests?” I say.

“What kind of contests?”

“The kind they used to run at the supermarkets. They gave you five minutes to fill your grocery cart. Whoever filled their cart up first won the groceries. What if we bring that back?”

“Where does the song come in?”

“It’s playing the whole time.”

“While the people jump around like monkeys,” he says, “which we turn into commercials. What would something like that cost?”

“Dirt cheap.”

Frank looks around at the other people, then the account guy.

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