Olivia asked one of her assistants to fetch some chamomile tea for me to soothe my nerves, and then we retreated to her office on the third floor. Her office was elegantly designed, with most of the room dedicated to a pair of beautiful sofas and matching chairs—clearly this office was designed with the comfort of elite clientele in mind. Her actual desk was a slim glass object, its surface empty except for a tablet computer and her phone. No pictures on the walls. Some nice accent lamps, providing the room with just a hint of warmth around the edges while maintaining a giant pool of optical frost in the center.
We were silent as she scrolled through docs on her tablet for a few moments. It seemed like we were flagrantly avoiding the topic of me shattering glass with my voice, and I didn’t understand why. Wasn’t that kind of a major development in the history of things people do with their voices? Or was there some mundane explanation for it hiding behind another layer of trade secrecy? Like, oh we’re just commercializing a classified technique the military pioneered years ago to make invading countries with glass walls significantly easier, that sort of thing.
I said, “How many other people have shattered glass during these usability tests?”
“None,” she said, a little too casually for me.
“How many other people have even taken these usability tests?”
“This round? You’re the first person we’ve invited this round. Oh, we’ve tested hundreds of people over the years, but our selection criteria for the tests has gotten stricter as we’ve learned more about how the sequences work. Still, you’ve shown us something new today, Isobel. We all have a lot to think about.”
She fell silent, her attention drifting back to her tablet. I started to visibly squirm. I think it was visible. I mean, it was almost writhing, to be technical about it. I sipped my chamomile tea and did not feel soothed.
Finally, she said, “Your last employment application with us was two years ago. Looks like we missed an opportunity when we passed on you.”
Wait, what?
I had come to peace with that very fact, honestly, and wasn’t super excited to revisit it. Last time I applied here, I was working as the marketing and brand manager for a pretty great indie record label, where the pay was shit but the experience was good and the music we sold was even tolerable. Unlike my prior applications, for positions that were clearly out of my league, this time I actually felt overqualified for the role they were hiring for: social media coordinator for Jenning & Reece’s entertainment group.
“I’m sure you had a wealth of talent to choose from,” I said.
“Actually, it looks like we wound up hiring someone incompetent for that position,” she replied. “The reason you didn’t get the job is because the hiring manager detected your obsession with SparkleCo, and thought that would be problematic.”
Yeah, yeah. I swear people just didn’t value subject matter expertise like they used to.
“But that was two years ago,” she continued. “I’m sure you’ve matured since then.”
She said that as a statement, but she meant it as a question.
I nodded, still a little surprised we were having this conversation.
“I have an opening on my team that you might be interested in,” she revealed. “If you happen to be on the market, that is.”
“Interesting,” I said calmly. “I’m actually in between opportunities at the moment.”
“I have need of a senior marketing specialist, to assist me primarily with the SparkleCo account and a couple other top-tier clients.”
Pretty sure my eyeballs started fluttering wildly like a slot machine until they landed on giant red hearts.
“I’d love to hear more,” I said.
“This role would also assist me in the ongoing design of tests like the one you just experienced,” she explained. “It’ll probably be a fifty-fifty split between high-touch client management and devising tests for our core product suite.”
“Your core product suite? Don’t those spells belong to SparkleCo?”
She shook her head and said, “SparkleCo is licensing our technology to power the game’s spellcasting. It’s an exclusive contract, but the intellectual property belongs to Jenning & Reece.”
“So—but what is the intellectual property?”
“The NDA you signed for the test isn’t sufficient for me to reveal too much just yet.”
She came out from behind her desk and sat down next to me on the couch. Shit was about to get informal in here.
“But look at it this way,” she said. “One of the core problems with advertising today is that your message has to include too many things—what to buy, why to buy it, when to buy it, how to buy it, how much it costs, how it will change your life, all that nonsense. The science of advertising is the endless pursuit of compression of meaning. Density of meaning. So for any given ad proposition, what is the absolute least amount of meaning required to be effective, and can you make a given ad more effective by using fewer but more powerful units of meaning?”
In my imagination I thought she was describing something like “blipverts” from this old TV show called Max Headroom, where they jam thirty seconds’ worth of advertising into five seconds of subliminal messaging, and it occasionally makes people’s heads explode. As though just saying the same stuff but saying it really fast would still work somehow.
Turns out, that was not at all what she was describing.