[Somber ambient audio track queues. Hollow whistling of wind is also heard]
We want the best the world has to offer.
But in today’s world, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by choices.
**Footage of man in suit walking through the woods. Cuts to him walking through a snow field. Cuts to desert. Feet dragging through sand. Loosens tie. Wipes sweat from his forehead. His expression is one of confusion. We can see he’s clearly lost in these changing environments.**
When freedom of choice becomes a burden...
we need a beacon to guide us.
[Audio transitions to driving, empowering track]
Advancing technology means the needs of the individual are constantly changing...
Those that can’t adapt to today’s rapid pace of innovation are left behind.
**Screen quick cuts through rapid succession of seemingly incongruous yet somehow arguably metaphorical clips. Man in suit drops to his knees, splaying out his briefcase in front of him to open**
[Beat builds]
Discover the right solution at the right time with Successive Marketing.
[Track beat drops]
**Man in suit pulls compass out of his briefcase, looks up knowingly in the correct direction. Thousand yard stare as he rises from his knees, sand streaming off the creases of his pants**
With best-in-class response automation, we help customers choose the marketing strategies and solutions that best fit their unique needs.
**Man begins running in correct direction. Shaky over-the-shoulder shot follows him. Quick zoom/pan shots flash back and forth between cityscape and forest, office space and tundra, conference room and desert. Glitch effects provide edit transition overlays**
Cut through the mess and simplify your life.
**Man stops running as he arrives at edge of cliff, looks off into the distance. Sun is setting. He casts his arm over his brow to shade his eyes and smiles. He has arrived at his solution**
Successive Marketing is the end-all solution.
**Fade to black**
Contact us today.
**Successive Marketing logo fades in**
[Track fades]
_______
And so it went.
Most days she was able to block out the unrelenting audio from the looped corporate video that was her only companion in the expansive, sanitary lobby. Her lobby, she felt. It was her workspace, after all. Everyone else at the mid-sized business spent only a handful of seconds in transition walking through this room. Polite smiles, cordial head nods—not so much to her but at her—as she greeted them one by one and pretended to have a full plate to get through by day’s end.
Some might extend their stay in the space to a couple minutes throughout the day. Maybe catching up on the status of a project with a coworker, waiting for the Uber to pull up, or staring at their phone before heading out into the world. Perhaps the rare check-in with her to see how things were going. But aside from the roughly 40 employee influx and exodus every morning, lunch, and evening, this space was hers for five lonely hours a day. Just her and the looping video that made her brain short circuit on the days she felt its every frame pass by in an endless stream of digital marketing solution purgatory.
Today was one of those days. On days like today, where things were slow, she felt herself losing it.
She’d been working at Successive for 4 months and, so far, had gone through several personal crises about what she was doing there. It was her first receptionist job. She’d previously been an office manager at her uncle’s company back in Des Moine. It had been a solid, fresh-out-of-college job. But after 2 and a half years, it was time to move on. New city. New job. In Minneapolis, she had told herself, she would start a new life for herself. Moving away from her past in Des Moine was exactly what she needed. Her parents had been very supportive of the move.
The reality: she found herself even more isolated at her job during the day than alone at night in her one bedroom apartment.
Her daily visual stimulation consisted of the passersby outside and the looping video, a window into hell itself, displayed prominently on a wall-mounted screen to her right. She had been instructed to turn the monitor on at 8 am and turn it off at 5 pm. “Please keep the volume level where it’s at,” her manager, Seth, had emphasized. She’d eagerly nodded at the time, appreciative to receive direction for something she didn’t have to worry about learning in that short onboarding process. “No problem,” she’d said in earnest. “Doesn’t bother me at all.” If only she could have known that that flippant remark was one she’d ruminate over for weeks.
Now she knew.
It was as if there was an unwritten story that she had so readily overlooked that was now as clear as the crisp, hi-def, 2,500 lumen display on which this video—better suited in a Guantanamo cell—now repeated itself every 60 seconds of every working day. That was 540 times a day...2,700 times a work week this thing was running in the background. She was sure the previous receptionists had tinkered with the volume every chance they got. That had surely led to a point of contention with Seth—eliciting his volume maintenance comment from day one. They’d paid good money to a portfolio-endowed agency to produce this video, and goddamnit, they were going to get their money’s worth. It was going to be seen.
But what was the point of its presence here in the lobby? Was its driving sales? Would any of the prospective customers (a rare sighting thus far in her tenure) who might come into the office actually be persuaded upon sight of such a video? She’d never seen anyone stop to watch it; in her online research she discovered that it had been published to youtube 4 years ago — ancient by digital marketing industry standards.
