0031 - The Account, Pt. 2

Holy shit and OMG the dystopian future is already here

RaleighTSakers

Finally catching up on comics. I worked as a copywriter for a company that made weight-loss shakes for about a year, and I still freelance sometimes, although my day-job is in tech now. It was one of those companies that said "we're a family" and expected everyone to come in and help them fill boxes off the clock when the warehouse staff quit en masse. They were eventually sold to a UK conglomerate. Needless to say that was in Utah.

Kate S.

I'm a copyeditor for a digital marketing agency that works primarily with small businesses. (Picture a sweat shop where recent college graduates optimize tractor websites.) We've recently laid off all our freelance writers and gone almost entirely to ChatGPT. So my job is less about grammar, and more about Quality Assurance on the assembly line. The content we produce is banal marketing drivel for SEO purposes, so no human being should have to write it anyways. We just put words on websites for Google to index. It's amusing to me that now we have one algorithm attempting to write in a way that will please another algorithm. ChatGPT is our Cyrano de Bergerac, attempting to woo Google by placing words in our mouths. Maybe the two of them will fall in love?

Nathaniel Keen

>wept quietly on the ferry home I wonder how many billions of tears have been drained into the Sound over the millennia

Don Rowe

I once worked for a company that made museum displays, many corporate. I was a graphics guy. One time we were working on something for Aramco (the Saudi enthno-religious kingdom owned oil company) and we realized all the little towers in the style sheet looked like dicks. Thankfully I was not the poor bastard who had to explain this issue to a bunch of guys who probably haven’t even seen their own wife nude. One day all the dicks were fixed and we moved on to the SPAM museum or whatever was next. Soon after, 9-11 happened and I switched careers.

SignOfZeta

it didn't really take that much time. also a lot of the people that worked there were totally nuts. there's a guy in a writing workshop who told me he was just doing an internship there and that it still pretty nuts so all in all I'm glad

J Hardy Carroll

Oh man, laying all that groundwork and then not going in to W+K. That had to hurt. Or did it?

Colter McCorkindale

"Of Myriad Nadirs" is officially the name of my new technical death metal band.

Colter McCorkindale

I was hired as a warm body to throw on a fire. It was my first job in New York City. I don't think I had a solid BM for all of Q1. Needless to say my colon demanded I escape. It was only 4 months but I didn't have time to spend my paychecks so I took the summer off and started an in-house gig at Amex that October. I've been there 15 years now.

Colter McCorkindale

Tina?!!

C C

Interestingly the only time Ive ever worked at one of those agencies was actually around about the same time I discovered Achewood.

Tom PM

I only ever worked in market research. I captioned focus group videos in the mid 90s before speech recognition tech was widely available. I know nothing of the creatives' grind and honestly I'm glad of that.

Julie (HiDeeHoGal)

Worked at a web agency in the mid-2000s. I was fresh outta college, and naturally was flying high on my promotion to Creative Director of a rapidly-shrinking digital powerhouse. Like most CDs, I was working nights and weekends to churn out handfuls of unique, expressive designs every week in order to keep the lights on. After not being paid for a few weeks I decided it was time to do my Forever Punch Out. Our fearless leader was taking a long lunch of coffee and cigarettes, so I took the opportunity to carry my monitors and computer to my car a block away. Naturally I ran into the guy with two awkward armfuls of my own hardware right outside the parking garage. _I’m sure he never suspected a thing._

Cody Richmond

wall to wall bangers

E Corcoran

There’s no way …Let’s Go To Macy’s isn’t a soulful R&B ballads album

Finbar Clougherty

Your toothpaste probably cost more because I met Charles Barkley once at hotel in New York on an ad firms dime.

neballer

For those who may have missed it, 1911 being the alarm code is absolutely a reference to a popular type of hand gun. This is consistent with everything else we know about Tina and is the kind of fine detail you come to Achewood for

kdusjjdhxksj

My dad was a CD for a couple of reasonably-sized firms from the 80s to the early 2000s, so I never worked in one but spent a lot of time in the offices as a kid. Being exposed to a 90s creative office as a child gave me unfortunately lofty expectations about how nice my own workplaces would be.

