Part 12
Female laughter washed over Tim, and he felt his face getting hot. How could things have gone so wrong, so quickly?
"C'mon," he said, shakily, looking around the room for someone who might support him. "This is crazy! Women aren't going to go for this kind of campaign."
But all he saw were smiling, slightly predatory looks on the faces of the attractive women surrounding him. "You don't think so?" Shawna said.
"Because the data suggests," Sandy jumped in, "that they're going to love it."
"And why wouldn't they?" Joy said. "Remember Sandy's bar graph? Most women would love to have an attractive male who was vulnerable to being manipulated out of his clothes!"
Murmurs of assent burned in Tim's ears. In a teasing voice, Anna said, "And more than a third of guys would fantasize about that, too. Are you sure that you're not part of that group who might be intrigued by a little CFNM action?"
"No!" Tim said, too quickly, and in a voice a little too high. More female laughter. He looked at Danielle, who he was disappointed to see was also smiling. "This doesn't make sense! With the ads already in the can that score so high and your deadline so short...?"
Danielle admitted, "That is a concern."
Sandy said, "But we need to remember how our new audience data skews our numbers. When 75% of our audience was male, the average expected positive response rate was 85 out of 100, which is really strong. I wouldn't suggest that we take the time to have a new, female-dominated focus group look at our existing ads, because there is a simple way to confidently predict what they'd tell us."
"What's that?" Danielle asked.
"We just flip the calculations. Assume that the male and female ratings of the existing ads wouldn't change, and just reverse the male-to-female ratio. That would drop our aggregate 85% positive response rate down to 71%."
Tim looked from Sandy to Danielle, feeling like his fate was in these women's hands. "That's still pretty good, though. Right?"
"It is," Danielle said, a pensive look on her face. "But Kurt and I already passed a glowing report from the original focus group up the ladder. So while 71% isn't a bad number, it will under-perform what we'd told them to expect." She looked at Tim with a partly sympathetic expression. "And I hate to do that."
"But they won't be happy when you tell them that we've got to start again from scratch, and come up with new scripts and blocking and... and everything," Tim said, feeling a little sweat on his forehead. "That will force us to miss the deadline for sure."
"We discussed that," Shawna said, looking at Sandy. Tim saw that they both had the slightest little smirks, and he swallowed hard. "And we think we've got a solution."
"What?" Julie and Pam said, at the same time, then giggled at each other's nervous excitement.
Sandy said, "We could just use the same two scripts we've already shot, and reverse the genders."
Everyone looked at each other, and Tim's employees began to grin, and then to giggle.
"I love it!" Anne said. "Instead of trapping the seat of my slacks in the door, I can trap Mr. Johnson's pants, so he's the one with his backside hanging out."
"And I can spill my coffee on his shirt," Kaitlyn said, "and help him out by taking it off and taking it to the kitchen to wash it out. We won't mind if he has to hang out in the office shirtless until it dries!"
Julie snickered. "And I can trick him into crawling under the coffee table when I drop some papers, and then 'accidentally' hook his pants on the table."
Tim felt light-headed and flushed. "C'mon. These aren't the same thing!"
"Sure they are," Mia said.
"No they're aren't," Tim insisted. He looked at Kaitlyn. "A pretty woman with her shirt off is a lot sexier than a guy with his shirt off. That's why women can't go topless in public, but guys can."
"YEAH, they can!" Anna said, and the other girls laughed.
"Besides," Mia said, "a pretty girl in a bra isn't completely exposed, and a bare-chested guy showing off his abs is. Even though nice pecs aren't as explicit as bare breasts, they're still pretty hot!"
Tim felt everything slipping away. "Mia, what about your scenario? It was sexy when I snuck a look up your skirt, but that wouldn't work if the roles are reversed."
"I think Mr. Johnson is suggesting that we dress him up in a skirt," Kaitlyn said, to several chuckles.
"NO I'm not!" Tim said. "But a skirt gives visual opportunities for a gag that pants don't."
Danielle said, "You might be right. But if we can keep the other pranks, losing one won't kill us."
"Plus, I could just pants him!" Mia said, and everyone looked at her. "You know. Get him to climb the ladder, loosen his belt while he's distracted, and then... whoosh!" She mimicked the action of grabbing a pair of pants and yanking downward.
Laughter once again filled the room, and Tim started to feel sick. "This won't work," he insisted.
"Why not?" Becky asked.
"Well..." he thought for a moment, "in the other scenario, each girl revealed just a little bit. But if we have all of these... tricks... happen to just one person. It won't be... balanced."