cardinal rule of advertising has always been, make your communication dumb enough for an eighth grader to understand. Lynn Mason’s mentor, the fabled Mary Wells, had the fabled Bernbach as mentor, and Bernbach once said, famously, “It’s true that there’s a twelve-year-old mentality in America. Every six-year-old has it.” Like Wells and Bernbach, Lynn respected American intelligence, and a lot of good had come from it: the talking llama campaign, the Cold Sore Guy spots. Sure, she was the one walking everyone Spanish down the hall, but she hadn’t walked any of
us
Spanish down the hall yet — that was an important distinction.
Lynn Mason was also scrupulous as hell. Once Karen Woo and Jim Jackers were redesigning the packaging for a box of cookies made by a big conglomerate who later broke our hearts when they left us for another agency. The box was standard stuff, overanimated with recognizable cookie characters and catchy little phrases like “Chocolicious!” and “Dunkable!” in colorful arching fonts. These mandatories had to stay; they had become scripture in the client’s thick red binder of branding guidelines. So Karen and Jim’s job was pretty simple — they were just being asked to find some way to play up the cookie’s nutritional value. In an increasingly health-conscious and weight-wary world, every cookie box was doing it. So Karen wrote some copy for one of the panels that spoke to the importance of niacin and folic acid. Then she went down to Jim’s cube and stood over his computer while instructing him to write, in a smallish font near the bottom of the front of the box, “0 g of Lastive Acid.” Jim did as he was instructed.
“What’s lastive acid?” he asked.
“Not something you want in your body,” replied Karen.
They took the box down to Lynn, who looked over the changes. Practically everything was the same except for the copy box on the side panel discussing the good effects of niacin and folic acid, and Lynn was happy with that until she came to the part that read — and here she stopped reading silently and began to recite out loud — “‘And our chocolicious cookies contain zero grams of lastive acid, making them the health-conscious choice for totally dunkable snacking.’ What is lastive acid?” she inquired.
“I thought it was like a, you know,” said Karen, “something unhealthy.”
“But what is it?”
“Sounds terrible, whatever it is,” said Jim.
“It’s probably not something you want in your body,” said Karen, “from the sound of it. Lastive acid. Sounds like it would stay with you longer than the formaldehyde.”
Meanwhile Lynn had gone searching through the input document provided by the accounts people. “I don’t see anything about ‘lastive acid’ in here,” she said, gazing at Karen.
“No, I came up with it,” said Karen.
Lynn’s face, which had aged into the early years of her forties with little modification of her cool detached beauty, was architecturally designed for such outrageous confessions. Her high cheekbones kept her eyes buttressed from the collapse of a disbelieving brow, her nearly crow’s-feet-free eyes never gave way to an off-putting squint, and her mouth, flanked on both sides by a single parenthesis of a gently etched laugh line, remained in perfect equipoise when presented with revelations that would have provoked in lesser professionals fallen jaws of slackened disgust or a steady stream of rebuke. She simply gazed across the desk at Karen and asked soberly, “You just made it up?”
“Well, not the part about there being zero grams.”
“Karen,” she said — and Jim told us later that the only show of irritation she allowed herself was to pull her chair closer to her desk and to place two fingers at her left temple.
“I was trying to think out of the box,” explained Karen.
“I . . . myself, Lynn, I didn’t know . . .” Jim stammered.
Lynn shifted her focus briefly to address him. “Jim,
us
Spanish down the hall yet — that was an important distinction.
Lynn Mason was also scrupulous as hell. Once Karen Woo and Jim Jackers were redesigning the packaging for a box of cookies made by a big conglomerate who later broke our hearts when they left us for another agency. The box was standard stuff, overanimated with recognizable cookie characters and catchy little phrases like “Chocolicious!” and “Dunkable!” in colorful arching fonts. These mandatories had to stay; they had become scripture in the client’s thick red binder of branding guidelines. So Karen and Jim’s job was pretty simple — they were just being asked to find some way to play up the cookie’s nutritional value. In an increasingly health-conscious and weight-wary world, every cookie box was doing it. So Karen wrote some copy for one of the panels that spoke to the importance of niacin and folic acid. Then she went down to Jim’s cube and stood over his computer while instructing him to write, in a smallish font near the bottom of the front of the box, “0 g of Lastive Acid.” Jim did as he was instructed.
“What’s lastive acid?” he asked.
“Not something you want in your body,” replied Karen.
They took the box down to Lynn, who looked over the changes. Practically everything was the same except for the copy box on the side panel discussing the good effects of niacin and folic acid, and Lynn was happy with that until she came to the part that read — and here she stopped reading silently and began to recite out loud — “‘And our chocolicious cookies contain zero grams of lastive acid, making them the health-conscious choice for totally dunkable snacking.’ What is lastive acid?” she inquired.
“I thought it was like a, you know,” said Karen, “something unhealthy.”
“But what is it?”
“Sounds terrible, whatever it is,” said Jim.
“It’s probably not something you want in your body,” said Karen, “from the sound of it. Lastive acid. Sounds like it would stay with you longer than the formaldehyde.”
Meanwhile Lynn had gone searching through the input document provided by the accounts people. “I don’t see anything about ‘lastive acid’ in here,” she said, gazing at Karen.
“No, I came up with it,” said Karen.
Lynn’s face, which had aged into the early years of her forties with little modification of her cool detached beauty, was architecturally designed for such outrageous confessions. Her high cheekbones kept her eyes buttressed from the collapse of a disbelieving brow, her nearly crow’s-feet-free eyes never gave way to an off-putting squint, and her mouth, flanked on both sides by a single parenthesis of a gently etched laugh line, remained in perfect equipoise when presented with revelations that would have provoked in lesser professionals fallen jaws of slackened disgust or a steady stream of rebuke. She simply gazed across the desk at Karen and asked soberly, “You just made it up?”
“Well, not the part about there being zero grams.”
“Karen,” she said — and Jim told us later that the only show of irritation she allowed herself was to pull her chair closer to her desk and to place two fingers at her left temple.
“I was trying to think out of the box,” explained Karen.
“I . . . myself, Lynn, I didn’t know . . .” Jim stammered.
Lynn shifted her focus briefly to address him. “Jim,
Similar Books
