Focus Group
Advertising, like a lot of other so-called glamour jobs, is a lot of hard work a lot of the time, but it also has its compensations. The story I tell you now is certainly one of them: one of those delightful, exciting sexual surprises that probably happen more times in this business than in, say accounting.
Back when I was in a large advertising agency in Canada, working on a crystal refreshment drink account, there was at one point consideration given to the marketing of some tropical fruit flavours. Why anyone would actually be interested in a powdered mango drink is still a bit beyond my comprehension, but my client was serious about it and therefore, of course, so was I. They had developed a range of these flavours and were in the process of taste-testing them across the country when one of the senior marketing people decided that the taste-test, which was being done in small research cells called focus groups, should also include some sample advertising. As the good agency we quickly developed some rough concepts and I took them to Edmonton which was the final stop in the five city test. (Another of the great mysteries is why the client company would feel that the taste-buds of Torontonians would be different than those of people in Winnipeg or Vancouver.)
I got into Edmonton late and went to the hotel where I met the senior client and a woman named Vida. Vida was the brand manager, but she had just moved over from another brand so I had never worked with her before. She was attractive, I thought, with the sort of dark Jewish looks that created this very exotic aura that never really quite meshed with the fact (as I later found out) that she had grown up in a quite typical middle-class, small-town Canada home. We met in her hotel room since the senior client had already checked out. He was on his way to Calgary that night. The three of us talked about the ads and how we would work them into the focus groups the next day.
When my main client left, it was almost nine o’clock and Vida and I decided we would go to the hotel restaurant for dinner. Vida was wearing a baggy McGill College sweatshirt and said she wanted to change. I offered to leave and meet her at the restaurant, but she said no she would just change in the bathroom if I would wait. She took a blouse, skirt and bra from her suitcase and went into the bathroom and was out again in minutes. Nothing could have been simpler, but I think it was just the quick glimpse of that bra that started me thinking along a line that wasn’t altogether pure. I have often found that when you are thinking about sex, even when the conversation is about the weather or market shares or where you went to school, there is an added piquancy to the talk, a heightened awareness to the sensual possibilities: and this feeling is contagious.
We had a glass of wine each before dinner and then ordered a bottle with the meal. The dinner was very pleasant with each of us telling our life stories in capsule form. But, of course, the wine loosened us up some and we each told things you might not normally tell someone you had just met two hours before. For instance, she told me that she had had a nose job when she was fifteen and that it really changed her life, or at least the way she thought about herself. In what way, I asked.
Well, she said, true or not, she simply thought she was more attractive. It was no accident, she thought, that fifteen was the first year she had a boyfriend. It was also, she admitted, the first year she had had a real sexual experience, though not — she was quick to add — intercourse. She laughed about it, saying that the boy, who was the same age as she, had begged her to let him make love to her but she had been scared to death and wouldn’t agree. And yet at the same time she didn’t want to be called a “tease,” so when in the midst of some serious fondling he asked her to unzip his pants and stroke him she didn’t want to say no. Still, she wasn’t at all sure exactly what she was supposed to do.
It didn’t matter much as it turned out. When she finally got his penis out of his underpants, while she was still just holding him, he immediately started to come all over her hand. She was startled and started to giggle and rub his jizz all over his cock while he just groaned. Such was her naiveté that she wasn’t even sure what had happened, none of the “dirty” novels she had read had prepared her for the for the super-stimulated state a sixteen year old boy might work himself to the first time a girl tenderly touched his penis. She said she was confused and embarrassed at the time and that the boy had not tried to help by explaining what had happened, probably because he too was embarrassed.
All of this sounds as if it were an overtly sexual talk, as if she were trying to seduce me in this restaurant, and I will admit I could feel the beginnings of sexual stirrings as she was telling this story. But the tone was so very light and anecdotal — with only the slightest hesitation and güvenilir bahis downward glance before saying words like “cock” or “jizz” — and she and I laughed so much that it didn’t at all feel like a come-on. And it wasn’t.
