Chapter 33 : Madison Avenue

Chapter 33: Chapter 33 : Madison Avenue

New York in October was already a lot colder than Los Angeles.

Ethan came out of JFK and flagged a yellow cab into the city. The suit jacket he had on came off a clearance rack at the mall the day before he left, and it was a little wide in the shoulders. Noah had begged to come along, until Ethan told him he could pay for his own ticket.

Outside the window, rows of Queens brick slid past, and after the bridge, the Manhattan skyline slowly rose to its feet. In his other life, he’d run a branch office in this city for two years. The day it closed had been about this cold, too.

The cab’s radio was still chewing on yesterday’s news. Google had agreed to buy YouTube for $1.8 billion in stock. A caller from Staten Island wanted to know why anybody would pay that kind of money for home videos.

Ethan had been about to smile. He stopped.

He remembered this deal. The way he remembered it, it came a week later, and the number was $1.65 billion. A week early and a hundred and fifty million richer. Somebody in Mountain View had been watching the same charts he’d been watching, and somebody in San Bruno had noticed them watching and raised the price.

The caller from Staten Island was still going. Ethan let him.

550 Madison Avenue, the Sony Building. Pinkish-gray granite rising thirty-some stories, topped by a pediment with a notch cut out of the middle that New Yorkers called the Chippendale.

The lobby was packed. A row of PS3 demo stations sat dead center, beside a countdown sign: 45 days to the November 17 launch. A few teenagers were crammed in front of the screens, gripping controllers and yelling their heads off.

Ethan signed in at the front desk, and while he waited for the elevator, he took another look at those kids. They were exactly who Sony was dreaming about getting its hands on this month.

The conference room on thirty-one looked down on Madison Avenue. Three people sat at the table.

In the middle sat Diane Prescott, vice president of marketing at Sony Electronics, mid-forties, short hair, thin-framed glasses. To her left was Ryan Cho, a brand manager in his late twenties. He was the one who’d found MrPelican and made that call from the 212 number. To her right sat a Japanese man in his fifties, gray at the temples, a black notebook open in front of him. Ryan introduced him as Takeshi Hayama, in from headquarters in Tokyo.

Hayama nodded and said nothing.

The small talk was brief. Diane said a few nice things about his videos, mentioned that her thirteen-year-old son had watched the last one three times, then slid a sheet of paper to the middle of the table.

"We’d like three placements in your next video," she said. "A Handycam on camera, and a brand mention at the top and the end. Thirty thousand dollars. For a college channel, we think that’s a very serious number."

Ethan glanced at the sheet and didn’t touch it.

He pushed the sheet aside with two fingers, unbuttoned his jacket, and leaned back in his chair.

"I’d like to ask one question first," he said. "That countdown sign downstairs says forty-five days. In those forty-five days, who do you want to sell to most?"

Diane and Ryan traded a look.

"Eighteen to twenty-four," Ryan answered first. "Mostly male. The PS3, plus the new hard-drive camcorders that came out this fall."

"And where are they right now?"

Nobody answered.

Ethan took three things out of his bag and laid them on the table one at a time.

The first was a stack of photocopies of Bob’s sales log. Every line was a car. Every line ended in a promo code.

"Ten days, one dealership, fifteen cars. Every one of them traces back to my video," he said. "Most of the buyers are under thirty."

The second was a printed graph from Maya’s player. A line started high on the left and slid to the right, but it slid slowly.

"More than eighty percent of people watch to the very last second." He tapped the tail of the curve. "How many people change the channel during a thirty-second TV spot, you know better than I do."

The third was a single page of statistics: the age breakdown of the hundreds of thousands of accounts registered on the site. The guessing game was long over, but more and more of the people who came to watch the videos and dig through the raw footage signed up while they were there. The eighteen-to-twenty-four column held seventy percent.

Ryan picked up the page and couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Diane took it from him, glanced at it, and set it back down.

"Those are pretty numbers," she said. "So what do you want?"

"I don’t want three placements," Ethan said. "I want Sony in every single shot."

He said it lightly, without a trace of haggling in his voice. Ryan’s pen stopped in midair. Diane lifted her eyes and, for the first time, took a real look at the college kid across from her in his clearance-rack suit. Ethan didn’t rush to go on. He let her finish looking. From that moment, the rhythm of the table belonged to him.

