The City That Spawned The Age of Advertising.
Once upon a time in a place far, far away, there was a mystical city. A city that only came out at night. During the day the city went by its Native American name. Manhattan. But the moment twilight began to fall, this throbbing metropolis took on a whole new persona.
As darkness enveloped its slate and marble spires, it emerged as Gotham. Her perspective became rakish. Her color palette slipped into the blues and deepest of purples. Her style, decidedly Deco. Yes, as Manhattan had been steel beam powerful and glass and concrete masculine, Gotham was decidedly femme fatale.
Two sides of a coin flipped on a billion dollar decision. Gotham will always win my heart. Gotham is the sleek reflection of the Chrysler Building in the in the black diamond finish of yet another long, black limousine, silently gliding past Grand Central Station. Gotham is the string of pearls made up by the round street light globes aglow in the post midnight mists of grand Central Park. Gotham is what they speak of when they whisper of the Stork Club, the Copa or, 21. Gotham oozes the music of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin.
How is it that I come by my fondness for New York at night? Because I never got to leave any agency I ever worked on on Madison Avenue before 2 a.m. From Young & Rubicam down on 40th & Madison, to Wells, Rich, Greene up at 59th and Madison, I never got to go home with the crowd. Me? I got to go home with the cleaning Crew. Just another slave in the media mines.
New York considers the souls of it's advertising folk as one of its five basic food groups. In fact the city invented the advertising industry just to provide itself with a late night snack. All of us then, just like all of us now, believe that to survive, we must give our life to our agency. For we know that our agency will devour it gladly. Bones and all.
And as we slip out of our darkened buildings and slink into our yellow taxi hearses or down into the subway veins of the beast we feed on, some thing whispers to us. "Suckers." But of course we fail to heed such whispered taunts.
Are we not, masters of all media? Do we not create the bearings upon which the wheels of global commerce roll? Are we not the minds that make the world go around, the world go around, the world go around? Another whisper taunts us as IRTs thunder past in the catacombs below. Up from the steel subway grates it comes. Faint but clear. "Pitiful."
And home we go to our overpriced condo closets, stuffed with our must have web toys. We mindlessly pound our selves into a sweat, entangled in the waxed and willing limbs of our partners of the moment, Then we slip into slumber, perchance to dream...about advertising.
Meanwhile Lady Gotham is still churning up our lives. Our world is not Gershwin or Porter, but that world, still awake, defines our fate as we slumber. Our client, being wined and dined by another of our breed, has been convinced by the lady in blue kneepads to "realign" his account, to her agency. Our jobs just died in our sleep.
And as the dawn patrol of garbage trucks and streetsweepers begin their rounds, the city begins to stir. Gotham raises her veil and vanishes into the mists of countless manhole covers. And beneath the first feat of Manhattan's morning, the ground begins to vibrate with the sound of the subways again reborn. Soon the entire city will begin to pulsate with the life of yet another day.
It takes a 60 day notice for us to fall from grace into "On the street." But it matters not. Our headhunters and slave traders assure us that this is just a career hiccup.
Funny, this doesn't look like Gotham. Could that be because now it's 2am in Pittsburgh. And you are still at work, in this throwback to the forties agency your "agent" sold you down the river to, (where the President's wife is the Creative Director) It takes every ounce of skill you have as a trained professional, not to use your belt to garrote her out of existence.
But you are determined to bring your brand of "New York Edge" to the greater Pittsburgh metro. They are paying you a shitload more money than you were making back in Gotham, and they got you a 16 room house in Carnegie Hills as a signing bonus. After a year you've put your Creative Director on maternity leave and slipped neatly into her corner office,( with the husband's blessings) which you are have redone to match Alex Kroll's digs back at 285 Madison.
You've joined the Pittsburgh One Club and chaired three awards committees so far. Everybody wants their work to have that ";New York Edge" to it, so naturally you've gotten seven or eight of your beached buddies to come out to "Perfect Pittsburgh" ( your award wining homage to "I Love NY") to work. So you vote for their work, they vote for your work and the "Gotham Mafia" becomes a beautiful thing.
Then the President has the DNA test results from his future ex-wife along with a tearful confession of how she was lead astray by that "New York asshole". Pittsburgh doesn't seem so perfect any more.
Others of your breed have also migrated to the four corners of the continent. And with them, the so-called "New York Edge" that you were counting on to get you on the next thing smoking. That hot little Bennington's waitress you are about to be divorced by is keeping the house in the "Gray Flannel Scandals," as they're calling it at the Pittsburgh One Club.
But it's all good. You get a tip that they just might need a little "New York Edge" in the City of LA.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Marketing, interactive advertising, sales, new media, advertising, creativity, entertainment, Pittsburgh, Manhattan, Madison, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter |
