“Hey, after three weeks of twenty-seven-hour workdays, things should settle down to a more reasonable pace,” she added with a smile.

She paused to survey the faces around her. They all looked interested, eager and alert. A little apprehensive, too. No harm in that. No one was surprised by the amount of work. No one complained.

“The tight deadline will mean a lot of work, but we can do it. Brenda has a list of all the details to be covered that we’ll go over at the end of the meeting. First, I want to start with the overall thrust of the campaign.”

Samantha outlined the information she had on the Rainiers, their recent history, changes in staffing, their strengths and weaknesses. If her staff hadn’t all heard this somewhere else, she wanted to be sure they did now. To design a good advertising campaign, Emerald Advertising needed to somehow magically erase the past. She wasn’t fooling anyone about how hard that would be.

“Let’s bounce some ideas around. Nothing is too far-fetched or corny at this point. Brenda, got your crayon and notepad warmed up?”

“Ready, coach. Let ’em fly. I’ll catch ’em.” Brenda’s pencil was poised to write, but the room was silent.

“Come on,” Samantha coaxed. “I can see those wheels turning. Spit something out. Anything.”

“Okay,” Lane began cautiously. “What about bikinis?”

“What about them?”

“Well, sports and women in bikinis just go together like, like—”

“Like safe and sex,” Pam finished. A burst of laughter followed.

“I’m all for bikinis,” Carol chimed in. “But only if the players are wearing them.” More laughter greeted this sally. Samantha joined in, then guided the conversation.

“Lane has a point. The commercials that have been used during most major sporting events have featured any number of bikinis and skimpy attire to promote everything except swimwear and clothes. But how do we use them? We’re promoting a baseball team. Is that a different market than beer commercials target?”

Samantha sat back and let the others debate the issue. Ideas were tossed out randomly. Bikinis and beer led—by a very circuitous route—to nuclear reactors and life preservers. She let them mine the raw possibilities of each idea for a while then pushed them off in another direction. Brenda wrote furiously, so every speck and notion was documented for future reference. Ideas and patterns of ideas mentioned in this session might even prove useful later for a completely different product. Brenda was a storehouse of past brainstorming sessions, any of which she might mention without warning to send them off in a new direction.

The discussion returned to its start and an argument raged back and forth about the ethics of using bikinis to promote anything. The women opposed it, the men were for it, so long as good-looking female models wore them. Then Lane yelled something crazy about extraterrestrials and the brainstorming took a decidedly odd turn. Samantha laughed and broke into the ruckus.

“Okay, guys. That’s a little bizarre, even for me. I know I said nothing was too far-fetched, but come on, aliens in bikinis kidnapping a baseball team?”

“Sure, it’d be great,” Stuart said, adopting Lane’s brainchild for the moment. “Like Willie Mays meets ET. But with less cellulite.”

“Yeah. The players could be sucked up into this ship. Then weird creatures would operate on them and make them better players.” Carol picked up Stuart’s thought and gave it another twist.

When this craziness had run its course, Stuart asked the question Samantha had been waiting for. “What do you have in mind for this campaign, Samantha? We’ve been spilling our guts for over an hour, but you haven’t offered much yourself.”

“Well. I’ve heard some good ideas passed around today, except the one about aliens.” She shook a finger at Lane. He smirked. “But I want to focus a little tighter on the problem before we look for solutions. The Rainiers are a bunch of druggies and bullies, and no one wants to go to their games because they always lose. Right?” There were nods of agreement.

“To change that perception, we need to recast the Rainiers as a completely new team. The old is gone. Here’s this new gang of kids that no one knows anything about. It’s our job to introduce them and show how they’re starting out fresh.” She paused for emphasis. “So I think we should show what the players were like in grade school.”

“Grade school?” was the startled question from several people.

“Yep. Grade school.” Samantha went on to outline her idea as she had to Brenda. “What if we set them up as a sandlot team on the playground. Make their individual talents come from something they did then. Exaggerate to show how they started out in the game.”

This set everyone into another flurry. Ideas spun around the room like Frisbees.

“Like the kid that hits a home-run ball through the plate glass window two blocks away,” Lane said.