By João Ventura

Adrian Adkins was one of the best creatives at We sell! Advertising and Marketing, Inc. He was responsible for the architecture of most of the agency's major campaigns. His imagination knew no bounds. A few years ago, one of his colleagues had told him: "You will still be swallowed by your own imagination.” Whether the phrase was the result of admiration or envy, what is certain is that its author had long since been fired from We Sell! while the career of A&A, as he was called by his colleagues, was still solid and just a short step away from a vice-presidency.

That morning, Adrian was amazed by a title he had found while wandering around the web: On the evils of tobacco! He accessed the site, and read the story in a mixture of surprise and admiration.

That Chekhov had chosen a title which was not the subject of the lecture given by the protagonist was nothing that shocked Adrian Adkins: after all, that's what marketing was all about, catchy phrases to sell no matter what...

But that title was a phrase of genius! It would resonate in the reader's head long after he had finished reading the short monologue of the despairing Ivan Ivanovich Nyukhin. "How did these Russians write so effectively in the 19th century..."

The sentence began to do somersaults in Adrian’s brain and it didn't take long for another sentence to take its place: On the evils of alcohol. And soon Adrian's fingers began hammering the keyboard, producing a text inspired by this title.

It was a known fact that all the computers in We Sell! were backed up to the server, as a precaution against the possible loss of creative or other material due to the possible crash of a machine. A much lesser known fact was that the agency's CEO had direct and immediate access to everything that was put on the server, allowing him to ‘look over the shoulder’ of any employee and watch what he was working on. 

And that morning, in the review he often made of his creatives' work, the CEO had come across Adrian Adkins's text.

He found  On the evils of alcohol amusing. And he immediately thought it could be useful in some future campaign, now that the public authorities were beginning to worry about alcoholism among teenagers. It had the irreverent touch that would speak to young people, while at the same time conveying the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption.

When he looked again, Adrian was already on another one:  On the evils of car driving. The text had the right balance between humour and facts, and the CEO thought that the Road Prevention Authority might be interested in structuring a campaign based on that text.

What the CEO most appreciated about Adrian was his ability to defend a point of view and its opposite, an extremely valuable skill for a creative in the marketing arena. And he watched, in his comfortable office, and with a smile on his lips, the unfolding of texts entitled On the evils of eating pork, soon followed by  On the evils of being vegetarian. After On the evils of a sedentary lifestyle soon came the counterpoint On the evils of physical exercise…

A red light flashed on the intercom. It was a call from his bank manager, because there had been some changes in the share prices of some stock in his portfolio. The CEO prided himself on making quick decisions, and spent the next ten minutes giving buy and sell orders. When he hung up, his bank account had grown by several hundred thousand dollars.

When he returned to observing Adrian Adkins's work, he felt some discomfort: his creative was now writing a text with the title "On the evils of rating agencies".

"This is not quite the typical work of We Sell!", thought the CEO. "It could be sold to a government on an appropriate occasion, of course, but with due caution so that our name doesn't come up..."

But when he saw the title of the following text appear, the CEO pressed the emergency button on the intercom and gave an order, quick and precise.

***

A&A was so absorbed in his writing that he didn't even notice the two men in white coats who noiselessly entered his cubicle. The one in front carried a syringe whose contents he quickly injected into Adrian's arm. Adrian collapsed immediately. The white-coats dragged his inanimate body out of the cubicle, placed it on a stretcher they had left outside the door, and sped down the corridor towards the exit.

Anyone watching Adrian's computer monitor would have seen the cursor positioned at the end of the text begin to shift to the left, quickly erasing the text character by character. When all that was left was the title, On the evils of marketing, the whole line was marked and instantly disappeared.

After making sure that there was no trace of the text left, neither on Adrian's computer nor on the server, the CEO talked to himself, as he often did in a tense situation: "Crisis over!" He rose from his chair and had one last thought for his former creative: “Sorry, A&A, nothing personal, but you’ve just gone over the edge! And I’ve got a marketing agency to run…”

He left his office, closed the door and went to lunch.

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