His Approval
His Approval
Julianna greeted Ace energetically as her team set up the presentation. I took my seat which was
located very far from Ace before taking in a deep breath and praying for the best.
“This is the new plan. It’s based off of Karina’s idea which I think should work well,” Julianna explained.
Ace just nodded his head without saying anything. Julianna took that as the cue for her to go on with
the presentation. I had to say that her presentation was very well structured, and it was easy to see that
she had thought everything through and had everything planned out. Now that I saw that Julianna truly
had her act together, all that I needed to worry about was Ace’s reaction to this whole thing.
I turned and glanced over at Ace who was seated at the head of the long meeting table. His face was
as passive as ever to the point where I wondered if he was even listening although I was sure that he
was. If he thought that our plan was impressive, he didn’t show it at all. When Julianna reached the
middle section of her presentation, Ace’s eyes narrowed slightly. I turned towards the presentation to
see the message on the slide and found it hard to understand what would make Ace react like that.
Regardless, I was able to breathe easy again when Ace didn’t say anything to interrupt Julianna’s
presentation. All the way to the end of Julianna’s presentation, Ace did not make any comments to
interrupt her. There was a slightly awkward silence when her presentation ended, and she returned to
her seat at the meeting table.
“Umm…what do you think?” Julianna asked what was probably on all of our minds.
“Why do you think this plan fits well with the commercial?” Ace replied to her question with a question
of his own.
Suddenly, he seemed very serious about this, and his passiveness was completely gone. Julianna
seemed hesitant to answer his question and her eyes glanced over to me. That reminded me that I was
the one who originally brought up the idea. I turned to Ace to offer him my answer.
“I believe this plan suits this commercial well because it is designed to connect emotionally to the
audience as much as possible,” I explained.
“Go on,” Ace prompted for more details.
Ace looked straight at me, and I could feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me as well. That made
me feel slightly more nervous than before. I took in a breath to calm myself as I chose my words to
answer him.
“Since this commercial is supposed to promote a charitable cause, I thought that it would be best to
market it based on its emotional appeal. That doesn’t mean that we ignore the data, but we consider
the emotional connection part of it more than before. That means that instead of just thrusting the
commercial in front of the audience faces all the time, we try out best to integrate the commercial in
placements that fit with the audiences’ natural life events…” I tried my best to explain our main intention
behind the plan.
As far as I was aware, this was the main difference and improvement compared to the previous version
that Julianna had. Ace seemed thoughtful as he seemed to consider our proposal seriously. The entire
room was silent as everyone waited for Ace to make his decision. I couldn’t help but pray that we would
get his approval. If we had to start over on this, there was a very high possibility that the project would
be delayed. That would be such a setback for the entire team and the lead that we had gained would
be lost.
“Where did you get the idea for this plan from?” Ace asked.
His question surprised me. Did he realize that I had taken elements from his past works and adapted
it?
I didn’t think that something like that was possible. The ideas were there but it had been adapted by me
and then Julianna did her magic and adapted it again. I didn’t think that Ace could have realized the
original source for the idea. If that was the case, then I must be the only one overthinking things. This
question was probably just a random question brought about by his curiosity and nothing more.
I hated to admit it but I felt more than slightly embarrassed to admit to him that I had been going
through his old work and that I had found the bulk of it in the company’s archives. Ace didn’t seem to Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.
like me digging around into his past work and had told me to stick to the present and concentrate on
the future, so I didn’t see how telling him the truth would benefit anyone including myself.
“I just combined various ideas from here and there. Julianna helped to adapt most of it and her team
helped to add in all the details,” I replied.
“I see…” Ace murmured.
So far, he had not given his approval yet but at least he had not outright rejected the proposal. Ace
seemed to be thinking it over and that alone seemed to give everyone hope. His eyes returned to the
presentation that was still projected on the large projector screen before his eyes shifted to my face.
Please…please approve this…
“Fine. We’ll go with this. Thank you everyone for all the work that you’ve put into this. I expect the
finalized date for the commercial launch to be pushed forward as soon as possible,” Ace declared after
a moment of thought.
Yes! We did it!
I didn’t bother hiding my smile and my joy as I beamed a smile in Ace’s direction. Even if Julianna and
her team did most of the work, I still felt proud that I contributed to the idealization phase of it. Although
every tired their best to keep their voices down, it was clear that everyone was so happy and relief at
the same time.
--To be continued…