Brand X
This book is for the supremely off-kilter
Mark Newgarden and Jordan Bochanis,
despite the fact that they had me
double-scrub their coffee mugs.
Beverly Horowitz for her risk-taking, editing, and moral support—and her assistant, Rebecca Gudelis.
My level-headed agents, Nancy Yost and Michael Cende-jas, who always patiently listen to some truly bizarre ideas for novels without snorting—and their assistants, Mercedes Marx and Carlyn Coviello.
Branding guru Douglas Atkins for his time and expertise.
My dear pals (and trusted guinea-pig readers) Corey S. Powell and Joanna Dalin.
My husband (and best friend), Paul O'Leary.
Gorgeous. Smart. Athletic. That's the description of the guy you want. The only problem is that he won't give you a second glance.
But what if you had an ad agency helping you—directing every move of your crush strategy?
That's right. Professional people. The best creative brains out there.
Forget about Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald's.
I'm talking about a campaign to make you the most sought-after hot item around. Or in professional shoptalk, you as a brand.
What you are about to read actually happened to me during my junior year of high school. It was only a little while ago that I took part in a “real world” internship program designed to give teens a taste of adult life. It's still hard for me to believe everything that happened.
The rules of the program: I had to keep a diary of what I learned. During my internship the mentors at the ad agency jokingly suggested I should use their creative brains and strategies to get the most desired guy in my class. So I started a much more personal spiral notebook too and just turned in the official one.
So I have two notebooks. Enough time has passed that I'm finally ready to make sense of everything, and I also feel that I can help others make some sense of this crazy process.
Whether you want to sell yourself as a girlfriend or sell a can of soda, there are more than a few principles and tips of the trade to benefit from. No kidding. The millions of bucks in the ad world exist for a reason.
All of a sudden I heard thunder. I ran for 179 Spring Street before the brewing storm hit my few feet of lower Manhattan.
I pushed open the filthy doors and the lobby was not so great. Right next to the scratched elevator was a garbage can that desperately needed to be emptied. My face was still wet with rain as I checked the slip of paper again to be sure I had the right address for the ad agency.
How could this building possibly be where a fancy ad agency was located? My father loves telling our out-of-town relatives on his embarrassingly braggy tours of New York City that the reason so many Manhattan lobbies are grubby is to trick robbers into thinking that there's no plush furniture and pricey electronics upstairs.
The door to suite 3B was held ajar by a glittery rubber stopper, a small thing, but such a funky thing that it gave me hope. On the side of the white door, the words OUT OF THE BOX were stenciled in green. Nobody answered when I knocked, so I let myself in.
How cool was this reception area? The nearest walls were candy-box red and the ones opposite a lemony yellow. Over the unmanned reception desk was an enormous painting of a multicolored lollipop that was actually spinning around because of some unseen mechanism. On the opposite wall above the red velvety couch was a cartoony Dalmatian painting. The two chairs on either side of the couch were upholstered in velvet, the purple of royal capes. Somehow the freaky decor hung together perfectly, like the eye-popping design of the week on one of those strangely addictive cable decorating shows with a bubblehead hostess.
“Hello?” I called out softly and a bit nervously. No answer. I didn't know what to do with myself. I noticed the vintage children's toys on the long glass table in front of the couch. I picked up a red plastic whistle shaped like a fish and put it back down. Maybe if I waited for a minute, the receptionist would come back. I decided that I definitely had the wrong outfit on for this interview. At my school internship coordinator's suggestion, I'd put my beloved jeans aside for the morning and played it safe with a button-down shirt and a pleated black skirt.
“Hello?” I said much louder.
Maybe the entire staff of the ad agency was in an unexpected board meeting and forgot about the high school kid hoping to work there for school credit five half days a week. I peered into a few open offices down the long corridor. If I saw anyone, I'd just nicely remind them that the kid was here, that's all. One room had a long shelf covered with a Pez dispenser collection-there were Snoopy and Bart Simpson and Humpty Dumpty heads crowning those familiar long rectangular Pez bodies. In the same room there was a rack of dress-up hats like in my little cousin's preschool. Except the fireman's hat and the white puffy chef's hat and the princess cone were adult-sized.
The kitchen area, which I found next, was empty too. But the items on a little round table made me laugh. Next to an open tin of orange and black sugar cookies—shaped like ghosts, pumpkins, and witches—was a plastic toddlers' cow barn with a tin roof and rooster weathervane, complete with plastic grain in the attached silo. I snuck myself a ghost cookie. The lights were on in Out of the Box, but someone must have forgotten to turn them off. Someone could have just been playing with the barn—the two pigs were placed right up next to the pig trough.
I grabbed a paper cone from the watercooler. I hadn't had anything to drink since homeroom, when I had my usual carton of pineapple-strawberry-orange juice.
“Well, well, well, looks like we have a visitor.”
I almost spat out the water. A short man with a thin, wiry body and one of those hipster goatees (that look like a bit of chin dirt) had mysteriously appeared in the doorway. I crumpled the incriminating paper cup into my skirt pocket and quickly wiped off the sugary white crumbs.
“You must be our internship candidate, yes?”