She talked about how, after that incident, she thought about it and read and asked questions of girlfriends until she finally came to a basic understanding of what had happened.
“So how did you feel about it then?”
“Well at first I was just curious, and then I was fascinated. What was it in me that gave me that power? I could see him again and again — I can still see him now, ten years later — with his head back and this look on his face like his heart had stopped, all caused by just that slightest touch. I mean for a sixteen year old girl that was pretty overwhelming. And I really wanted to understand it.”
“Yes, it’s like that Bob Seger song where he calls it ‘working on mysteries without any clues.'”
“Exactly. But of course, then I kind of wanted to find out more. So while I never actually had intercourse until almost two and a half years later, I certainly … experimented. A lot.” Vida giggled.
“Like?”
“Like, you know, how I could rub my boyfriend with his pants on. And finding out what kinds of things he liked. The way he liked me to touch and stroke him. Baby oils. Under water. Public places. Like under a blanket at an outdoor concert. You know.”
“Sounds like a very lucky boy.”
“Yeah, I guess he was. I mean he never got technically laid, but he sure got a lot of sex there for about a year or so. As I said, I never wanted to be thought of as a tease, so I made sure he was satisfied.”
“I wish you had been around when I was sixteen.”
“Well, you know, it was all pretty exciting for me too. Even though I wouldn’t even let him touch me below the waist, I absolutely loved it when he creamed. I would shiver with excitement — it almost brought me to orgasm. I thought of it as this very feminine magic of giving pleasure. And I was becoming a master of it.”
After dinner, even though it was almost eleven o’clock, there was still a bit of light in the early summer sky because of how far north Edmonton is, so we had a drink at the bar. Still it was all quite decorous, certainly nothing indicating seduction. We had, I remember, a pretty mundane discussion about the next day’s focus groups. I must admit though that after her revelations at dinner I did take a bit of special notice of her, I now thought, rather magical hands.
There were three focus groups scheduled for 10AM, 3PM and 6PM the next day, and Vida told me how bored she was getting with watching these things after having already gone through them in four cities. We would check out of the hotel in the morning, go to the group sessions (which were in a facility in some shopping centre) and then leave from there to the airport to catch the last flight back to Toronto. We made plans to meet at the checkout counter at eight the next morning and said goodnight in the elevator.
We arrived the next day at the sessions laden with the art case with the ads and our personal luggage, which we parked in the viewing room. Focus group facilities have two basic rooms: a large boardroom-size space for the group and a moderator, and a smaller room positioned behind a two-way mirror with a complete view of the large room. This is the viewing room where the agency and client people watch the session. These viewing rooms are always pretty standard with three or four swivel chairs right in front of the mirror facing the session room and then usually more seating on raised levels behind this front row. The front row also had a large ledge in front of it so the observers could take notes and place their soft drinks and sandwiches which were always available in overflowing abundance.
After briefing the moderator on the new advertising part of the session, we settled down to a long day of watching the groups. I do get a little antsy in these things. Most of the discussion you’ve heard before and you’re stuck there in this darkened room trying to pretend for the client that you actually find what the participants say interesting. We sat through the first session with Vida (who had now seen eleven of these taste-tests across the country) telling me how this one was pretty much like the others in terms of what they were saying about the flavours.
During the second session, we started making rude comments about the participants as we watched them through the mirror. And Vida humourously tore into one of the group in particular — a 20-year old blonde girl with quite provocative tits. They were very perky and you could tell through her T-shirt that she was not wearing a bra.
“I bet you she bought those things,” Vida said.
“Well, they work for me,” I laughed. Then alluding to our discussion the night before, I said, “Besides, what’s the difference between buying tits and buying a different nose?”
“Touche. türkçe bahis But watch her showing them off. See, she’s even coming on to that guy sitting across from her. See, see — leaning back and stretching. And just before that she was touching her right nipple with her middle finger, casually as if it were just an accident. But what she was really doing was getting it sensitive so that when she did the stretch-back move it would be hard and show through that T-shirt.”
“You’re making this up!” I said laughing.
