Plus One by Christopher Noxon Page B

was positively Clintonian in the way he could bring calm and confidence to a room with one soulful frown. It was a different story in the office, away from clients. One on one, he was often moody and blunt and hypercritical. He was also, Alex learned, strangely indifferent about his actual family. One day Alex asked his boss about the photos on the credenza behind his desk—they were blurry shots of small children scrambling around an inflatable raft, their faces turned away from the camera.
    â€œFamily whitewater raft trip,” Kanter said. “Grand Canyon.”
    â€œWhen was that?” Alex asked.
    â€œNinety-two? Three? I don’t know. Brenna said I needed to get some family photos in here, so I gave the interior designer a roll of film that I had in the glove compartment.”
    Alex figured that the kids in the photos were now—teenagers? Or all grown? “Wow, Jeff—that’s super depressing.”
    Kanter waved him off. “Not as depressing as being stuck on a whitewater raft with three kids for ten days.”
    Kanter hadn’t gotten to be successful by being Super Dad. Over the course of his career he’d won six CLIOs, a dozen Ogilvys, and a reputation as a rock star of food marketing. He made almond butter sexy. He was the top creative on Burger Stop’s “Feed your monster” campaign. He was singlehandedly responsible for the entire category of toddler sports drinks.
    Then came the unfortunate business with the carrot. Working with the California Carrot Council, Kanter came up with the idea of sculpting roots and scraps into bullet shapes, then packaging the pieces in clear plastic magazines. VeggieBullets! Boys gobbled’em up. VeggieBullets were so successful that growers went to twenty-four-hour shifts to meet demand. In the rapid ramp-up, growers apparently skimped on sanitary provisions for the farm workers. A precise cause was never identified, but an E. coli outbreak in Tampa left two kids dead and one on dialysis. “Carrot contamination kills two: VeggieBullets blamed” read the headline in the Herald-Tribune . While neither Kanter nor his agency was named in the $32 million class-action suit that followed, he had been so front and center during the rollout that his client list had shrunk to zero overnight.
    After laying low for a year, he opened BestSelf, a “boutique brand innovation and consultancy focusing on social purpose”—i.e., a tiny shop catering to nonprofits that were treated as pro-bono pissants at the big agencies. Alex was four years into a midlevel copywriting gig at Feinstein Pierce when he met Kanter at a demographic conference in Huntington Beach. At the time, Alex was getting increasingly sick of his job and harboring doubts about the whole profession. Jeff convinced him to join BestSelf “to do something unprecedented.”
    Alex’s own mother was appalled when he told her he’d accepted a job with Kanter.
    â€œThe carrot killer?” she asked. “I understand advertising is just a… stepping stone for you into other creative work. I’ve made peace with that. But I just don’t know how you can you live with yourself, working for a man like that.”
    â€œMa, he didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “It’s not his fault that growers were too cheap to provide portapotties. All Kanter did was get kids to eat more vegetables. And look what he’s done since then. Nothing but good.”
    That much was true, kind of. They’d done a decent campaign on behalf of a state recycling initiative and produced a series of PSAs to promote spaying and neutering of pets. Mostly, however, Kanter specialized in nonprofits of dubious worth backedby bloated foundations. Today, for instance, Alex was doing final revisions on a promotional cookbook for TestiCure, a testicular cancer charity run by real estate developer Simon Russo Jr., a cancer survivor who claimed he “owed