—
PATRICK AND A GROUP of his Chiat\Day colleagues had been flying up
to Palo Alto once a week to brainstorm with Elizabeth, Sunny, and her
brother Christian throughout the fall of 2012 and into the winter and
spring of 2013—the period when Ian Gibbons was spiraling into
depression and Steve Burd was serving out his last months as Safeway
CEO. Elizabeth scheduled the meetings on Wednesdays after learning
that Apple’s creative meetings with the agency had always been that
day of the week. She told Patrick she admired the simplicity of Apple’s
brand message and wanted to emulate it.
Inside Chiat\Day, the Theranos assignment was known as “Project
Stanford.” Joining Patrick on the weekly trips up to Palo Alto were
Carisa Bianchi, the president of the agency’s L.A. office; Lorraine
Ketch, the agency’s chief of strategy; Stan Fiorito, who oversaw the
account; and Mike Yagi, a copywriter. Early on, the Chiat\Day team
decided that the best visual representation of Theranos’s innovation
was the miniature vial it had created to collect blood from fingertips.
Elizabeth called it the “nanotainer.” It was fitting because it really was
tiny. At 1.29 centimeters, it was shorter than a dime positioned
upright. Patrick wanted to take pictures of it to convey its scale to
doctors and patients. But Elizabeth and Sunny were very concerned
that word of it might leak out before the launch if anyone from the
outside was allowed to see it. So they agreed that Chiat\Day would use
its in-house photographer to take photos of it in the little photography
studio the agency had in its Playa del Rey warehouse.
On the appointed day, Dan Edlin, one of Christian’s Duke friends,
flew down to L.A. with a custom-made plastic case containing twelve
nanotainers. Checking it in with his bag at the airport was out of the
question; it remained in his possession the whole flight down. When
he got to the warehouse, Dan didn’t let the little tubes out of his sight.
No one at the agency was allowed to touch them except Patrick, who
held one briefly and marveled at how small it was.
Real blood tended to turn purple after a while when it was exposed
to air, so they filled one of the nanotainers with fake Halloween blood