Page 21 of One in Three

AJ is waiting anxiously for me in reception. He falls into step with me as I swipe my card through the chrome barrier and head towards the elevators. ‘Where have you been?’

Grumpily, I jab the lift button. ‘Jesus. It’s not even eight. Where’s the fire?’

‘Patrick’s doing his best to contain it. You’ll see when you get to the conference room.’

‘AJ, I’m not in the mood for games.’

‘Tina Murdoch’s here.’

I look up sharply. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. The client meeting’s not till next week.’

‘Tina brought it forward.’ He peers down at my shoe. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Don’t you readVogue? Uneven heels are going to be huge next season. You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull to get these.’

‘Seriously?’

I love AJ, though he’s never been the brightest crayon in the box. But he seems particularly distracted this morning, and I suddenly notice his eyes are suspiciously red. ‘You all right?’ I ask.

‘I’m fine,’ he says quickly.

‘AJ—’

‘Wayne and I had a bit of a row. It’s nothing, really. Lover’s tiff. Come on, we’d better get a move on. Patrick’s waiting.’

Upstairs, the office has the deserted air of theMarie Celeste. Everyone is already gathered in the glassed-in conference room on the other side of the atrium. Patrick spots me as I change my shoes at my desk, and gesticulates for me to come and join them. I hate open-plan offices.

AJ thrusts a file into my hands and we hustle into the conference room. When Patrick assigned me this campaign, it never occurred to me I’d end up working for Tina. Seven years ago, when she was still working for Whitefish, she almost torpedoed my career. I was her assistant brand manager on Tetrotek, a major client, and we’d been working for months on a new pitch for them. Two days before we were due to deliver it, a rival advertising agency, JMVD, presented a pitch that was almost word for word the same as our own. Assumingwewere the plagiarists, Tetrotek defected to JMVD, and there was a searching internal investigation at Whitefish to find the source of the leak.

I’dbeen the one seen lunching with JMVD’s Business Director twice in the preceding month; lunches Tina had personally asked me to take, and subsequently denied requesting. She deliberately set me up to take the fall to get back at me because she’d found out about me and Andy. Patrick came within a whisker of firing me, and it took me a long time to claw back my reputation and his respect.

‘OK, Caz,’ Patrick says, as I sit down, ‘why don’t you start us off with a general overview of where we are on the campaign?’

‘Well, it’s still early days,’ I stall. I haven’t even had a chance to speak to the creative team yet. I glance at Nolan Casey, our Creative Director, for help, but he’s studiously looking the other way. ‘Once we have a clearer idea as to what Univest are looking for on this—’

‘But you’re the Account Director,’ Tina coos. ‘Isn’t it your job to tell me what I want?’

I’ve had enough of this. ‘As you know, Univest has scored a few own goals recently,’ I say crisply. ‘That business with the sweatshops in India – it got a lot of media play. Then there was the scandal over the paraben-free shampoo, and the recall on the organic fabric softener—’

‘Obviously, that was all before my time as Marketing Director,’ Tina says testily.

‘What you need to do now is re-establish trust,’ I shoot back. ‘JMVD’s policy when they had the account was to ignore these PR disasters and focus on the quality of their brands, but I think they’re wrong. What we need to do is acknowledge the elephant in the room, apologise, and move on.’

‘Apologise?’

Patrick makes a calming motion to Tina. ‘Let’s hear her out.’

AJ nudges me and I open the folder he gave me, fanning a sheaf of bright graphs and pie charts onto the beech conference table. I have no idea what they’re supposed to show, since I haven’t yet had a chance to read them, but no one looks at them; they never do. ‘You’re not the only conglomerate to get caught up in ashit-storm like this. But the more you ignore it, the more the problem festers.’ I tap the graphs as if it’s all right in front of us. ‘After Barclays apologised to its customers for the role it played in the Libor rate-rigging scandal, the problem went away. Toyota, Goldman Sachs, even Facebook – they’ve all used the corporate apology as a means of addressing branding issues, and they’ve all bounced back quickly as a result.’

‘I disagree,’ Tina snaps. ‘If we apologise, all we’ll do is bring attention to the issue and give the story legs. Our brands are blue-chip. We need to focus on their strengths and let these distractions die down.’

How did this woman end up running the marketing division of one of the biggest international companies in the country? She wouldn’t recognise a market trend if it bit her on her flabby, conniving arse.

‘There’s no such thing as blue-chip anymore,’ I say tersely. ‘Your customers are dying off, and the next generation doesn’t have brand loyalty to anything. Social media has changed the landscape. The era of a specific media push around a single theme is over. Brands need to be having a conversation with their customers 24/7 to win their loyalty. And the foundation of any relationship is honesty.’

I hold her gaze, daring her to contradict me. We both know I’m not talking about advertising.

‘This is why I wanted Caz on this,’ Patrick intervenes. ‘You and I are part of a different generation, Tina. We need to think the way these kids think.’

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