Location: East London, Private Ad Firm
Date: April 3, 2032
Five Years Since the Collapse
“You ever try selling bottled water without the girl in the bikini?”
Jamal glanced up from his tablet. “Not recently.”
Gareth gave a thin smile. “Exactly.”
The office was quiet, save for the hum of the air purifiers and the occasional ping of a message on the glass wall. An old advertising firm, quietly retooled for a world that no longer bought lust.
They sat in a corner office littered with concept mockups—renderings of shoes, cereals, commuter bikes, all shot with crisp lighting and gender-neutral models. Clean lines. Clean expressions.
Nothing suggestive. Nothing performative.
“Used to be, you show a woman in heels stepping out of a car, you’ve got a campaign,” Gareth said. “Didn’t even matter what the product was. Just the association. The charge.”
He sipped his tea, shrugged. “Now you might as well show a well-aligned hip joint.”
Jamal didn’t laugh, but he smirked. He’d grown up into this.
Gareth leaned back in his chair, looking out the window.
“It was like muscle memory, you know? For years after the switch, I’d still start a pitch with a visual angle—beauty, allure, whatever. And then halfway through the design process I’d catch myself and go, ‘That doesn’t mean anything anymore.’”
He paused.
“It doesn’t work. It doesn’t even register.”
Jamal spoke quietly. “That must’ve been weird.”
“It was like losing gravity,” Gareth said. “I spent thirty years learning how to bend desire into language. How to shape need. Now the shape’s gone.”
Across the desk, Jamal flicked through mockups. “You think it was all built on sex?”
“Soft power, mostly,” Gareth said. “That’s the truth no one wanted to admit. Women had it in spades. Men had it too, just in a different flavour. Attraction wasn’t just about sex, it was about status—how to pull eyes, how to signal. It was the undercurrent of half the economy.”
He gestured vaguely at the renderings.
“Now it’s like trying to sell rain to a cloud.”
They were quiet a moment.
“We still sell things,” Jamal offered.
“Yeah,” Gareth said. “But not the same way. Not the same volume.”
He stood and walked to a screen showing sales trendlines over the past decade.
“Consumption dropped. You strip out sex, and you strip out half the insecurities people used to have. Makeup? Tanked. Fast fashion? Wrecked. Fitness tech held on a bit longer—until people realized no one was looking.”
He tapped the graph.
“We had a recession. They don’t say it like that, but it was a libido-driven downturn. Global. Quiet. Not catastrophic, just... deflationary.”
“Like the air slowly went out of everything.”
Jamal leaned back. “So what are we selling now?”
“Logistics,” Gareth said. “Clean water, mobility, food without preservatives. We’re not selling identity anymore. We’re selling function.”
“Looks still matter. A little. People still want healthy partners. Symmetry, posture, all that. But it’s not charged. It’s not loaded with implication.”
“Money still matters. But not like before. Not for dominance. For security. For raising kids. And only if they want kids.”
Jamal glanced at the time.
“We’ve got the CleanTech campaign review in ten.”
Gareth nodded.
He looked once more at the skyline, the stillness of it. No billboards with bare skin. No perfume ads with parted lips. Just soft blue glass and pale green rooftops.
“You know,” he said, “for the first time in my career, we’re actually trying to tell the truth.”