Stephen Greco's Blog: Over a Cocktail or Two - Posts Tagged "advertising-lgbtq"
A Higher Orbital
Back in 2014, when people read this passage about my character Peter, a gay advertising executive, opinion was divided: some thought Peter was cool to be involved in such work, while some thought he had drunk the Kool-Aid and sold his soul. I’d be curious for any opinions now…
Excerpt from Now and Yesterday(Kensington, 2014), by Stephen Greco:
The voltage of advertising hit him right in the face that day, as he stepped off the elevator and into the atrium. The girls at the reception desk were smiling a little more magnetically than usual, their voices galvanized as they spoke into headsets, directing calls, while in back of them, on a thirty-foot expanse of video wall, large-scale animations representing the company’s biggest clients fluxed with provocative flash. The kids tripping up and down the atrium’s jungle-gym stairway and across the main floor seemed a little sparkier than usual. And outside the Gymnasium, a large meeting room off the main reception area, a young woman in dark leggings and a cropped jacket, clearly a member of the client team inside, was standing next to a refreshment table, emitting signals that were apparently terribly important into her cell phone.
It was a big day at the office: important clients were everywhere. Peter nodded to a colleague, a creative director, who rushed past him with a delegation to greet an A-list television star waiting in the reception area with an entourage. A new series, Peter thought, or a voice-over for some high-profile campaign. Upstairs, in his own private warren of offices, where Peter was headed, key members of McCaw’s communications team were spending the day with Peter’s top people, led by Tyler, going through an inaugural series of conceptual explorations.
The great work begins.
Peter loved it when the office felt this electric. The sheer energy of being inside a major ad agency at the dawn of the Age of Truly Global Mass Culture was like a drug. Madison Avenue was now the undisputed control room of civilization, whereas Washington and Hollywood were only its rec rooms. Actions like voting and going to the movies seemed quaint, now that the purchase and consumption of the right soft drink or the right body wash promised to put the experience of Life Right Now into focus. More than in politics and entertainment, the higher processes fibrillating the top levels of advertising were charged with the full juice of vast national and global conversations, of the collective unconscious itself; and the people involved in these processes, even when not actually working, existed in a higher orbital, spiritually, than everyone else; they inhabited a better place than Earth, a possible planet where the abundance of everything good was a given. For not only were these young ad execs among the best and the brightest, the most creative, self-actualized, and best-paid individuals of their generation, they could depend on the daily exhilaration of work and play at the font of contemporary civilization, the source of ideas that functioned for consumers like answered prayers.
Being in this line of work, wielding its lightning, was an ultimate privilege, Peter often mused—ten times better than riding to a party in a limo with Nick’s one-time friend Madonna and her crew. At the agency, Peter got to create campaigns—movements!—that would sweep whole continents with messages about products and services so beneficial that people would spend trillions of dollars on them; and along for the ride, in that traffic of wants and needs, aspirations and means, came fresh ideas about self and family and nation and world, which brought life on Earth forward, upward. Talk about illuminati! Here was the true elite. Tyler and the rest weren’t hoo-dooing around with naïve, medieval travesties of so-called secret, ancient wisdom. They were serving humanity by generating enlightenment from moment to moment, conjuring new values and powers and orders and blessings—which was the chief thing, Peter felt, that separated him from Jonathan and the other gentlemen of their generation, who had devoted themselves to older values and powers and orders and blessings. Those guys were a little less aglow…
Excerpt from Now and Yesterday(Kensington, 2014), by Stephen Greco:
The voltage of advertising hit him right in the face that day, as he stepped off the elevator and into the atrium. The girls at the reception desk were smiling a little more magnetically than usual, their voices galvanized as they spoke into headsets, directing calls, while in back of them, on a thirty-foot expanse of video wall, large-scale animations representing the company’s biggest clients fluxed with provocative flash. The kids tripping up and down the atrium’s jungle-gym stairway and across the main floor seemed a little sparkier than usual. And outside the Gymnasium, a large meeting room off the main reception area, a young woman in dark leggings and a cropped jacket, clearly a member of the client team inside, was standing next to a refreshment table, emitting signals that were apparently terribly important into her cell phone.
It was a big day at the office: important clients were everywhere. Peter nodded to a colleague, a creative director, who rushed past him with a delegation to greet an A-list television star waiting in the reception area with an entourage. A new series, Peter thought, or a voice-over for some high-profile campaign. Upstairs, in his own private warren of offices, where Peter was headed, key members of McCaw’s communications team were spending the day with Peter’s top people, led by Tyler, going through an inaugural series of conceptual explorations.
The great work begins.
Peter loved it when the office felt this electric. The sheer energy of being inside a major ad agency at the dawn of the Age of Truly Global Mass Culture was like a drug. Madison Avenue was now the undisputed control room of civilization, whereas Washington and Hollywood were only its rec rooms. Actions like voting and going to the movies seemed quaint, now that the purchase and consumption of the right soft drink or the right body wash promised to put the experience of Life Right Now into focus. More than in politics and entertainment, the higher processes fibrillating the top levels of advertising were charged with the full juice of vast national and global conversations, of the collective unconscious itself; and the people involved in these processes, even when not actually working, existed in a higher orbital, spiritually, than everyone else; they inhabited a better place than Earth, a possible planet where the abundance of everything good was a given. For not only were these young ad execs among the best and the brightest, the most creative, self-actualized, and best-paid individuals of their generation, they could depend on the daily exhilaration of work and play at the font of contemporary civilization, the source of ideas that functioned for consumers like answered prayers.
Being in this line of work, wielding its lightning, was an ultimate privilege, Peter often mused—ten times better than riding to a party in a limo with Nick’s one-time friend Madonna and her crew. At the agency, Peter got to create campaigns—movements!—that would sweep whole continents with messages about products and services so beneficial that people would spend trillions of dollars on them; and along for the ride, in that traffic of wants and needs, aspirations and means, came fresh ideas about self and family and nation and world, which brought life on Earth forward, upward. Talk about illuminati! Here was the true elite. Tyler and the rest weren’t hoo-dooing around with naïve, medieval travesties of so-called secret, ancient wisdom. They were serving humanity by generating enlightenment from moment to moment, conjuring new values and powers and orders and blessings—which was the chief thing, Peter felt, that separated him from Jonathan and the other gentlemen of their generation, who had devoted themselves to older values and powers and orders and blessings. Those guys were a little less aglow…
Over a Cocktail or Two
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