author

Sad news strikes again — just a few days after Studs Terkel passed away, surprising word came around that Michael Crichton, at a very young 66, had died of cancer. Studs Terkel and Michael Crichton were clearly very different writers, but they both operated at the very top of their respective areas — Terkel in Pulitzer Prize-winning oral history, Crichton in techno-thriller bestsellerdom.

I just wrote about my ground level floor, very minimal connection to the great Studs Terkel, a wonderful and significant memory for me. I was also fortunate enough to get to work with Michael Crichton on the online marketing campaign for his book Next, which came out in 2006. My involvement with the Next campaign ran a bit deeper than my one logistics phone call with Studs: It offrered up the opportunity to truly engage the creative process — not always the case in the workplace.

Next is all about genetics gone, well, Crichton — he had a knack for isolating scientific what-ifs ahead of the curve and spinning fast paced yarns that let a worst-case scenario dangle its way to a climactic conclusion.

Working with Crichton, along with Cary Murnion and Jon Milott from the excellent creative agency Honest, we created an expansive online campaign that explored the world of Next without spoiling the plot.

There was this — NextGenCode.com — the website of a fake company that, while not in the novel, allowed us to convey some of the thought-provoking scientific issues addressed in the book.

And there were videos like this one:

(See more videos here.)

Working on all of this was a hell of a process — The concept and goal of the campaign was quite ambitious, the budget was “book publishing money” (meaning, not much at all), we had to adhere to many voices (some highly intelligent, some just plain idiotic) and of course we had to get Crichton’s sign off on everything. Boy, if you could read some of the emails that went back and forth… Like I said, it was a hell of a process.

It’s not always easy to understand or truly feel this way in the thick of the stress of trying to get a major, creative campaign done on a tight deadline, but if it’s NOT a hell of a process, if it’s not keeping you up at night and making you sweat and want to pull your hair out, if someone isn’t sending nasty emails, if there aren’t pleas to see if there’s a way to delicately revisit something that has already been absolutely killed, well, then, it probably isn’t going to be any good, or maybe it will be good, but not great, or maybe it will be great, but it won’t blow any minds.

Blood. Sweat. Tears. Essential ingredients.

One thing that always sticks out in my mind from this experience is something that Crichton said on a conference call while discussing a particular scene in one of the videos. Crichton didn’t like some of the visuals — he felt they did not belong, that they served no purpose, and therefore should not be included in the video. Then, in a low, serious voice, he said: “Remember guys, everything has meaning.”

In other words, to put the wrong images in there, no matter how briefly they were flashed, would take away from the overall experience and message we were trying to convey.

At the time I distinctly recall thinking — not saying out loud, but thinking, as I rolled my eyes to the back of my head — “For fuck’s sake, it’s like a 2 second thing, who cares if it doesn’t quite fit, it’s totally fine being in there and now we’re just going to have to take the time to edit and fix and show the damn thing again…” With hindsight, however, Crichton’s statement continues to resonate. To view a creative project in such a way, to work very hard to calibrate and fine tune every aspect of it, is of course maddening, but everything does have meaning… So the entirety of your endeavor, all the pieces that make up the whole, need to be just right.

Not that you will get every single component just right, but at least you have to make the effort.

I really do feel lucky to have gotten the chance to work on this campaign. Though it was certainly a minuscule piece of Crichton’s amazing, thought-provoking, entertaining, ahead-of-the-curve, prolific, hugely successful body of work, I do believe it was a part of the book’s success, broke some new ground in online marketing (for books, anyway), and most importantly, gave me the incredible opporunity to catch an informative glimpse into the way Crichton approached the creative process.

Everything has meaning.