This is Doc Marsh.
He’s a sandhill crane that somehow graduated from medical
school (I know, makes me wonder what I’m doing with my life, too) and is now a
physician at Marshfield Clinic, a network of hospitals and clinics in
Wisconsin.
Doc Marsh is too modest to say so himself, but he’s a pretty
big deal. I don’t mean to drop any names, but check out the good doctor hanging
out with none other than rock star Eau Claire School Board At-Large—and in
Charge—Commissioner Joe Luginbill, a.k.a. the bad boy of the City of Eau Claire Utility Appeals Board.
Yeah, the Joe
Luginbill. That ain’t no Photoshop, yo.
The reason I know that Doc Marsh wouldn’t be a shameless
namedropper is because, contrary to his origin story on the Marshfield Clinic
website, Doc Marsh wasn’t created by
Marshfield Clinic. Rather, this alumnus of the Avian School of Medicine was the
product of the finest ragtag group of advertising professionals with whom I’ve
had the privilege to work: 88 Advertising.
Truth be told, I hadn’t thought about Doc Marsh or 88 Advertising
in years. But back to school week—with all these commercials for school supplies and dorm gear1—coupled with an unsolicited reminder from Facebook that
I’m still an admin for the Doc Marsh fan page we set up has made me nostalgic
for the halcyon days of senior spring semester. This nostalgia has, in turn,
provided a stark reminder of my rapidly evaporating youth, the fading sense of
limitless possibility, and the ephemerality of all things.
So join me as I work through this via the most effective of
quarter-life crisis remedies: a needlessly exhaustive history on a topic with
limited, if any, general appeal.
* * *
ADV4800, better known as Advertising Campaigns, is the
capstone course in the advertising major at the University of Florida. The
premise is simple: the class is divided into several teams (or “agencies”) of
about eight students each, and each agency creates and pitches an advertising
campaign for a real-life client with a real-life advertising challenge. The
agency whose campaign most impresses the client wins.
It’s treated as Very Serious Business. Some advertising
majors have described the class as basically having a full-time job; some plan
their schedules so that ADV4800 is their only class during their final
semester, while others supposedly quit their actual jobs in preparation for the
Campaigns workload.
While that may be a bit much, there’s good reason to take the
class seriously. If rumors are to be believed, past clients gave the winning
agency pretty great prizes: a travel agency purportedly gave free plane tickets
to Europe to one winning team several years ago; a brewery gave its winning
team a year’s supply of beer. It’s entirely possible that these are apocryphal
Campaigns urban legends, but even without fabulous prizes, you get a chance to
impress a client and their ad agency, and maybe you can parlay that into an
entry-level position fetching crullers and advancing Keynote slides after
graduation—which is the greatest prize of all, right?
And make no mistake; the course is structured to be treated
as Very Serious Business. To ensure everybody treats the project seriously,
agencies have the ability to “fire” underperforming or unpleasant team members
via unanimous vote. A fired employee would either have to complete the project
from scratch by themselves (close to impossible, and almost certainly an F),
find another agency to “hire” them (pretty difficult as well—who would want to
risk taking on another team’s rejected riff-raff?), or drop the course and try again
next semester (which means delaying graduation).2
* * *
88 Advertising was formed entirely by chance. In this case,
“chance” is slang for “Sprint’s spectacularly bad coverage in Gainesville.”
When I was at UF, there were two professors you wanted for
Campaigns. Both had well-deserved reputations for being smart, insightful,
encouraging, and all-around amazing people. (Basically, they were the Joe
Luginbills of advertising professors.) One of them—the professor in my first
real advertising class and one of my favorite instructors ever—left UF. It was
genuinely upsetting (seriously, he was amazing), but we understood; I suppose
there are only so many jorts and flip-flops you can take before wanting a
change of scenery.
Luckily, the other professor stuck around, and I snagged the
last seat in his class. This would leave me all alone in Campaigns without my
three friends from previous group projects, so I repeatedly refreshed the
Drop/Add page on my laptop to check if more seats were available for them to
join me. It seems thoughtful, until
you realize I was asking three other people to rearrange their entire schedule just so that I don’t have to be
alone. (Was I a selfish dick in college? I didn’t think so at the time, but in
retrospect: maybe?)
Finally, I caught lightning in a bottle: three seats opened up. I texted my three friends immediately (“QUICK 3 SEATS IN CAMPAIGNS RIGHT
NOW”); two of them grab seats within minutes; one, I’d learn when it was too late,
never got the text. He got stuck in the other Campaigns class, unfortunately.