“No I’m not — watch for a while. You’ll see.”
I did. For the next eight or ten minutes of the session I watched this baby blonde. More specifically I watched her breasts as they shifted position and jiggled a bit when she gestured with her hands when she was talking. Frankly I noticed nothing out of the ordinary except a beautiful set of tits. Of course, with all this concentration I was also starting to get a bit of a hard-on.
At about that time, Vida, who had set her cup of soda water down on her note pad, reached down to get her purse which was sitting on the carpet under her chair. Somehow when she did this, her elbow clipped the edge of the notebook which was overlapping the ledge in front of us. This rather violently upset the cup which poured all over Vida and got a bit on me. In the shock of it we both jumped to our feet and Vida let out an uncontrolled yelp. I quickly looked into the group room and saw that three or four of the participants had heard something behind the mirror and were looking in our direction, though of course, they couldn’t see anything but their own reflections in the glass.
Vida and I stood silent for a moment as we looked at each other. Though her skirt was still essentially dry, her white blouse was drenched and clinging. It had much the same effect as a wet T-shirt contest except, as I could now clearly see, she was wearing a bra. The left leg of my pants was likewise sopping. As the group went back to its discussion, Vida suddenly started giggling uncontrollably, all the while trying to stifle the noise. I too was laughing soundlessly at the sudden shock and the ridiculousness of the situation.
“I’m really sorry,” she said as she patted paper napkins against my pants. She was still giggling.
“I’m not too wet,” I said, “but you’re drenched. You’ve got to change. It’s lucky you’ve got your suitcase here so you’ve got a change of clothes.”
Holding her hands out to her sides Vida looked at her clinging blouse. “Well, at least you can see why I didn’t need to buy a set of tits to go with my nose,” she laughed and then sort of stuck her breasts out in a burlesque of chesty movie star’s publicity photo.
She then went over to her suitcase and took out the same oversized McGill sweatshirt she had been wearing when I first met her the night before.
“I’m going to change here,” she said, and she went to the back of the riser behind us and turned to the wall. “Now you look the other way. Concentrate on that session!” She said it in a mock-disciplinarian tone that carried a little tease to it.
I dutifully looked straight ahead into the group room, but my focus was clearly much shorter — on the glass, which more or less acted as a mirror. There wasn’t much I could see except, after she had discarded the sodden blouse and bra, a well-shaped back. For one brief instant, Vida twisted around a bit to see, I assumed, if I were peeking, and in that moment I was able to catch part of the shape of her left breast, though her arm hugged it and her hand was covering the nipple area. Now, my genitals were aching and I longed to put my hands on those breasts. I could feel some of the sticky pre-come dampening my underwear.
But in a minute, it seemed all over. She was back at the chair mopping up the rest of the water that was on the seat and the ledge in front of us. She laughed about what a klutz she was and sat back down to watch some more. I, for my part, was glad my lap was under the ledge and not visible, because the only thing I could think of for the next few minutes was that she was not wearing a bra under that floppy sweatshirt and that I could slip my hand underneath and touch her stomach and gradually move up to those tantalizingly available breasts.
I fought to pay even the faintest attention to what the groups were saying about guava flavour. Suddenly Vida said, “See! Look at her now. What a brazen tease.”
I looked immediately at the blonde and saw that she had shamelessly put one finger to her mouth and was running her tongue along the side of it, as if she was mindlessly feeling for a paper cut or something. But the look in her eyes was pure come-on, aimed directly at the guy across from her. He seemed suitably uncomfortable. She then sat up and adjusted herself in the seat coincidentally pulling her T-shirt tight for a moment. Pure Marilyn Monroe.
Vida then said, “You know, when I was changing, I got this sudden urge to just sort of turn around güvenilir bahis siteleri and flash the focus group. I even looked around briefly and was going to do it for just a second, just to say that I had. But in the end, even knowing that they wouldn’t be able to see me on this side of the mirror and that you were turned the other direction, my small town upbringing got to me and I just couldn’t do it.
