Creative Briefs #8: Portrait of a Team
Paul’s email was nothing more than a list of links and his signature. Haley surveyed the URLs, a who’s-who of local ad agencies with each digital address ending with some variation of /MeetTheTeam. “Hey Paul, are you sending me a virus?”
“Just check them out. I sent them to everyone.”
“Great,” Lois lamented, “Paul’s sending out homework assignments.”
“They’re fun. Check ‘em out.”
Haley clicked the first link, the screen filling with a grid of employee portraits, each posed in Hawaiian shirts in front of a clearly fake tropical backdrop. Haley surveyed the thumbnails, curious who was using the beach ball and cooler props to get a laugh, and who was strategically covering the part of their body they felt self-conscious about. Haley would have held the beach ball in front of her face, because in this photo shoot, the thing she’d want to hide is her identity.
The next link featured individual portraits of a team dressed in their best business attire, each posing like a Price Is Right model, except the glamorous prizes were common office supplies instead of luggage and jet skis. Between a millennial highlighting a rainbow of Post-It notes and another hawking cellophane tape, an old guy held out a red Swingline stapler. Haley wondered if the stapler was a prized possession, and if everyone in the adjacent photos had had their fill of TPS report jokes. Then she remembered that in Office Space, no one enjoyed working at Initech, so what did that gag say about the firm’s culture?
The third click conjured a lineup of people dressed meticulously in vintage clothing, clearly inspired by Mad Men. Haley immediately started doing inventory, trying to find which of the men got to be Don Draper. She imagined them negotiating, probably in the men’s room so that the women wouldn’t make suggestions and damn one of them to be Pete Campbell. When she couldn’t find either a Joan or Roger, she realized it was more homage than mimicry, a move that almost saved it from looking like a Halloween photo series. Haley’s eye gravitated to the two women who were clearly channeling Peggy Olson, which is exactly what she would have done herself.
“Question,” Haley asked the room. “Leaving out that Mad Men might be a dated pop culture reference, is emulating that fashion an effective nod to a golden age of advertising, or does it insinuate that the firm is stuck in the past?”
“Door number two,” Lois replied. “They look sharp, but it doesn’t convey modern thinking.”
Paul made a sound that almost qualified as a sigh. “I didn’t mean for us to debate the particular sites, I just liked the fun. My favorite was the space one.”
“There’s a space one?” Haley clicked the other links until she found the set Paul was talking about, a series of faces in bulbous helmets in front of a cardboard starfield. “Is it kinda weird that they’re all floating off by themselves, tethered by some technological umbilical cord? It hardly conjures intimate, personal service.”
Paul’s sigh was more convincing this time. “They don’t work in the suits, they’re just being creative. I thought we could do something like this.”
Lois shook her head. “The shelf-life on these gags is pretty short, Paul. Plus, once you lose your dignity, it’s hard to get it back. I don’t want to meet with a client and have them picturing me in an oversize sombrero or with a cream pie smooshed on my face.”
“Then let’s brainstorm something cool.”
“What’s cool about looking like we’re at a pop-up photo booth at a trade show?” Haley understood the desire to differentiate a team, to offer more than a LinkedIn line-up of corporate snapshots, but to her, the more elaborate the forced-fun photos were, the less you saw of anyone’s personality. It’s hard for your true self to shine when you’re wearing a chicken costume.
Paul growled, literally. “Fine, no space suits, no retro, whatever. What would you do?”
There was a pause before Lois said, “Dogs. Everyone loves dogs. I bring in Lucy, Haley brings Jackpot, you bring – sorry, I can never remember your dog’s name, but don’t tell him I said that.”
Before Paul could answer, Roland spoke up from behind his wall of monitors. “I was hoping to stay out of this, but what are we going to do with these pictures? We don’t have a Meet the Team page.”
The silence that followed Roland’s comment was much longer than Haley expected. Whether Paul hadn’t thought that far ahead, or simply realized he was outnumbered, the sonic clarity of his typing was like the digital version of crickets. When it was clear Paul wasn’t planning to answer, Haley and Roland added their own key clicks to the chorus. Eventually, Lois spoke up.
“For the record, I’m still cool with bringing in Lucy. Just sayin’.”
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