Robin Cook - Contagion

“That’s equally absurd,” Terese snapped. “The campaign is solid. It’s just that the account people couldn’t get the client to buy adequate exposure. There should have been ‘flights’ on multiple local stations at a bare minimum.”

“With all due respect, they would have bought more time if they’d liked the commercial,” Robert said. “I don’t think they were ever sold on this idea of ‘them versus us,’ ancient medicine versus modern medicine. I mean it was humorous, but I don’t know if they were convinced the viewer truly associated the ancient methods with National Health Care’s competitors, particularly AmeriCare. My personal opinion is that it went over people’s heads.”

“Your real point is that National Health Care has a very specific type of advertising it wants,” Brian said. “Tell Terese what you told me just before she came in here.”

“It’s simple,” Robert said, making an open gesture with his hands. “They want either ‘talking heads’ discussing actual patient experiences, or a celebrity spokesperson. They couldn’t care less whether their ad wins a Clio or any of the other awards. They want results. They want market share, and I want to give it to them.”

“Am I hearing that Willow and Heath wants to turn its back on its successes and become a mere vendor shop?” Terese asked. “We’re on the edge of becoming one of the big-league firms. And how did we get here? We got here by doing quality advertising. We’ve carried on in the Doyle-Dane-Bernback tradition. If we start letting clients dictate that we turn out slop, we’re doomed.”

“What I’m hearing is the usual conflict between the account executive and the creative,” Taylor said, interrupting the increasingly heated discussion. “Robert, you think Terese is this self-indulgent child who is bent on alienating the client. Terese, you think Robert is this shortsighted pragmatist who wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The trouble is you are both right and both wrong at the same time. You have to use each other as a team. Stop arguing and deal with the problem at hand.”

For a moment everyone was quiet. Zeus had spoken and everyone knew he was on target as usual.

“All right,” Brian said finally. “Here’s our reality. National Health is a vital client to our long-term stability. Thirty-odd days ago it asked for an internal review, which we expected in a couple of months. They now have told us they want it next week.”

“Next week!” Terese all but shouted. “My God.” It took months to put together a new campaign and pitch it.

“I know that will put the creatives under a lot of pressure,” Brian said. “But the reality is National Health is the boss. The problem is that after our pitch, if they are not satisfied, they’ll set up an outside review. The account will then be up for grabs, and I don’t have to remind you that these health-care giants are going to be the advertising cash cows of the next decade. All the agencies are interested.”

“As chief financial officer I think I should make it clear what the loss of the National Health account would do to our bottom line,” Phil Atkins said. “We’ll have to put off the restructuring because we won’t have the funds to buy back our junk bonds.”

“Obviously it is in all our best interests that we not lose the account,” Brian said.

“I don’t know if it is possible to put together a pitch for next week,” Terese said.

“You have anything you can show us at the moment?” Brian asked.

Terese shook her head.

“You must have something,” Robert said. “I assume you have a team working on it.” The smile had returned to the corners of his mouth.

“Of course we have a team on National Health,” Terese said. “But we haven’t had any ‘big ideas’ to date. Obviously we thought we had several more months.”

“Perhaps you might assign some additional personnel,” Brian said. “But I’ll leave that up to your judgment.” Then to the rest of the group he said: “For now we’ll adjourn this meeting until we have something from Creative to look at.” He stood up. Everybody else did the same.

Dazed, Terese stumbled out of the cabin and descended to the agency’s main studio on the floor below.

Willow and Heath had reversed a trend that began during the seventies and eighties when New York advertising firms had experienced a diaspora to varying chic sections of the city like TriBeCa and Chelsea. The agency returned to the old stamping ground of Madison Avenue, taking over several floors of a modest-sized building.

Terese found Colleen at her drawing board.

“What’s the scoop?” Colleen asked. “You look pale.”

“Trouble!” Terese exclaimed.

Colleen had been Terese’s first hire. She was her most reliable art director. They got along famously both professionally and socially. Colleen was a milky-white-skinned strawberry blonde with a smattering of pale freckles over an upturned nose. Her eyes were a deep blue, a much stronger hue than Terese’s. She favored oversized sweatshirts that somehow seemed to accentuate rather than hide her enviable figure.

“Let me guess,” Colleen said. “Has National Health pushed up the deadline for the review?”

“How’d you know?”

“Intuition,” Colleen said. “When you said ‘trouble,’ that’s the worst thing I could think of.”

“The Robert-and-Helen sideshow brought in information that National Health has lost more market share to AmeriCare despite our campaign.”

“Damn!” Colleen said. “It’s a good campaign and a great sixty-second commercial.”

“You know it and I know it,” Terese said. “Problem is that it wasn’t shown enough. I have an uncomfortable suspicion that Helen undermined us and talked them out of the two-hundred- to three-hundred-point TV commercial buy they had initially intended to make. That would have been saturation. I know it would have worked.”

“I thought you told me you had pulled out the stops to guarantee National Health’s market share would go up,” Colleen said.

“I did,” Terese said. “I’ve done everything I could think of and then some. I mean, it’s my best sixty-second spot. You told me yourself.”

Terese rubbed her forehead. She was getting a headache. She could still feel her pulse clanging away at her temples.

“You might as well tell me the bad news,” Colleen said. She put down her drawing pencil and swung around to face Terese. “What’s the new time frame?”

“National Health wants us to pitch a new campaign next week.”

“Good Lord!” Colleen said.

“What do we have so far?” Terese asked.

“Not a lot.”

“You must have some tissues or some preliminary executions,” Terese said. “I know I haven’t been giving you any attention lately since we’ve had deadlines with three other clients. But you have had a team working on this for almost a month.”

“We’ve been having strategy session after strategy session,” Colleen said. “A lot of brainstorming, but no big idea. Nothing’s jumped out and grabbed us. I mean, I have a sense of what you are looking for.”

“Well, I want to see what you have,” Terese said. “I don’t care how sketchy or preliminary. I want to see what the team has been doing. I want to see it today.”

“All right,” Colleen said without enthusiasm. “I’ll get everybody together.”

Susanne Hard had never liked hospitals.

A scoliotic back had kept her in and out of them as a child. Hospitals made her nervous. She hated the sense that she was not in control and that she was surrounded by the sick and the dying.