“Yes,” I said softly. At that moment I heard more muted voices from another room.
“We didn't hear you come in. So sorry about that. It's a staff holiday here, you see. It's the company president's birthday, so my team snuck into his office to see if we could have more ideas sitting in leather chairs.”
“You're here even though it's a vacation day?” I'd never actually been on a big interview before. Why did I ask that?
He smiled warmly. “Our lot is not allowed to holiday right now—we have a major client presentation coming up. The one we need new ideas for.”
“Did sitting in your boss's office work?”
“Nothing. Not a single thought. No wonder the Pope of Mope is such a blank page. Anyhow, Marcus and I forgot all about you until we heard a noise in the kitchen.”
“That's okay,” I said guiltily. “You found me.”
He smiled again. “Which type of cookie did you choose? I'm guessing you chose a witch for the chocolate hair, right?”
“A ghost, actually. I'm all about vanilla.”
“Interesting. Very, very interesting.”
“They're really good, by the way. I was tempted so I'm glad it's okay I took one.”
“Paulette will be pleased—she baked them herself. I know it's only October first, but she is such a fan of Halloween that she's decided it's a monthlong holiday. You'll meet her in a minute.”
The mystery man motioned for me to follow him. He led me to a room I'd scouted out already, the one with the novelty hat rack. There were two other people in there now: a very tall man standing on his chair in a pirate hat and a woman at work on an art project.
“Is this the spy, Joel?” This loud question came from the pirate brandishing a plastic sword in my direction. “Spy!” he cried again after he fixed the plastic black eyepatch falling down over his left eye.
The fortyish woman was seated at a desk with a floating orange jack-o'-lantern balloon tied to an arm of her chair. She had a mass of red frizzy hair flying up over her ears like she was in the middle of bouncing on a trampoline. She was clearly ignoring the pirate. Her huge eyeglasses covered up her tiny nose as she scribbled furiously on shiny black paper.
No doubt about it: this place was wack. “I think I'm here at a bad time,” I said to the man they called Joel. “I could go and come tomorrow. Come back when things are normalized?”
The woman looked up. “Normalized?” She smiled to herself and went back to work. Before I could fully process her comic face—was that her real hair or a clown's fright wig?—the tall pirate stomped his white sneaker and pointed at me with his sword. “Who are you? State your case!”
“I'm Jordie Popkin,” I said tentatively.
“Louder!” All three of them screamed this together.
“I am Jordie Popkin! High school junior!” I couldn't believe that I'd just complied like that.
I mentally dubbed the would-be pirate Bluebeard. There was a skylight above us, so the rain clouds outside darkened the room. But even with dim light, one look at his long face and big chin told me he had to be my principal's brother. Becky Lee, the internship coordinator at my high school, had only yesterday informed me that a sibling connection with my principal was the reason this unusual internship was being offered to students at my math and science high school this year. I couldn't wait to tell my closest friends, Jeremy and Clara: Dr. D's brother was running around the room like a pirate, no BS!
“Speak!” demanded Bluebeard. “Answer! What do you want to be when you grow up?” This guy was really pushing that corny pirate voice.
“I don't know yet, Captain,” I replied.
“You don't want to be a scientist, then, lass?”
“No,” I said. It felt so freeing to finally say that. The kooky mood in the room made me feel free to talk without holding back.
“Well then. I'm Marcus Herman,” said the pirate in a much more normal voice. He opened a Krispy Kreme variety box and held out a half-dozen doughnuts. “You, new girl. First dibs.”
“She'll have the vanilla one,” Joel said just as I was about to reach for it.
“I'm guessing that you're my principal's brother,” I said to Marcus a bit daringly after a bite. (My dad had always said that fearlessness is a great sell-yourself technique.)
“Guilty as charged. But don't hold that against me,” Marcus said. “Delores was always the serious one in the family. To this day she sees absolutely nothing funny about the word Uranus.”
I smiled. That little detail explained so much about my principal.
“Would you like something to drink?” Marcus said happily.
“We have everything in the kitchen,” the frizzy-haired woman said with her eyes still focused on her artwork.
“Tang. Ovaltine. Quik. Kool-Aid,” Marcus said.
“Thanks, I'll have a Coke,” I said to Marcus. I was sure that I could actually converse with him now that he'd dropped his dopey pirate accent.
Marcus looked at me like wanting a can of Coke was some kind of strange request.
“You want a soda? Joel, do we have any Cokes?”
“No, just banana and pineapple soda. But no more peach.”
I ended up going with a neon yellow glass of repulsively sweet pineapple soda. Before I could take a second sip, the woman with the frizz do reached into a drawer of her cluttered desk and topped my drink with a pink paper parasol.
“I'm Paulette,” she said, finally introducing herself. She smiled big as she stood up for a cat stretch in a stained shirt and ripped jeans. Now I could clearly see what she was working on. She was not scribbling, she was scratching. As she rose she rested her sharp X-Acto knife diagonally across a waxy black scratchboard card. She'd let some interesting colors emerge, and her design was some kind of rainbow-colored bird that, against the black background, appeared to be floating in space.
I smiled back at Paulette. “Good to meet you.”
