I grew up an ad kid.
Most of my family was born and raised in Chicago, but my brother and I were drawling with the best of ’em in the Peach State, thanks to my dad’s advertising career which took our family to Atlanta for Coca-Cola and later to the home of the Arch for clients with very St. Louis-y roots. (One of those accounts was a major beer brand, and the number of people who guess “Miller” when I tell this story astounds me).
But geography aside, some of my strongest related recollections came from the glimpses I got into what this business seemed to involve.
There were weekend office trips, which felt less like “Yuck, people have to work on Sunday” and more like “I get to make multiple photocopies of my hands and test every art pen’s ink color while other people are typing up memos.”
There were work-in-progress jingles on cassette tapes, played often enough that decades later, lyrics still randomly surface from some apparently indestructible corner of my brain.
“What a day, at Six Flags, what wonderful sights to seeeeee…”
I’ll spare you the rest – and my off-key rendition – but yes, I still know it.
There was Commercial Day.
My brother and I would get out of school once a year to spend the day at Six Flags while TV spots were being filmed. Craig happily tackled the roller coasters. I stuck with less death-defying options; one year I “sailed” on a swinging pirate ship more than 30 times and somehow ended up pictured in the local newspaper.
Rides, amusement-park food and even a stipend… For playing.
So, to say that my childhood view of that industry involved some glitz and sparkle might be an understatement.
Years later, after getting my M.A. in Psychology, I realized I wanted a field where I could use my creativity more. Advertising made sense: my schooling focused heavily on behavior, motivation and communication – and I had some pretty fond memories (and a few now-retro Coca-Cola beach towels!).
I’m not going to pretend reality shattered that childhood perception. There have been many really cool moments along the way.
I’ve worked on major brands. I’ve attended TV shoots with amazing catering and treats – once, after commenting about a craving for Teddy Grahams, three flavors appeared. Also, as I love to mention whenever remotely relevant, I even got to grab drinks with Patrick Dempsey at the Indy 500.
Truly… I’ve done things.
But behind all that fun was the work that made it possible.
In 2004, my team was focused on a big program launching a new service, and we’d tied the announcement to the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Week, with a goal of introducing the service to the media.
After the new Hall of Fame members were inducted, journalists needed to file their stories quickly, often from cramped hotel rooms, and tended to leave town as soon as they hit ‘send’.
So we decided to give them a reason not to head out so quickly.
We created an oasis: a comfortable workspace and great Wi-Fi, alongside an enticing area to hang out when they were finished – full bar, passed hors d’oeuvres, former NFL players and kiosks featuring the new service.
But, getting the event to a ‘spend-time-here-worthy’ state took some doing.
A couple of months beforehand, a colleague and I headed to Ohio for a site visit. The plan was easy: fly from Chicago to Cleveland in the early evening, pick up our rental car, drive to Canton, have a nice dinner and get a good night’s sleep before meeting with the Hall of Fame team the next morning.
Instead, there were multiple delays and hours of uncertainty about whether we’d even leave O’Hare that night. Because the updates kept amounting to some version of “Your flight may leave soon; don’t stray from the gate,” we didn’t bother getting food.
We eventually landed close to midnight, grabbed our rental car just before they locked up and headed down I-77, where the adrenaline wore off enough for us to realize something:
We were starving.
Dreams of prime rib and shrimp cocktail danced in my head.
At 12:30 a.m., we found a Wendy’s drive-thru.
My colleague pulled off to the side of the parking lot and squirted mustard and ketchup onto his burger. I opened two butter packets and a tiny container of sour cream to add some interest to my baked potato.
We looked at our “meals” and started laughing.
“Whoever said advertising is glamorous should see us now.”
The potato wasn’t really the point.
It was just the moment that captured it.
That small spud is what I think of when I remember everything it took to create what our guests ultimately saw.
Months of planning meant long hours and late meetings, followed by constant troubleshooting. Then came setup in August. A tent. Heat and humidity. Hauling product, getting desks and tables into just the right positions, working with vendors and dealing with whatever popped up next.
At one point, the client decided some paperwork had to be hand-delivered to an associate an hour away – immediately – and told me to drop what I was doing and take it there.
About 45 minutes into the drive, my phone rang.
It was the same client.
She wanted to know why I wasn’t back at the tent yet. Apparently, there were boxes waiting to be moved.
As much as I love being a problem solver, I wasn’t entirely sure how to bend the laws of time and distance quite that creatively.
That’s the strange thing about producing something designed to look effortless.
The attendees just see the final product.
And ours went off without a hitch. The space looked fantastic. The media had a writer’s lounge. Guests ate, drank, talked with former football players and experienced the new service.
Nobody attending needed to know the many, many, many hours that went into how the sausage was made.
But frankly, if you’d told Little Jill that one day her career would involve sitting in a Wendy’s parking lot after midnight, eating a baked potato after a hectic travel day instead of a relaxing dinner, I’m not sure she would have been terribly disillusioned.
She’d probably have said “Wow, I can eat Wendy’s whenever I want? Your job sounds amazing! Also… why didn’t you get a Frosty?”