Arthur Hailey - Wheels

She walked quickly down a corridor. In the austere Detroit offices of OJL, where Barbara worked mostly, her heels would have "tip-tapped," but here, deep carpeting deadened their sound. Passing a door partially open, she could hear a piano and a girl singer's voice:

"One more happy user

Has joined the millions who Say Brisk!

Please bring it briskly,

It satisfies me too."

Almost certainly a client was in there listening, and would make a decision about the jingle - aye or nay, involving vast expenditures - based on hunch, prejudice, or even whether he felt good or breakfast had given him dyspepsia. Of course, the lyric was awful, probably because the client preferred it to be banal, being afraid - as most were - of anything more imaginative. But the music had an ear-catching lilt; recorded with full orchestra and chorus, a large part of the nation might be humming the little tune a month or two from now. Barbara wondered what Brisk was. A drink? A new detergent? It could be either, or something more outlandish.

The OJL agency had hundreds of clients in diverse businesses, though the auto company account which Barbara worked on was among its most important and lucrative. As auto company men were fond of reminding agency people, the car advertising budget alone exceeded a hundred million dollars annually.

Outside Conference Room I a red MEETING IN PROGRESS sign was still flashing. Clients loved the flashing signs for the aura of importance they created.

Barbara went in quietly and slipped into her chair halfway down the long table. There were seven others in the dignified, rosewood-paneled room with Georgian furnishings. At the table's head was Keith Yates-Brown, graying and urbanely genial, the agency management supervisor whose mission was to keep relations between the auto company and the Osborne J. Lewis agency friction free. To the right of Yates-Brown was the auto company advertising manager from Detroit, J. P. Underwood ("Call me J.P., please"), youngish, recently promoted and not entirely at ease yet with the top-rank agency crowd. Facing Underwood was bald and brilliant Teddy Osch, OJL creative director and a man who spewed ideas the way a fountain disgorges water. Osch, unflappable, schoolmasterish, had outlasted many of his colleagues and was a veteran of past, successful car campaigns.

The others comprised J. P. Underwood's assistant, also from Detroit, two other agency men - one creative, one executive - and Barbara, who was the only woman present, except for a secretary who at the moment was refilling coffee cups.

Their subject of discussion was the Orion. Since yesterday afternoon they had been reviewing advertising ideas which the agency had developed so far. The OJL group at the meeting had taken turns in presentations to the client - represented by Underwood and his assistant.

"We've saved one sequence until last, J.P." Yates-Brown was speaking directly though informally to the auto company advertising manager.

"We thought you'd find them original, even interesting perhaps." As always, Yates-Brown managed an appropriate mix of authority and deference, even though everyone present knew that an advertising manager had little real decision power and was off the mainstream of auto company high command.

J. P. Underwood said, more brusquely than necessary, "Let's see it."

One of the other agency men placed a series of cards on an easel. On each card a tissue sheet was fixed, the tissue having a sketched layout, in preliminary stage. Each layout, as Barbara knew, represented hours, and sometimes long nights of thought and labor.

Today's and yesterday's procedure was normal in the early stages of any new car campaign and the tissue sheets were called a "rustle pile."

"Barbara," Yates-Brown said, "will you skipper this trip?"

She nodded.

"What we have in mind, J.P.," Barbara told Underwood with a glance to his assistant, "is to show the Orion as it will be in everyday use. The first layout, as you see, is an Orion leaving a car wash."

All eyes were on the sketch. It was imaginative and well executed. It showed the forward portion of the car emerging from a wash tunnel like a butterfly from a chrysalis. A young woman was waiting to drive the car away. Photographed in color, whether still or on film, the scene would be arresting.

J. P. Underwood gave no reaction, not an eyelid flicker. Barbara nodded for the next tissue.

"Some of us have felt for a long time that women's use of cars has been underemphasized in advertising. Most advertising, as we know, has been directed at men."

She could have added, but didn't, that her own assignment for the past two years had been to push hard for women's point of view. There were days, however, after reading the masculine oriented advertising (the trade called it "muscle copy") which continued to appear, when Barbara was convinced that she had failed totally.

Now she commented, "We believe that women are going to use the Orion a great deal."

The sketch on the easel was a supermarket parking lot. The artist's composition was excellent - the storefront in background, an Orion prominently forward with other cars around it. A woman shopper was loading groceries into the Orion's back seat.

"Those other cars," the auto company ad manager said. "Would they be ours or competitors'?"

Yates-Brown answered quickly, "I'd say ours, J.P."

"There should be some competitive cars, J.P.," Barbara said. "Otherwise the whole thing would be unreal."

"Can't say I like the groceries." The remark was from Underwood's assistant. "Clutters everything up. Takes the eye away from the car. And if we did use that background it should be vaselined."

Barbara felt like sighing dispiritedly. Vaseline smeared around a camera lens when photographing cars was a photographer's trick which had become a cliche; it made background misty, leaving the car itself sharply defined.

Though auto companies persisted in using it, many advertising people thought the device as dated as the Twist. Barbara said mildly, "We're attempting to show actual use."

"All the same," Keith Yates-Brown injected, "that was a good point. Let's make a note of it."

"The next layout," Barbara said, "is an Orion in the rain - a real downpour would be good, we think. Again, a woman driver, looking as if she's going home from the office. We'd photograph after dark to get best reflections from a wet street ."

"Be hard not to get the car dirty," J. P. Underwood observed.

"The whole idea is to get it a little dirty," Barbara told him.

"Again - reality. Color film could make it great."

The assistant ad manager from Detroit said softly, "I can't see the brass going for it."

J. P. Underwood was silent.

There were a dozen more. Barbara went through each, briefly but conscientiously, knowing how much effort and devotion the younger agency staff members had put into every one. That was the way it always went. The creative oldsters like Teddy Osch held back and - as they put it - "Let the kids exhaust themselves," knowing from experience that the early work, however good it was, would always be rejected.

It was rejected now. Underwood's manner made that clear, and everyone in the room shared the knowledge, as they had shared it yesterday, before this session started. In her early days at the agency Barbara had been naive enough to inquire why it always happened that way. Why were so much effort and quality - frequently excellent quality - utterly wasted?

Afterward, some facts of life about auto advertising had been quietly explained. It was put to her: If the ad program burgeoned quickly, instead of painfully slowly - far slower than advertising for most other products - then how would all the auto people in Detroit involved with it justify their jobs, the endless meetings over months, fat expense accounts, the out-of-town junkets? Furthermore, if an auto company chose to burden itself with that kind of inflated cost, it was not the agency's business to suggest otherwise, far less to go crusading. The agency did handsomely out of the arrangement; besides, there was always approval in the end. The advertising process for each model year started in October or November.