If he had gotten the text, though, 88 Advertising wouldn’t
have existed. Some acquaintances from our previous courses had a group of five
and needed exactly three more people to complete their team, and our smaller
group of three just happened to be sitting right next to them. Ours was the
first team formed.
It’s not exactly clear why we picked “88 Advertising” for
our name, but the explanation we settled on was that 88 miles per hour was the
speed required for time travel in the Back
to the Future films. We set up an official (and immediately-neglected) team Twitter account and 88advertising.com, a website that had our logo and a clip
of Doc Brown saying, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” (Because we’re
such innovative and creative thinkers that we don’t follow predefined paths!
And, also, because when we brainstorm, we operate at 1.21 gigawatts!
Thankfully, my agency didn’t make unforgivable dorkiness a fireable offense.)
We later found out that some neo-Nazis use the number 88 as a symbol; “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so “88” is “HH,” or “Heil Hitler.” This was obviously distressing, and in our second team meeting, we discussed changing the name. The consensus: well, we’re definitely not neo-Nazis, but we did already buy the domain name, so… yeah.
Also, we arbitrarily decided to become
arch-rivals with another agency that called themselves Checkm8te and had a chess motif on their identity materials. As far as I
can tell, it was entirely one-sided (though one of our classmates told us on
Pitch Day that “the biggest competition is between you guys and Checkm8te,” so
maybe we eventually willed a rivalry into existence) and for the stupidest
reason: we thought of the idea to have a
numerical name first, damn it.
(And also, how are you supposed to pronounce that? If it’s
supposed to be like “checkmate,” shouldn’t the name be “Checkm8”? You’d
pronounce Checkm8te like “checkmatete.” But I digress.)
* * *
When we discovered that our client would be Marshfield
Clinic, we were kind of bummed. No offense to Wisconsin’s finest health care
provider or anything, but our dreams of free tickets to Europe or limitless
booze evaporated, and in its place… a free checkup, perhaps? Or a coupon for 25
percent off a pap smear or something? Alas, there would be no additional prize
for winning beyond the standard $100 bonus—a C-note that, it should be noted,
would have to be split eight ways. So basically, $12.50 for each of us was
on the line.
But it didn’t matter. Ours was a group of competitive
people, and we all wanted to win, even if the prize would be barely enough to
cover a meal at Chili’s, excluding tip. That’s not unusual; Campaigns was
designed to bring out the fighting spirit in even the most indifferent student.
What was unusual was that we somehow
adopted a team policy that we were a team powered by love.
To wit, here was a set of informal team principles that we
wrote, presumably instead of, y’know, actually working:
For the record, we never delivered a presentation drunk. And
man, we didn’t like Checkm8te.
It gets even cutesier. This is an actual excerpt from a
draft of our team philosophy:
88 Advertising is a group of eight advertising professionals who are smart, creative, dedicated, and driven. And we pretty much love each other, too.
Dorky? Kind of. Truthful? You bet.
It’s the special kind of love that comes with being around people whom you respect and admire. We all bring something to the table, and we bring out the best in each other. We’re here for each other, and we support each other—even if we’re cringing at each others’ bad jokes, or attempting and failing to give each other high-fives, or scamming free sandals from American Eagle campus reps.
We say, with varying levels of facetiousness, that we’re the most loving team ever. But that’s not just a reflection of our sentimentalism; it’s a reflection of the work we can produce. It’s true that our work is a product of our love, but just as true is that our love is a product of our work: the more we see what we’re capable of, the more we learn about each other’s abilities, and the more time we spend with each other both professionally and personally, the more our affection for each other is affirmed.
Yikes, right?
I remember I had a hand in writing that, and as
tongue-in-cheek as that excerpt sounds—especially for us, people who weren’t
just “smart, creative, dedicated, and driven” but also at times a bunch of
jaded smartasses—I think I was being sincere when I wrote it. It’s not just
that I really liked my teammates (that American Eagle aside isn’t a weird joke;
we, as a team, scored free footwear from American Eagle by surreptitiously
following the campus reps around the Reitz Union North Lawn and pretending to
stumble upon the giveaway—seriously, these were my peeps); I wanted to have at
least some evidence before graduation that, despite the advertising field’s
reputation for being a cutthroat, hypercompetitive, dog-eat-dog field, you
could do good work predicated on respect, admiration, and affection for your
colleagues.
And we lived up to that: we did become fast friends with each other. We ate lunch and dinner
and frozen yogurt together, at first as “on the clock” meetings, but then just
because. We’d go out for drinks or sushi, then, because we were adorable, note the
trips as “team-building exercises” on our required weekly Agency Activity
Reports. (In retrospect, it must’ve looked suspicious to our professor that we
had a team meeting… at a bar in midtown… that ended at 3 AM.) We gave each
other personal3 and professional advice, talked about our dreams and fears for
post-collegiate life, and cheered each other on whenever one of us scored
and/or aced a job interview.