Dalton Reyburn

"Arlin Cortney" anagrams to "central irony," which may or may not mean anything. Probably not. Also "corny latrine."

Oppido

I remembered one. One night I stayed late to upload hundreds of photos of used clothing a body builder was selling to her creepy male fans. And if you're Jason and you can read this, you should block me now 😇

Jenn

Would love to catch up with Polly next!

Oppido

Who on Earth would name a company after Bertie Wooster? Seems like an attractant for clients like his Aunt Agatha that want someone to bully.

picklefactory

"Two-month audition" sounds like T is gonna continue to be the Cal Ripkin of not paying rent for a bit.

RocketMermaid

this comments section really fucked with my head

Datura

This one gives me anxiety for what's to come

A. C.

Closest I've gotten was that I worked as a sysadmin for small companies back in the late 00s and one of our customers was a place that did printing jobs, design work and stuff. They had a bunch of old (G4/G5 PowerPC) Macs for the design/print work and a Windows network for the rest of the office. As I had an Intel-based Macbook and was as a result familiar with OSX I was the chosen one to help them with any of their Apple-related issues and managed to keep everything chugging along. We had set them up with a nice domain server that also did backups but for some reason nobody ever bothered to set those up for the Macs. They just had a big external drive hooked up to one that served as the backup. It failed catastrophically, we couldn't recover the data as the entire partition table had shit itself. It turned out it was not a backup but their long term storage for everything as the Macs had started to run out of disk space. There were no real backups and for a lot of (important) files this was their only copy. We sent it off to a recovery firm who managed to retrieve all the files (wasn't cheap, the client was billed though) but none of the paths or filenames so the client had to spend a while rebuilding their entire directory structure and figure out what everything was. The day that disk died and we found out we couldn't get it back I was instructed to make sure the Macs were also on the same network and had access to the server so they could run actual backups. There was no budget for newer machines despite multiple requests from the users by the way.

Smoke

Let's Go To Macy's needs to be put to vinyl asap

Ben Wissett

I feel you. When Accenture bought my small, independent agency, they asked me to give a lecture on how to build and nurture a creative culture. Afterward they told me it wasn't "billable" activity. I wrote an editorial entitled "Please don't kill the creatives" and then quit. It was tantamount to banging on the hull of the Death Star with a rubber chicken for all the good it did; there goes a special boy…

Rob Dalton

I worked for an ad agency 20 years ago and kept a diary about how much I hated it. (It's now a book called The House of Wigs, buried somewhere in the bowels of Amazon.) Then I proceeded to work as a copywriter for the rest of my life! Including today! Ha ha! Funny how life goes! [stares into middle distance an hour]

Josh Fireland

I worked at ACN for a year, and now have to work with McKinsey, Deloiite, BCG, and Bain. These douchebags only speak in bullshit, and managing up is their only skill. Remember that their product is billable hours, so the business model makes sense. I stopped being upset about this years ago, and haven't written anything close to advertising copy in years.

J Hardy Carroll

Knowing that this will almost certainly end in heartbreak for Téodor makes me sad, but as always I am along for the ride

