Smokey

Stepford Ad Company #4

Added 2025-11-19 10:00:28 +0000 UTC

With Dear Darling Doctor done, let's dip a toe into our upcoming oneshots, shall we?

It's been a bit since I last wrote an Ad Company anthology, but it was fun getting to play around with some of these again. I wanted this to stand apart from others though, so most of the ads in this story actually tie back to various other things I've written. The most notable are the reference to Game Night and that story's instigator, Lina Bonner, as well as Puriderm, which showed up in DDD as well as past stories like The House Wins.

The big thing though is our framing device. Way back in the very first Ad Company story, there was a stinger segment involving two guys whose job it was to work on these advertisements. One of those men, Don, was a little shout-out to Don from Runaway, which is referenced itself in the remake of Runaway. Since there will be a second arc of that story coming early next year, I wanted to bridge the gap, so to speak, by having Don pop up in the framing narrative for this along with his new intern, Sam. So ultimately, while this is a brand new Ad Company story, it's also a bit of connection between our first and second arcs of Runaway.

Enjoy!