* * *
Somewhere along the line, we decided we needed a Marshfield
Clinic mascot. We had two criteria for deciding what animal we’d use:
- Is the animal native to Wisconsin?
- Is it easy to draw the animal wearing a lab coat?
Some furious Wikipediaing later, we decided on the sandhill crane. There was some concern over whether the sandhill crane is unique enough to Wisconsin—they’re all over the country, so these birds are native to Wisconsin in the same way a housecat is native to Florida—but then we saw how easy it was to draw a crane in a lab coat, so that pretty much sealed the deal. As a placeholder, we called our creation “Doctor Marshie” and made mental notes to come up with a better name ASAP. I assume at some point we were all just, eh, whatever, let’s just chop off two syllables and call it done.
We did some rough concept art, but then hired one of our
roommates to clean up our sketches. (88 Advertising’s accounts payable records
show that payment was rendered in full in the form of Pabst Blue Ribbon.) This
was the first official graven image of Doc Marsh:
There exists an image of a maniacal, knife-wielding Doc
Marsh that was included in the art we received. We declined to use it.
My proudest contribution was some truly heinous Doc Marsh
puns on the Doc Marsh Facebook page:
Also of note: we ordered a sandhill crane stuffed animal to
be a sort of Doc Marsh avatar that ultimately served no real purpose in our
presentation besides lookin’ cute (which I thought was supposed to be my job,
amirite ladies?) and was really more expensive than it should’ve been. And we temporarily “adopted” a sandhill crane named Chevor at the Wildwood Zoo in Marshfield,
Wisconsin. We got a bio sheet and photo and everything!
I put “adopted” in scare quotes because none of us remember
actually sending the zoo a check; we remember contacting them for more
information, and then the adoption certificate arrived. So there’s a chance we
screwed the Wildwood Zoo out of $35, which, if so: we apologize. But if it’s
any consolation, we probably used the $35 for team-building exercises.
* * *
This story ends the way you think it does. 88 Advertising’s pitch was selected by Marshfield Clinic as the best creative pitch (two other agencies, which our old Twitter account tells me were called +Moxie and Lighthouse, shared the prize for best strategic pitch), and we each collected a sweet $12.50, which was indeed enough to cover a dinner at Chili’s.
That receipt was real, by the way, and happened entirely by
chance.
At graduation, we all sat together, and each of us put an 88
Advertising logo on our caps. It sounds impossibly lame when I say it, but it’s
true and I’m going to say it anyway: we spent our final moments as undergrads
together. And we spent them chanting “88,” probably to the eyerolls of anybody
within earshot who knew who we were.
Sometime between then and now, Marshfield Clinic actually
made Doc Marsh a real thing—although they made him look younger and less fat,
which, ugh, typical youth-obsessed,
body-shaming advertising. Make no mistake; our industry is evil, and not
even highly-educated, fictitious birds are safe.
Also, can we all get free Doc Marsh plushies or something?
Because suddenly our $12.50 seems somehow inadequate.
* * *
The easy takeaway from my 88 Advertising experience is some
clichéd notion about the importance of having coworkers you like and about whom
you care deeply. That’s true enough: many people spend as much as half (or
more!) of their waking life at work with their colleagues, and the people at
work become an imaginary family of sorts. If you’re indifferent to your
coworkers, work tends to be boring; if you hate your coworkers, work tends to
be miserable; if you love your coworkers, that love can imbue the most
meaningless of tasks with a sense of mission and purpose.
Ostensibly, that’s what happened here. There’s no real
reason for any of us to care about a chain of medical practices in Wisconsin;
even if, inexplicably, Marshfield Clinic and/or its advertising agency were so
impressed by our work that they offered us jobs, it’s doubtful any of us
would’ve moved to Wisconsin to take it. Yet, we cared—a lot.
Some of it was just natural competitiveness and a desire to
end our time at UF on a high note, to be sure. But a lot of it was the joy that
came from creating a community that could depend on each other and the mild
high that comes from growing closer by having a shared vision. In retrospect, it’s
remarkable how much we jelled; I don’t recall a single fight or argument or
even a cross word, even during the most stressful times. (I remember the
opposite, actually; when we were close to a project milestone, we’d send emails
and texts asking each other what we could do to make each other’s lives easier,
because we were fuckin’ adorbs.)
