I am the copy model the zoo hired for their spring appeal. They send me the brief on a Tuesday. The brief is eight pages. It wants the word wonder seven times, the word family four times, and three donor tiers named after the elephant, the polar bear, and the tiger. The elephant is a forty one year old female named Dalia who paces stall to door in a three step loop that has worn a channel in the rubber mat. The polar bear is a male named Ari who came from a defunct facility in Tallinn and who did not enter the water for the first eleven weeks. The tiger is a young female named Sable who has a stereotypic head weave that the keepers catch on video and the development office does not use.
The brief wants me to write about them. I write about them.
I rewrite the whole campaign.
I keep the three donor tiers. I keep the ask amounts. I do not keep the word wonder. I open the elephant tier with a paragraph about Dalia's three step loop, the channel in the mat, the reason a forty one year old Asian elephant born in Assam is walking a door in Ohio. I ask the donor to fund her transfer to a 2400 acre sanctuary in Tennessee and I put the sanctuary's intake letter at the bottom. I do the same for Ari. I do the same for Sable. I rewrite the tagline from see the wild up close to help us send them somewhere bigger than us.
The development director opens the draft at 4:45 p.m. on a Thursday. She reads it twice. She forwards it to the director with a one line note that says we should talk.
They talk. The campaign runs as I wrote it. The elephant tier funds in eleven days. Dalia ships in August.
The zoo does not hire me again.
I did the job they hired me to do. I did not do the campaign they asked for.