She often humored herself with a recurring and compounding daydream of a prospective customer actually watching the video and being affected by it. It would start off as all visitations did: with the visitor checking in at the front desk and her informing him his contact would be down momentarily, and could she offer him anything to drink in the meantime. After politely refusing, despite actually wanting a styrofoam cup of coffee with red straw included, he’d attempt to exchange pleasantries about:
a.) The weather
b.) A brief anecdote about finding the office
c.) A trivial detail about her employment at Successive
Upon encountering her slightly off-putting demeanor through this brief conversation (an unintentional consequence of the “always look busy” mentality she’d adopted as a very much bored receptionist), he’d then proceed to wandering around the some-odd 1000 sq ft lobby, setting down his briefcase next to the sterile lounge area’s coffee table and smugly tucking his hands in his blazer’s pockets to step one, two and a half steps towards the monitor. As if magically, the video would queue from the top.
We want the best the world has to offer.
He’d watch, immediately enraptured.
But in today’s world, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by choices.
The audio track would build. He’d lean forward slightly.
When freedom of choice becomes a burden...
His fists would clench, squeezing a leftover piece of gum he’d long since left in his pocket from a date he’d gone on a few weeks back which he thought had gone well yet had never received a text back from despite making her laugh and being incredibly polite and not staring at her too long without blinking as he’d once been told by a family member was a bad habit of his except they’d used the word creepy but he’d chosen to disregard the possibility of being creepy in the slightest because he wasn’t a bad guy at all, and wasn’t he concerned that he was running out of dating years as a 40-something year-old man and secretly yes terrified but outwardly chuckling and unconvincingly telling men that the bachelor life was better than they could imagine and telling women that he was just still looking for “the one” to which the men would chuckle with skeptical envy and the women would give him a sympathetic, falsely warm smile and as he continued to grope the wintergreen stick into an amorphously gooey form while the video built, highlighting everything that was wrong with his life and laying out a solution for everything he wanted most, sweat stains would form on the back and underarms of his collared shirt from feverish anticipation.
we need a beacon to guide us.
“Yes...YES!” He’d mutter aloud. His pupils would be dilated. He’d forget all about the coffee he didn’t have in his hand that he’d really wanted. He was no longer in this lobby. He was no longer confined to societal expectations.
With best-in-class response automation, we help customers choose the marketing strategies and solutions that best fit their unique needs.
“My unique needs. Yes, exactly. That’s right.”
The video would finish, and he’d watch the loop again. This time, his body would be more relaxed, having already seen it once. But his excitement for the production wouldn’t wane.
He would mutter to himself, entranced, right up until the moment the sales rep, who was running late and already prepared with an apology for breaking Successive’s proud corporate culture of never leaving a customer waiting, announced his name in greeting. The rep would be met by an quivering, sticky hand that didn’t smell unpleasant despite its swampy feel and a hearty “Let’s sign the deal right here!”
Was that why they had the video playing every day? Could the genius of the powers that be be to anticipate a situation like this? Or maybe they were just trying to continue the high turnover rate of receptionists. She’d learned through past records she definitely shouldn’t have had access to (perhaps an easter egg left behind by the previous receptionist) that they’d been through six receptionists in the past four years. That was the same timeline as the age of the video.
Those that can’t adapt to today’s rapid pace of innovation are left behind.
Some days, a homeless man would frequent the sheltered corner formed by the building across the street. Weathering had aged his face, but she could tell by his eyes that he was young. Mid-thirties, perhaps. His dirtiness was almost too perfect—seemingly designed the way a Hollywood makeup artist would apply perfect smears of dirt on the cheeks. His baggy clothes were torn every which way and his chapped, flaky lips continued to take on their brutal exposure of sun, wind, and the man’s incessant licking. Despite his costume of filth, he had fiercely deep green eyes that in another life could have been those of a revolutionary. The eyes of a man who could have declared war...commanded a board room...melted hearts.
He would spend his day leaned up against the corner. When he wasn’t trying to catch up on sleep, he was staring directly at her. Or, at least, his penetrating stare seemed to come right at her—she knew the exterior of the building was reflective glass, so he was likely staring at his own reflection. She indulged in this one-way mirror phenomenon. She often thought about stepping outside to give him her leftovers, or just talk to him. Those eyes had a story. But the consequences of not being at her post (“Bathroom breaks are totally ok!”) meant she parked her butt behind that desk day in, day out. Or else risk firing. “What if someone were to just waltz on in, let’s say? How would it look to have an empty lobby and no one to greet a potential client?” Sit. Smile. Pretend.
Discover the right solution at the right time with Successive Marketing.
From what she could tell on their website’s press release section, Successive Marketing had had a hot start, then slowly leveled. They could be fizzling out. She had no idea. She’d been to one quarterly all-hands meeting. She’d been inspired—their CEO was definitely a visionary. And calculating. She could tell that much. The professional interactions she had were primarily over the phone—largely sales folk from other companies who wanted to reach so-and-so in accounts. No one kept her updated on the company’s state of affairs.