“Isn’t that silly? Especially with little Miss Stiff-Nips just six feet away from me in a room with eleven other people giving her finger a blow-job.”
“She seems pretty good at it too,” I said.
“Actually, I sort of envy that freedom, that abandon, that open sensuousness. Sometimes I wish I could bring myself to it without all those inhibitions that we grew up with.”
“Go ahead, flash the focus group! Be free!” I urged her with a smile on my face. “I’ll leave the room and you can have your ‘moment of abandon.'”
“Yeah?” she laughed. “You think I should?”
“Definitely! It’ll change your life, besides you may never get another chance.”
I could tell she was seriously considering it just as a lark. But, of course, larks should not be seriously thought out. But then she laughed and said, “Okay, I’m going to do it. You don’t have to leave though. Just turn the other way — like you did before.”
I thought this was incredibly exciting and my underpants were starting to get positively swampy. The only problem was that this time when I turned away I was going to have to turn away from the mirror so I truly couldn’t see. Still just being in the same room as she revealed her breasts to twelve unknowing people, some as close as five feet away, had my heart pounding. Once again I discreetly turned away.
I could hear the gentle brushing as she lifted her sweatshirt, and then to make matters stickier for me, she started giving a play-by-play:
“Yes, Blondie, yes, Blondie, you see these beautiful firm half melons sticking straight out at you. This is what men like in tits — not those big, hanging surgically-made globes of yours. Yes. Yes … yes … yes.” These “yeses” were now accompanied by slow, sensual breaths between her teeth.
I have never been so aroused in my life as during those moments. I was so tempted to turn around and look, but was afraid not only of coming across as having no manners, but — more than that — that she might stop whatever she was doing during the slow, steady progression of “yeses.” I couldn’t tell what it was, but I imagined her hands caressing the breasts, maybe squeezing the nipples a bit, maybe even reaching down to touch her pussy. I didn’t dare move or say a thing.
Finally after what seemed like forever to my now almost-bursting dick, but was probably only about a minute and a half or so, the breathing evened out. Had she come? It seemed merely an unlikely fantasy on my part given the brief period of elapsed time. I heard more rustling of the sweatshirt and then she said, almost peremptorily, “Well, that was … fun.” As if it had been a ride on a Dodge-‘Em car. Her hand touched my back and she said, “You can turn around now.”
I did so. Slowly. I was none too steady myself at that point and my pants were sopping from more than the spilled soda water. But when I turned full to her I found her facing me with her sweatshirt sitting on the ledge and her hands over her bare breasts. She had a very vulnerable look on her face. After a deep intake of breath on my part, she closed her eyes and slowly pulled her hands away to the sides, dragging her fingers lightly across her nipples as she did. I sat stunned for seconds taking in these lovely, dark breasts with smallish, but very erect, nipples.
“They are beautiful.”
With her eyes still closed, she smiled her gratitude.
“Would you …?” She stopped after the first two words.
“Yes,” I said
“What?”
“Yes. I would like to touch them. Softly at first. Lightly. Caressing the edges of — but only lightly brushing — those beautiful nipples. Stroking gently first one then the other with my — most tender — right hand. Then both at the same time using both my hands so lightly that you may only feel tingles.” I was then silent, made no advances, but only watched her with her eyes still closed and her hands at her sides, and awaited her invitation.
During this pause, I could hear the blonde in the other room talking about the “mouth feel” of bananas and mangoes, but I didn’t even take a sidelong glance.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I would like that. Just the way you said … just.”
“Lightly?” I knew I was tantalizing her.
“Yes.” “I may then?”
“Please. Just as you said. Please.”
But I would do it all differently. With her eyes still closed I put my hands behind her back and gently pushed her breasts forward to my slow, wet tongue. Slowly and endlessly I circled the right nipple and I could hear her breathing getting deeper and less controlled. When her left hand came up to caress her other breast I switched to that one and repeated the operation. While still salivating her breast, I lifted my eyes to see her head now rocked back with her mouth halfway open and her eyes still closed.