“So, you go to Manhattan Science….”
Was that a question? “I do.”
“Great. That's absolutely perfect because I have a science question for you. Do hummingbirds open their beaks?”
Joel threw his arms over his head. “Paulette!”
“What?” she drawled out in two syllables.
“Again with the hummingbirds? Just because they're tiny doesn't mean they don't have mouths. How else are they going to feed themselves and their babies?”
“I know the answer, though,” I said. “My mom has a hummingbird calendar, and I've never noticed any beaks. I kind of thought they had a built-in straw to sip up the nectar.”
“That's what I thought.” Paulette beamed at me with a big gummy smile.
“Wrong and wrong.” Joel shook his head furiously, but he was laughing at the same time.
“I'm not the one making mistakes today, Joel.”
Joel looked right at me instead of Marcus. “My mistake? I sent our client a lovely bunch of flowers from an Internet florist.”
“What's wrong with that?” I said.
Marcus took his seat. “Nothing wrong, unless you idiotically sent a funeral wreath because you were too busy talking when you were clicking!”
I laughed. They all smiled appreciatively in my direction and then looked at each other knowingly.
“The gig is yours if you want it,” Marcus said. “We're all good judges of character here. Creatives are sensitive souls.”
Paulette cringed at the last part of his comment, and added, slightly more formally, “You're exactly the person we want.”
“I'm glad to hear that. What exactly do you do here? What would I be accepting? All I was told was that this is an ad agency of sorts.”
“We dream up toys,” Paulette said. “Not toys aimed at the upscale toy store buyers. That kind of toy is night and day from—”
“Just get it out,” Joel said to Paulette with a curious look.
She hesitated for a second, but then loudly and proudly added, “We specialize in premiums.”
“Oh, um …” I wasn't quite sure what she meant. Premium what?
My question was left hanging. Marcus leaned over to where Paulette was scraping her birdlike design and grabbed a square of origami-sized, mossy green tissue paper. He laid it on a comb he retrieved from his pocket and blew his impromptu, homemade kazoo.
“Answer her, Paulette,” Marcus demanded.
Marcus stared at her. Finally he spoke instead. “We make the toys in Happy Boxes. Our boutique agency is number one in the fast-food toy premium business. We have only one serious competitor, out in Los Angeles.”
“Oh,” I said again, again drawing the word out of my mouth really slowly.
“Is there a problem?” Marcus asked.
Paulette watched me closely. “Do you have a moral issue with that?”
Did I? Her question prompted me to think a bit, and I discovered that I was relatively okay with it.
Yes, okay, a few toddlers might get a few too many greasy french fries in their system, but was I about to ponder the evils of corporate America when I had just been granted a get out of jail free card? Here I had thought that this was going to be some kind of dull pharmaceutical agency approved by Dr. D, and I was doomed to be Xeroxing copy about sinus and allergy pills. Marcus, Paulette, and Joel seemed warm, funny, and nice. This “real world” work experience veered so far from my school's stringent math and science mandate that my guess was that my internship coordinator didn't even know what Out of the Box marketed.
“Why should she have a moral issue with us?” Marcus snapped.
“It sounds out of the ordinary,” I said with a real smile, and the three of them looked at me approvingly.
Over the past few years my principal, the self-righteous Dr. Delores Herman—aka Dr. D—had made it clear that she thought none of her students should be allowed any unusual (i.
e., cool) internships, like working for the inkers at Marvel comics or assisting the stylists at Glamour magazine— internships we'd jealously heard were offered at another of Manhattan's public magnet high schools. As far as my circle of friends was concerned, the three most desirable internships Dr. D had allowed for the students of Manhattan Science were: assistant to the NBC News medical reporter; production intern with the science show at WNYC, our local NPR radio station; and the spot at the New York Times with the science editor. But most of the “taste of the real world” junior year “jobs” involved things like filing with medical libraries and helping out in the administrative offices of hospitals. The kids who were really gunning to be scientists could duke it out for the assistant positions with big-name researchers, but that kind of work was not for my small artsy group of friends.
We really stood out, and were sometimes derided for it. All of the kids in our magnet school had a large vocabulary, so nobody ever got picked on just for being a brain. But even a school geared to spitting out future innovators in quantum mechanics and string theory has a social pecking order. Here, cheerleading and football were nonexistent, but guys like Vaughan Nussman and girls like Tara Jones were our version of the A-listers. They were often just as exceptional at math and science as the nerds, but they were also extremely attractive and social butterflies.
My friends were considered likeable B-listers. It was an okay existence. There are always going to be kids who have it worse in high school than anyone else, the really really unfortunate-looking girl your heart goes out to because none of the boys will talk to her, or the stringy-haired guy who never bathes who no one will talk to. I was in an average slot, not miserable but longing for an A-list guy. I was not really offensive to anyone, you know what I mean?
Every year across the five boroughs of New York City— Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—there are thirteen-year-olds out celebrating when they find out they've gained admission to my renowned school. In an insanely expensive and competitive city, here's a school that every year sends over one hundred out of seven hundred seniors to an Ivy League college and costs parents absolutely nothing.