RBM

Oh yeah man. I had a big loft on SW 13th Ave (where Masu is now) where I lived during the turn of the century II. We called it Überhaus because it was over the Great Northwest Bookstore, and it was right across from Food Chain Films and down the street from new location of the Big Daddy of Portland ad agencies Weiden + Kennedy. I knew a handful of people who worked there (in fact, one of them showed me the very first Razor scooter that we rode around SW Morrison building before they moved). I'd been doing some underground agency shit, making websites for indy films and managing small campaigns for things like the aborted Woody Harrelson movie about (surprise) the war on weed. But nothing was super solid, and aside from jamming on ideas I was pretty bad at business stuff. W+K had moved into NW, and thought fuck it. I should go to work there. But how to jump out from the slush pile? I'd already tried to work for Second Story but they wanted hard credentials and serious coding skills, and I could barely hang with HTML and JS I copied from elsewhere (like you, I am a cartoonist who only learns shit when there's no other way). I got really high and came up with a plan. I would do it by mail. Every day for three months, I sent a letter or card to Dan Weiden. Each piece of mail featured a different monkey or ape. The first one was a Planet of the apes postcard I wish I still had. I followed up with 19th century circus monkeys, King Kong stills, subtle monkey photos where the ape barely figured in the photo (I am sorry that you hadn't yet invented Homosexuals yet, because he would have been perfect.) There was no correspondence or return address on any of it, no explanation at all. As time passed, the mail got more elaborate. I sent a barrel of monkeys with their arms all glued together, a rubber gorilla mask, and...the final mail... a stuffed cymbal monkey with my Überhaus business card taped to his stomach and a note that said WILL WORK FOR PEANUTS. This netted me a call and and interview, despite my "resume" being about as thin as Teodor's. But before I could go in, I was hired by CTR as an assistant creative director for their new Website business. They'd gotten their start repairing typewriters (Columbia Typewriter Repair) and had moved into hoary Oracle applications but saw what appeared to be money lying on the ground (this was 1998) so they bought an old warehouse in what is now called The Pearl (we called it the warehouse district) and spent five million bucks renovating it. We were right across the street from Boo.com and had yurts instead of cubicles, 21" CRT monitors, Aeron chairs, and our own espresso machine. What we didn't have was business, and aside from some giant flash intros for commerce websites I didn't do much. I was able to start studying digital design in my spare time, and have now spent twenty years as a user experience architect to pay my bills. I do wonder what would have become of me had I been hired by W+K and gone down that route instead. I totally fucking HATE design firms now, and have to deal will all kinds of bullshit from "designers" who want to get all creative in their enterprise software layouts...but that's another story.

J Hardy Carroll

Let’s Go To Macy’s is stellar <3

Nicole Lyden

Even Tina’s back 🥲

Cf Duddy

Don't miss John Oliver's McKinsey takedown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight

Rob Dalton

Teodor hitting that Commodore 64 like he wants to marry it

b.zap

"...Let's Go to Macy's" has gotta be a title track

Elyse

This is so funny, because I attended a keynote with Jelly Helm talking about how he talks about love at Nike. That headline is hilarious. At one one point I held a report from McKinsey (that cost upwards of $100k) "We must leverage all points of leverage."

Jenn

I didn't so much mind the "Sabbath titties" footnote in the comic from a couple weeks ago, but I did find it odd that Onstad then repeated the explanation word-for-word in the accompanying post. I assume he drafted the post and then didn't look it over very carefully before publishing, or something.

Oppido

That album cover has powerful "Téodor did not use his imagination" vibes.

Oppido

No, Téodor! Don't do it, you silly bepantalooned bear!

Graeme Anthony

I lost a quarter century playing CD to clients like Nike, Boeing, and Microsoft, and often wept quietly on the ferry home thinking about how my storytelling skills were being dented and frittered convincing people to buy total bullshit. Of myriad nadirs, I once had a T-Mobile client suggest this headline: "Visualize the freedom of wireless freedom." I laughed out loud, then quickly stopped laughing when I realized she was serious. (But oh: the money the money the money.) Advertising is a specious, fantastically large waste of time, resources, and human attention. I'm beyond relieved I escaped that madness to work in sustainability, so I could look my kids in the face at the dinner table. #FuckMadisonAve

Rob Dalton

I used to work on the tech side of digital advertising. (Obligatory Mitch Hedberg: "I still do, but I used to, too.") The low point of my career was at my first job when I was ordered to set up ad-tags for those scammy "1 weird tip to lose 15 lbs of belly fat! DOCTORS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!!" I told my boss, who'd sold the campaign, that these ads wouldn't work on our site, nobody would click them, and the client would soon cancel due to low conversion rates. But it was a startup, we needed every dollar we could get in revenue, so I was overruled. Guess who cancelled within 2 days of the campaign starting? The client. Through my long and illustrious career, I've learned that the only people I despise more than the customers are the salespeople upstream of me, over-promising to them. :-( The things we do in pursuit of a passable existence.

