CARBON TAX PITCH

OMG! It’s panic stations on the Carbon Tax pitch. The work has got to be ready next week for the first tissue session. All the Clients are going to be there, including Julia, Greg, Bob, Rob, Tony and some other random. ECD has had a nervous breakdown and had to be rushed to hospital so at the last minute we’ve brought in this gay freelance creative team who are sooooo up themselves coz they worked on Kevin 07 (although that wasn’t one of their lines - they reckon they had a much better one which was Manna from Kevin). CEO reviewed the work this morning and threw a mega spaz attack saying we were all idiots and had entirely missed the point of the brief. Head of Strategy disagreed, saying we were focusing on the balance of nature and CEO yells “any fool knows it’s all about tax cuts!” HOS starts getting hysterical about the “semiotic beauty of holding the balance of nature in the palm of our hands” but CEO cuts her off and yells that the only balance of nature he can see in the room is coming out the top of Inga’s bra and he’d happily hold them both in the palm of his hands but it won’t win us the pitch. At that point HOS storms out of the room and so we get ECD on speakerphone from the hospital where he’s high as a kite on some cocktail of free drugs (soooo not unusual!) and he goes it’s all about future generations and the only way to win the pitch is with shots of people’s grandkids playing happily in a carbon-free world but CEO goes “No! No! No!” coz that would only remind everyone what some dude said about it taking over a thousand years to fix global warming and we’d been clearly briefed to avoid at all costs any suggestion that the Carbon Tax would actually do anything to help stop Climate Change. One of the freelancers suggests maybe the brief is really about people power and nothing to do with CO2 and at that point CEO loses it completely and starts tearing down all the layouts from the wall and ripping them in half with his teeth and getting bits of paper stuck in his mouth and yelling “well if that’s the goddam brief, what’s all this shit?” which I thought was kind of unfair coz their ideas were lame but at least they were pretty much bang on what we’d asked for and I was just about to say that when HOS comes back into the room looking sick as a dog and goes “Email from the Client – with some minor revisions to the brief.” Everyone stares at her, apart from ECD who we can hear on the speakerphone demanding the nurse give him some more pethidine. “So? What is it?” says CEO, sounding ultra pissed off. “They want us to, um, emphasise how families are going to be at least $953.00 a year better off.” Everybody waits while CEO finishes pulling bits of paper out of his mouth. “Is that it?” he says finally. HOS sighs. “They’ve also changed the name. Now it’s called the Carbon Cashback Family Bonus Scheme.”