(Below is an excerpt from Tales From a Roundabout: Volume 4. Enjoy!)
Doug Murphy paced back and forth in the
reception area of the Aztec Hillbilly Brewery
headquarters in Carmel, Indiana. It was only
a month until the Fourth of July, and Doug was the city
employee in charge of corporate sponsorships for both
the parade and the Carmelfest event that accompanied
it. Carl Bernard had called him for an urgent meeting
that morning. Bernard was the vice president of
marketing at Aztec Hillbilly and the man who had
committed $100,000 worth of sponsorship to the
mayor’s favorite event. Murphy was worried they were
about to pull their commitment. After the Bud Light
fiasco, beer companies were reevaluating all their partnerships,
no matter how safe they might seem.
Doug started to take off his jacket, but realized his
armpits were soaked with nervous sweat and pulled it
back on to hide his stains and embarrassment. He
continued to mutter to himself about the counterarguments
he intended to use. “We’re as American as apple
pie. It’s a Fourth of July parade. Who’s going to boycott
you for that? Think of the children. How can we afford
rides if there’s not a beer sponsor for the Tilt-a-Whirl?”
Regina Simpson tapped her feet and hoped her
boss would hurry up. Doug’s muttering under his
breath made her nervous. This guy is about to come
unhinged, she thought. And the frat boys running this
brewery don’t pay me enough to take a bullet from a nut job.
She dug pepper spray out of her purse and kept an eye
on Doug.
A light blinked on her phone. “Mr. Bernard will see
you now,” she practically shouted. She stood up,
adjusted the Dashiki slipcover on her office chair, and
motioned for him to walk in front of her. No way she
was going to turn her back on the guy who had just
talked to himself for 15 minutes in her lobby. This was
her lobby. Her place of Zen. No muttering white boy
was going to mess that up.
At the last second, she stepped in front of Doug and
opened the door to Mr. Bernard’s office. “You can go in.”
She shut the door behind him and returned to her desk.
She replaced the pepper spray and dug out some weed
edibles that she drove to Michigan to buy every other
month. Regina took a deep breath and decided it was
all Mr. Bernard’s problem now.
“Douglas, have a seat. Welcome.” Carl Bernard
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motioned to a set of leather chairs in front of his oversized
cherry desk. “Thanks for seeing me on short
notice.”
“Oh, no problem. Unless there is a problem?” Doug
was sweating and already losing his composure.
“Do you want a drink? Some water or a beer? I think
we can make that happen.” Bernard laughed and indicated
the window behind his desk that overlooked the
production floor of the brewery below.
“No, I’m fine.” He wasn’t fine.
“Let me get to the point.” Bernard frowned and that
made Doug sweat even more. “I know that lots of
banners and whatnot have been printed for the parade.
Lots of marketing already done.” He paused for
moment and then leaned forward. “But we want to
make a change.”
There it was. The news Doug had been worried
about since he got the call from Bernard’s assistant the
previous afternoon. The news that had kept him up all
night. He forgot all the objections he practiced and
went right to begging.
“Oh, Mr. Bernard. Please don’t do this to us now. I
don’t have time to secure another sponsor.”
“Another sponsor? What the hell are you talking
about?”
“You said make a change.”
“In products! Did you think we were dropping the
event?” He laughed, and Doug felt embarrassed. “No, we
just don’t want our beer brand to be the sponsor.” He
Tales From a Roundabout 361
got up and walked over to a small fridge next to a fully
restored coin-operated deer hunting game. The
graphics on the side of the game showed a deer in the
crosshairs of a hunting rifle. Doug thought the deer
looked like him.
Bernard pulled out a white can and tossed it to
Doug. He ducked instead of catching it. The can
skidded off the desk and onto the floor.
Bernard shook his head. “Doug, relax for heaven’s
sake.” He grabbed another can from the fridge and
walked it over to him. Bernard pointed to the labeling.
“What do you think of that?”
Doug looked it over. It was white with a metallic
grey silhouette of a person holding a can and a cell
phone.
“We want to know how quickly we can change all
the banners, signage, and social media marketing to
Trendy Booze. It’s the newest lifestyle brand in the
Aztec Hillbilly family of products. We’re still in, we just
want to promote this product instead.”
Doug’s initial panic had started to subside. “You
mean this stuff is actually called Trendy Booze?”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding me. When you first handed it to me,
I thought that was a placeholder.”
“No, that’s the name.”
Doug looked from the can to Bernard. His initial
fear of being dropped by the sponsor had given way to
disbelief. “Did you come up with this yourselves or did
362 JEFF STANGER
you pay some outside firm for this? Because if you did,
you got ripped off.”
“What do you mean? Our in-house people came up
with this campaign and it’s brilliant. Today’s young
people want you to get right to the point. They don’t
want to sort through a bunch of options on the shelf.
Sure, we could go the craft beer route and come up with
all sorts of names like Rail Splitter Lager and Dragon’s
Breath IPA. But this is about social proof and influencer
marketing and all that shit.”
“Huh? Can you repeat that in English?”
“We put a silhouette of pretty people with a can in
one hand and a cell phone held up in a selfie pose in
the other and we sell the hell out of it to teens and
twenty-somethings.”
“Teens? It’s alcohol.”
Bernard replied, “Oh, don’t be naive. You didn’t get
drunk when you were in high school?”
“Well, yeah, but …”
“No buts. Any booze manufacturer that tells you
they aren’t considering the vast underage drinking
market is full of shit.”
“Okay, but what’s in it?”
“Does it matter what’s in it?” He answered himself.
“No, of course not. What matters is which influencers
we get to swallow it on TikTok.”
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