270 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.

historical

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 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! We finally made 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..