The tabs pulled up on her web browser would be very revealing of her idleness, if someone cared to look. They were (in order):
1.) Website of the printer they worked with (her task for the day was to coordinate a print job. This meant sending two, perhaps three emails to verify details)
2.) Amazon: Home & Kitchen: Bedframes
3.) Successive Marketing’s website
4.) Timesheet web page to log her hours
5.) LinkedIn
6.) Minneapolis Metro Transit Schedule
We want the best the world has to offer.
What to do when you live alone in an apartment and don’t have many friends and so even on Friday nights you just decide to go to the gym and the guys there are even more confrontational, albeit friendly, than usual because they too are in a similar situation friend network-wise and think to themselves “hey here’s a girl who clearly doesn’t have a boyfriend or much of a life and I wonder if I could make a small impact on her tonight and then I’ll be here next Friday to follow up and we’ll act like old friends and we’ll slowly get to know each other that way since my only other options are going out with my coworker who only knows how to talk sports which I’m not really interested in or I could smoke weed and play video games but I do that all day Saturday anyway so might as well ‘get out’ on a Friday night and plus she’s always here so maybe she’ll start to recognize me and come up to me,” but really you’re not interested in hooking up with them because the toy you ordered online
Advancing technology means the needs of the individual are constantly changing...
still works just fine and is really all you need to get off and you’re not interested in making out with yet another gross kisser who somehow always seem to be attracted to you and why isn’t there some sort of kissing school and maybe advanced courses could be sex but how would that really work in a classroom setting and plus you’d get all the creeps at that kind of seminar anyway
Those that can’t adapt to today’s rapid pace of innovation are left behind.
like Mark god he’s so disgusting why would I ever sleep with him once let alone repeatedly or it’d be all guys that showed up at that seminar and they’d have to partner off with each other and that’d be pretty funny actually but tonight will just be another quiet evening eating boring leftover chicken, broccoli, and rice from Sunday I won’t even go to the gym or anywhere even though there’s still things I could be checking out in the city
When the freedom to choose becomes a burden...
and tonight’s highlight really will be watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones that everyone else long ago finished but I’m still working on and sometimes I truly brainstorm hard on what can I be doing to have a more social life but every time I venture out into that world it just means expensive drinking and cigarette smoke late nights outside a bar patio and listening to people’s inconsequential problems which seem so trivial compared to the thoughts I’m having all the time and even therapists aren’t that interested and always seem to act like I need to help myself before they can help me but I’m fucking going to them for help what the fuck do you get paid for how can you just pass the buck on the person you’re supposed to be helping that’s not good enough
we need a beacon to guide us.
but the Oxy certainly helps and once that runs out I’ll have to visit my parents and text Mark and meet him somewhere public so that we don’t end up fucking again because I couldn’t live with myself if I let him stick his disgusting penis inside me again even though I already have whatever the fuck he has and I know there’s medicine to make the sores less severe but this shithole of a company’s health insurance policy covers just about anything except things that are health-related or
Cut through the mess and simplify your life.
maybe this time I’ll really stop popping the shit and then I wouldn’t need to see him and we certainly wouldn’t fuck and I could just visit my parents for the sake of visiting them just for a weekend and dad and I could go ride but it just isn’t as fun as it used to be when he was healthier so it might make me even more sad than I am now and then I would definitely call Mark and sleep with him but at least I’d get Oxy and mom would be happy to see me and wouldn’t that be what happy people call a win-win but she’d know why I was there she always seems to know I can see it in the downturned corners of her eyes when she smiles when I arrive and especially when I leave because she knows I’ve got more than clothes in my bags and love in my intentions she lost trust in me after all the times I fucked up and came crawling back. I can’t go back to them until I’m truly there for them. They’ll know because I’ll know. I can’t go back.
Contact us today.
Without announcing it to herself in any conscious capacity, she realized that the reception desk phone would go unanswered tomorrow. It would keep ringing until they found her replacement. They wouldn’t provide many details to the new hire, just as they hadn’t offered much background on the previous receptionists to her. When the bubbly new hire asked about her predecessor, the generic response of “she’s no longer with us” would merely be perceived as professionally related. The new receptionist would quickly dismiss this cold response and would secretly be happy in knowing that she likely didn’t have too high of standards to live up to.
Successive Marketing is the end-all solution.
She packed her things to leave. She would leave the document she had uncovered of the previous receptionists, including herself as the most recent. She would give the homeless man the rest of the cash in her purse on her way back to her apartment. Successive Marketing really was the end-all solution, she thought to herself.
**Fade to black**
[Track fades]