“I wanted you here,” Osbourne said, “because we have some very serious issues to discuss, issues that are at once fundamental to doing business in the fin de siècle and also somewhat of a departure in terms of past strategy, past ideas; and, with due respect to Mr Gracey here, I didn’t want you to hear these ideas filtered or secondhand.” He sat down across from Mr Doucette.
It was not lost on John that he alone might have reason to find Osbourne’s assured, charismatic manner, his easy command of the room, strange or even ominous, given the amazing contrast it presented to his moody, insular silence when they had last met. All that was strange about it, though, was how connected the two states seemed. It was as if Osbourne were emerging from a sort of chrysalis of personality: developed, brilliant, natural, and inexplicable.
“Doucette’s sales have gone up,” Osbourne said, “in each of the three years since Canning Leigh & Osbourne took over its national advertising account. However, that’s not good enough for you. I understand that. I understand that, at your level, competition, more than money, is the nature of the game. You blame CLO’s advertising for the plateau Doucette seems to have reached in terms of its growth percentage. Well, such cause-and-effect relationships are notoriously hard to prove, but I will agree with you on one thing: our advertising for Doucette stinks. It’s lousy. I can hardly stand to look at it.”
He rose and walked over to the first easel. Pulling the cloth on to the floor, he revealed a blowup of a six-month-old magazine ad for Doucette’s Oxford shirts. It featured a black and white Bruce Weber — style photo of a well-known young movie actress, wearing the shirt with most of the buttons undone, and with the tails tied into a knot at her midriff. “Wear What You Like,” the copy began. John recognized it right away as Dale and Andrea’s work. He didn’t look over at them.
Osbourne stood there gazing at the sample ad for as long as a minute — an expansive silence, as if he had forgotten the others were waiting for him. Then he looked back at Mr Doucette.
“Let me tell you something about myself,” he said, in a softer voice. “I hate advertising.”
John felt his heart racing. He wondered if what he was witnessing was going to cross the line from humiliating failure into a kind of larger-than-life disaster, a Hindenburg of ad pitches.
“I hate it so much I want to kill it. Have you ever hated anything that much, sir?”
Mr Doucette wasn’t sure where to turn his eyes. No one said anything.
“I see something like this, and … and you have to multiply it by like a billion, that’s the problem, to get an idea of the cultural noise, the mental noise, advertising like this creates, you have to look at this ad and then close your eyes and imagine a billion images just like it, all speaking at the same time, all of them saying nothing. A huge, overwhelming, stupefying nothing. Images like this open their mouths and nothing comes out, and yet the noise they make is deafening.”
Jerry Gracey, who had lured Mr Doucette to this meeting with the promise of meeting one of the legendary geniuses of the ad business, had made a tent out of his hands and was looking inside it.
“What I’m proposing today,” Osbourne said, unruffled, “is not advertising.”
“It’s not,” Doucette said, with the indulgent air of a man who is holding his wrath for later.
“No, sir. Not as the word is understood. Because I don’t want to speak in that language anymore. Not that I don’t know it. Christ knows I’m fluent in it. But advertising, traditional advertising, is about nothing. It’s about—” he gestured at the exposed ad — “it’s about movie stars. Its great resources don’t concern themselves with anything important. It’s not about life and death. And I ask myself — why can’t it be about life and death?”
“Death?” Doucette said skeptically.
“It’s just a form, after all — advertising, I mean — and so the question of content is wide open. It’s a form for the massive production and global distribution of simple visual messages; staggering, really, if you think about it. Why should it be limited to the perfection of titillating people sexually? Mr Doucette, you’re a rich man. Because of that, and because of your position of power as the head of a large concern, you have the greatest means of communication in history at your disposal. How are you going to use it?”
“To sell casual clothing,” Doucette said, a bit more animated now. “What the hell do you mean, how am I going to use it?”
Osbourne put his hand over his mouth for a few seconds. Then, saying something to himself the others couldn’t hear, he marched over and tore the drapery off the second easel. The eighteen people at the table saw a large color photograph of a sparkling white beach, in the light of midmorning. At the left of the picture were two tanned, attractive couples, sitting in beach chairs, under a broad umbrella. One of the women had turned her head to the right, where, perhaps a hundred feet away, an inflatable life raft floated near the shoreline, filled to overflowing with a dozen or more dark-skinned, ragged, exhausted people, two of whom had climbed out to pull the craft the last few feet on to the sand.
“I submit,” Osbourne said, “that the only effective way to use it is to show people something other than what they are bombarded with every second of their waking lives.”
“What the hell is that?” Doucette said.
“It’s a photograph of a boatload of Cuban refugees landing on a south Florida beach.”
“Is it staged?” Gracey asked.
“The world’s a stage. Our plan is to run this as a kind of inaugural next spring in Vanity Fair, theNew Yorker, Elle—”
“You do understand, young man,” Doucette said, “that we’re trying to sell a product here?”
“Yes, sir,” Osbourne said patiently.
“And you understand the nature of that product? Casual wear, sportswear?”
“I understand it perfectly,” Osbourne said. “I just don’t think it matters.”
Everyone on the CLO side of the conference table was watching Osbourne motionlessly, as if they were all having the same dream.
“With all due respect,” Osbourne went on, “the product we’re talking about here is not one that’s unique to the market. The consumer knows, presumably, that Doucette’s jeans or boxers or what have you are attractive and not cheaply made; but there’s the Gap, there’s Banana Republic, there’s J. Crew and Lands’ End. When you really think about it, what could possibly be unique or distinctive, in the common imagination, about Doucette clothing?”
He smiled and lifted his hands in a gesture of self-deprecation.
“The advertising,” he said. “The advertising. Nothing else. Nothing but that.”
He unveiled the third image: a photograph of a vast herd of cattle in a holding pen just outside a slaughterhouse. Rolling hills and a deep blue sky were visible in the background.
“Transgressive images,” he said, “are your only viable strategy for rising above a market that’s frankly overcrowded, for making yourself heard above the cultural noise.”