2scrogz

This assumes that T is doing to see a dime

Spyguitar

Agent Orange was our enemy :) Though in 2000 we had a graph showing how they were inevitably going to drive us out of business in a few decades, dunno if that calculation ever changed....

Tim Pratt

T's a genius at fumbling opportunities, though -- ask Beef how that wedding dinner turned out. Ask the guy who just wanted a nice spatchcock chicken barbecue. Ask Circus Penis. I feel like Téodor disappoints just as much as he is disappointed.

Oppido

Orange or blue, or are you allowed to say? ;-)

Spyguitar

on the one hand t needs to eat on the other...everything else in the universe

Zen Window

So I've not done my time in a marketing agency, but as a front-end web developer, the idea of "quickly" converting a huge pile of physical documents into responsive pages, without any pretence of digital assets, or any environment better than Notepad, in one afternoon, would definitely pump out more red flags than an Albanian flag factory.

Andy Jennings

I wrote LivingSocial ads. They were alright, but I had to describe a lot of Italian restaurant dishes.

Tom P

C.F. FROST

OMG HA HA HA WOW you win I think

Jenn

i try to block out the memories... I worked at a web design company back in '06 where Carole Baskin (yes, her) was one of our clients. I wasn't on that project. My project was to copy paste junk SEO content into a website dedicated to importing viagra from Canada on the cheap. another one of my jobs was at an "innovation lab" for a bigger agency, we were making iphone apps back when iphones were still pretty new. I was too poor to afford my own iphone so the ceo gave me his old phone to test the apps with but he forget to delete the videos of himself jerking off and all the nude photos of his wife. or maybe he didn't. maybe i was receiving signals and didn't pick up on them at the time.

Michael Ryan

My first job after college was as a junior copywriter at the in-house advertising department for a large chain hardware store. My creative director used to run the Land's End catalogue and our vp of marketing was one of the people who invented the Happy Meal. Our strategy for entering new markets was to open a store on either side of the town, to starve any local mom-and-pop hardware stores or lumber yards of traffic by being the more convenient choice, and then, once we put the locals out of business, we'd shut the less profitable location. Everyone was very nice and it paid quite well and after six months of saving my salary I resigned and fled to California and started working for a disability advocacy organization to cleanse my soul

Tim Pratt

Yeah wondering when the other Nike shoe is gonna drop, and how hard. Scientology? Gimme dat Cruise clipart bae

Yelahneb Unicornucopiax

This sounds like an Arrested Development plot: The triumphal moment of my tenure there was designing a t-shirt for an event where local architects made elaborate pet houses for charity.

Linus Lee

FTR I did not fuck up but I totally cried because it was so miserable. I quit after 4 months and turning in my letter felt better than doing a fat line.

Jenn

That seems like a perfectly normal number of red flags, in this economy

Tyrone Slothrust

What a loathsome creature T is

Kristaps Porzingis

oh my god

Juliette Page

Oh my God. Conversion copywriter of 18 years here. I don't even know where to get started with the client AND agency abuse. I did a brief stint at one little agency where the 24yo project manager (I was 31) told me, "If you fuck up, I will make you cry. Apologies in advance I guess."

Jenn

Ray: By Request Only

Matthew Harris

Any more red flags for this job and... uhhhh there will just be too many red flags

Bungus Bronbo

I am impossibly excited to see how T is disappointed by this experience

Josh Egbert