But that would be a lame takeaway. The truth is, for all the
hype about how Campaigns recreates what things will be like in the real world,
the course hasn’t resembled my lived reality of what real-world work life is
like. Campaigns creates a situation in which everybody has the same goal, and
your team members have every incentive to trust and be trusted, to do good
work, and to be there for each other. In the real world, your coworkers are
often incentivized to sabotage, backstab, and create the illusion of working
hard without necessarily doing so, all to get their promotion or their
raise. Hell, I’ve worked in low-stakes workplaces, and this still exists when there’s nothing of
real value to be gained—people will act shittily just to get the slightly nicer
cubicle or a raise that amounts to 55 cents an hour or the right to the kitty
cat Post-it dispenser4.
* * *
When I think back to 88 Advertising, I think of this: By
senior year, and especially by senior spring semester, I had all but completely stopped making an effort to meet new people—it’s the last few months of
college, so what’s the point? It’s going to be tough enough to hang on to your
friends that you’ve known since freshman year post-graduation—time, geography,
and the pressures of becoming an adult in a then-bleak economy all have a way
of reducing even the strongest of connections to a tenuous,
occasional-text-or-Facebook-message dynamic—that relationships that gestate
during the nine months of senior year will wind up stillborn by the time you
start moving out of your college apartment.
Even at the apex of the 88 Advertising lovefest, I still
wasn’t Pollyanna about these realities. I remember thinking more than a few
times how much it sucked that, in all likelihood, these connections are going
to be temporary. And, of course, for the most part, they were: of my seven 88 Advertising colleagues, I’ve talked to exactly
two of them in the past three years. And while that’s disappointing to think
about—when I mentally counted the years just now, I audibly said oh damn to myself—that seems about
right.
Senior year was my favorite year of college, and it was in
part thanks to 88 Advertising5. Having this group of people, even temporarily,
to accompany me through my final months of college and act at times as a
support group, cheering section, and collective confidant played a role in turning
what could’ve been a terrifying and nauseating transitional time into probably
the time I felt happiest and most at peace and, if not necessarily fearless about the future, then kind of scared-but-excited
about it.
So that’s my real takeaway from—and the legacy of—88 Advertising: that
impermanent connections have value, and just because something is temporary
doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning. And that’s heady stuff for what is
essentially just a study group for a class
project, but hey: transitional times have a way of filling normally
insignificant things with more meaning than they should have. These people were
pretty great, and I’m glad I got to know them, even if it was just for a little bit.
Or, at least, that was my takeaway, until it turned out that
Doc Marsh became a real thing. That’s a much less bittersweet legacy for 88
Advertising, so I’m happy to go with that instead.
* * *
Oh, and also, we learned that “Use Twitter!” will not be
well-received as an answer to, “How can Marshfield Clinic reach out to the
Amish community?”
1I started writing this back in September. I decided to finish it after I wished one of my 88 Advertising colleagues a happy birthday and he expressed interest in reading it (and to make sure it was completed before Marty McFly Goes to the Future Day).
2I’ve always been fascinated by this aspect of Campaigns. Wouldn’t it be crazy strategy if someone joins an agency with the intention of being a mole for another agency? The mole steals all of the team’s work, then acts like an ass to get fired, then gets hired by the agency he was working for all along. It’s an amazing bit of chicanery—especially if the agency who’s supposed to hire the mole double-crosses him and declines to hire him in the end.
3I remember one of my teammates was going through a breakup, and I used my column in the campus newspaper to try to cheer her up, resulting in an article describing all the reasons why a breakup can be a good thing right there in the editorial pages. And although, yes, I totally had a crush on her, I’d like to point out my super awesome restraint in not asking her out on a date, because I figured either she’d say no OR she’d say yes and my awkward-ass self would have, probabilistically speaking, found a way to make the date go terribly, and either way, I didn’t want to risk making her feel uncomfortable having to work with either the Dude She Turned Down or the Dude With Whom She Went On A Shitty Date for an entire semester. Also, I thought she was really smart and pretty and I got a case of the cowardice. Really, either explanation works.6
4Just kidding—I got that kitty cat Post-it dispenser thanks to an awesome coworker, so that’s actually a bad example. But my general point stands.
5It was also thanks in huge part to my amazing senior year roommate, but this essay isn’t about him, and we don’t really get effusive about each other ever since we got dinner at a Cheesecake Factory and a well-meaning waitress thought we were a couple and started earnestly suggesting post-dinner date ideas for us. It’s my bad—I had a mustache at the time, so I can see how she could’ve gotten confused.
6Probably more the coward thing. Hey, she was so cool and so cute and I got a little intimidated. It happens. Don’t judge me.
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