He walked them through the next video. A hundred people, an entire campus, one day and one night. Every camera angle shot on Sony professional gear. A whole wall of Bravias standing in the command tent, dozens of feeds lit up at once. And at the very end, one line: Shot on Sony HD.

"The prize is a hundred thousand dollars in cash, in a clear box hanging right over the field," he said. "Every time somebody’s eliminated, one of your people drops another thousand into it, on camera. The money never passes through my hands. Whoever wins takes that hundred grand from Sony."

Diane took off her glasses.

"A hundred thousand." She repeated the number. "We have never given a college kid a hundred thousand dollars."

"You wouldn’t be giving it to me," Ethan said. "You’d be giving it to the hundred people in front of the camera, for a few million people in front of their screens to watch. I know what you spend on TV in a month. That’s why I’m only asking for a hundred."

He paused, then kept counting. "Also, Sony supplies the gear for the shoot. Ten HVR-Z1Us. Twenty HDR-SR1s. And forty Bravias, built into one full wall." He let that sit for a beat before he added, "Only on loan, of course. Plus a fifteen-thousand-dollar sponsorship fee."

Ryan couldn’t help it and laughed through his nose. Diane put her glasses back on. "Ten Z1Us? That’s every demo unit we have on the West Coast. The SR1 only came out last month. We don’t have enough stock for the holidays as it is."

"Then it comes down to how many you can spare," Ethan said. "But every extra Sony on screen is one more ad slot you don’t pay for."

The conference room went quiet. Car horns from Madison Avenue came through the glass, muffled.

Diane turned to look at Hayama.

The older gentleman from Tokyo hadn’t said a word since the meeting started, only written a few lines in his notebook. Now he set down his pen and spoke slowly, in accented English.

"I would like to ask one question. Young people. Why do they watch you, and not television?"

Ethan thought about it.

"The people on TV have nothing to do with them," he said. "The people in our videos live in the dorm room next door. The one who wins might be their roommate. The one who loses might be them."

Hayama took that in, closed the notebook, and nodded to Diane.

The next hour went to the fine print.

The gear got whittled all the way down to two Z1Us, a few SR1s, and one full wall of Bravias, which he could buy at a discount or lease cheap after the shoot if he wanted to keep them. The hundred thousand in cash and the fifteen-thousand-dollar fee didn’t move by a cent.

When Diane signed, she probably thought she’d held the line on most of the equipment.

What ended up on paper was the exact number Ethan had settled on before he ever walked through the door.

Ryan walked him all the way to the end of the hall. When the elevator doors opened, he lowered his voice, a grin still on his face. "Honestly? They’d only signed off on thirty."

Ethan smiled and shook his hand.

Outside, dusk was settling over the street. Ethan didn’t hurry to hail a cab. He walked south down Madison Avenue. The evening rush was pouring out of the office towers, coat collars turned up high, everyone walking faster than the person in front of them.

At the corner of Forty-Seventh, he stopped.

383 Madison Avenue. Forty-some stories, crowned with an octagon of glass that had just lit up. The people going in and out of the doors all wore dark suits and the same badge clipped to their chests.

Bear Stearns.

The fifth-largest investment bank on Wall Street, worth twenty-some billion dollars. The people upstairs were probably popping champagne right about now, celebrating another record quarter. The mortgage bonds they’d stacked up looked like pure gold to every one of them.

Ethan knew what would happen seventeen months from now. One weekend. It would take a single weekend, and this company would be sold off for two dollars a share. The people in this building would walk out these doors carrying cardboard boxes and stand on this corner with no idea where to go.

He took out his phone and dialed Noah. It picked up on the first ring.

"Well? Well?" Noah’s voice was trembling, he was so wound up. "How much are they giving us? Thirty? Fifty?"

"A hundred."

The line went completely silent.

Ethan didn’t need to see Noah to know the look on his face. It was the exact same look he’d worn in Big Bob’s showroom, the moment he’d heard Ethan say that M3.

He looked up. The glass crown on top of Bear Stearns was glowing just right, and against the Manhattan night it didn’t look old at all.