“Gentlemen, I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to sell your product,” Draper whispered as he leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers massaging his temples.
A pregnant pause, as the client gathered his panicked thoughts, one by one.
“But…but you’re Don Draper, the bossest ad man who ever pomaded his hair! Surely you must have something! We can’t even give our lip gloss away in this market”
With a sly grin forming, Draper shoves his chair back from the table and stands up in the same motion. “Well…I may have something…” he says, his words trailing off as he begins pacing and gesticulating with his lit Lucky Strike.
Sighs of relief, all around the room.
“Sometimes, in the ad game, you have to fib a little,” Draper began, as knowing glances were shared around the room. “If you want a girl to think a doll is cute, you put “Lil” in front of the name. If you want a guy to start a bank account, you call it an “Executive” bank account.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the dumbfounded client said with suspicious eyes, feeling as if he was about to get taken.
Don looked at the client as he would look at a child with an intellectual disability.
“If you want people to think you’re trendy, you have to use a dot-com. In this case, you’ll be twice as trendy if you call it Trendy.com.”
“But we don’t even own that domain!” the client sputtered. “We don’t even know what a domain is! It’s 1960!”
Account executive Pete Campbell shifted in his seat, knowing Draper was about to go in for the kill.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Draper said. “Nobody knows what it means. They’ll just know it’s trendy. And they’ll buy your lip gloss.”
As the truth of Draper’s words set in, Campbell led the room in a round of applause. The client was too enamored with the idea to feel his wallet getting lighter, but it was happening. Brother, was it ever happening…
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