Okay, so where am I?

I sitting in my hotel room staring at a keyboard that doesn’t move and won’t move as a wrestle with my inadequacies that only copy can deliver to an imperfect mind. It both frightening and paralyzing. I have four books in print, countless commercials still on air, and a straight from Korean theater to DVD movie I’ve penned and yet, one client shakes her head at some ad copy and I freeze up.

But why?

Digging around the mind of anyone in this odd cricket-herd we call advertising and marketing is a virtuous way to see some bizarre and dreadful things. So, to poke a manicured finger into the hornet’s nest that is your own professional essence is less the subject of a quirky column and more the act of a dodgy madcap.

Nevertheless, the psychosomatic makeup of the regular Joe copywriter comprises the kind of struggle, hallucination, and outright hysteria that coerces us to peel away the aluminum foil helmet and renders the delirious truth. (I’ll warn you though, this column contains a daring amount of wild generality and no trivial degree of hypocrisy).

In most copywriters there exists an abnormal sense of privilege. Not that we demand a powder blue dressing room filled with green M&Ms, pricey writing instruments, and precisely-chilled Perrier, but more a obligation to be listened to. The very nature of the job is to be, not the loudest voice, but the most gripping – to say something predictable and common in a way that feels extraordinary and compulsory. How often have you seen a copywriter punctured by a message that, within the promotional vortex, whines timidly to be noticed?

We’re also guilty of a festering exasperation, a moral disrespect for those who believe that anyone with fingers, eyes and direct access to ink or Microsoft Word is capable of writing serious prose. And, we see these characters everywhere, even prowling in the shadows of our finest and most fruitful client relationships.

A sentiment that our contribution isn’t quite as valued by some as we know it should be is perhaps the energy fueling another common apprehension: a compulsive, crippling, infuriating conscientiousness. Leave some copywriters alone with a flawlessly erected headline and they will rip it to shreds, splattering the walls with a spray of progressively unsatisfying substitutes. I’ve met many a writer chase down a final draft on its way out of the door, paralyzed by a fear that there may be not enough, or indeed too many, commas.

Your typical, well-fed copywriter is also unsettlingly contented with their own professional schizophrenia. We are personas with endless voices and takes clattering around in our minds, with the aptitude to debate for, and against, any exact point with identical persuasion. And yet, while we’re capable of nurturing all kinds of dissimilar voices, we never truly release our own. Even in that 2200-word manual for a digital camera, our own unique style clicks quietly around the onscreen shutter speed menu.

We are, I suppose, beasts of inspiration trussed inescapably to authenticity. We define success by artistic genius, knowing ultimately it is only properly defined by commercial performance. And amongst all this, we bungee jump in and out of an offbeat state of absorption – spellbound by a brief about insect repellant, or chewing gum, or coffee drinks all the time knowing that none of it really exists. Writing, like advertising, is the art of sculpting fog.

That’s just a few of the phobias and idiosyncrasies I can identify in myself and other writers with whom I’ve interacted. There are some of us who share these, just as there are some with no recognition at all, for this somewhat lumbering picture of our vocation. There are some, I’m quite sure, with an even more complex relationship with the job.

Whether it’s the foundation of abnormality that the job that sends our way, or whether it’s our inherent foibles that direct us to this weird working life, I’m unsure.

Ink on the page, ink on our hands and, without doubt, ink on the soul.


AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER
The Olivetti girl


Advertising legend George Lois crafted the “Olivetti girl” ad for electric Olivetti typewriter in the mid 1960s. But just who is the Olivetti girl? (From the George Lois website:)

WE HAD TO MAKE THE OLIVETTI TYPEWRITER FAMOUS FOR SECRETARIES TO ACCEPT IT.

Olivetti, the great ltalian typewriter, had been advertised in America with a primary emphasis on the beauty of its design. Among industrial design cognoscenti, Olivetti was always synonymous with beauty, but most people wouldn’t recognize good design if they tripped over it. Sales of Olivetti’s splendid line of electric typewriters had gone stagnant while mighty IBM had the market locked up. IBM was so dominant that purchasing agents of large corporations would rarely even consider buying another brand. We had to breakthrough the IBM barrier. To plot our strategy, Jim Callaway interviewed many key buyers and found that while they regarded Olivetti as a top-notch typewriter, their hands were tied. Secretaries, they explained to Jim, felt that IBM gave them status. So we conceived the Olivetti Girl, who would out-status everyone. We told secretaries that Olivetti was the typewriter to type on. And we were putting across a message that was being seen by her boss, her girl friends, and all those reluctant purchasing agents. We produced six ads and nine TV spots that showed the Olivetti Girl as the star performer in her office, as the secretary who typed faster, neater, sharper, as the girl most I likely to succeed. (One of our headlines summed it up: “When you want to do something right, give it to the Olivetti Girl!”) In a few weeks, brand awareness of Olivetti leaped, and sales of Olivetti typewriters went through the roof.

THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN VS. BROADWAY JOE NAMATH

Believe it or not, these ads were the genesis of the first #TimesUp movement.  The Olivetti campaign burst on the scene in 1972, just as the National Organization for Women was flexing its muscles. NOW attacked the campaign for stereotyping women as underlings (they were furious that only men were shown as bosses while only women were shown as secretaries), and they called me a male chauvinist pig.

They picketed the Olivetti building on Park Avenue and sent hecklers up to my office to un-n-n-nerve me. Something had to be done. Who can fight a woman’s fury? I capitulated. I would do an ad and a TV spot, with a woman executive giving orders to a male secretary. I cast an actual woman exec (not an actress) as the boss. I cast Jets great Joe Namath as the secretary (because he could type).

Lois invited the women of NOW to view the spot, but when they saw the boss ask her secretary for a date at the conclusion of the spot, they were aghast. (You do very good work, Joseph. By the way, what are you doing for dinner tonight?) “It’s an old story,” I said. “The boss always tries to make the secretary.” They cursed Lois, walked out, and never bothered that male chauvinist pig again.

From “Rebel Secretaries,” Time magazine, March 20, 1972:

“This infuriated a group of New York City secretaries, backed by members of the National Organization of Women, a feminist organization, which picketed Olivetti’s headquarters. The 2,000,000 U.S. secretaries —nearly all women, many underutilized and underpaid—would seem to be ideal recruits for Women’s Liberation. Yet few so far have joined the cause. Nevertheless, with new pages being turned almost everywhere else, some are being flipped over in shorthand notebooks too.

Last week, responding to complaints from employees, the U.S. State Department ordered its executives to stop treating secretaries as “char help,” to show a little more diplomacy toward them and to encourage independent secretarial decision making.”

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Okay, so where am I?

Yesterday’s email from the Telly Awards letting me know that I am now an 11-time winner launched a quickie celebration until the very next email reminded me of the pending deadlines I have on a handful of  projects, each demanding their own slice of greatness.

Great.

Just great.

Where to begin?

So now I’m hunkered down Unibomber style with a hoodie on covering my forehead, face barely visible as I chug caffeine trying try to craft that unicorn of a big idea I drone on about endlessly.

It’s been a process on my old 1940’s typewriter as I pound out rotten idea after crummy thought after regrettable copy. Yeah, the creative process can be drag, but usually it all works out at the 11th hour. I love to work alone in the middle of the day, blinds closed with a stray light somewhere near and talk radio blabbing on about everything and nothing at the same time. When I work in a team, I tend to drive people a bit insane. I talk and talk a lot once I grab the floor of the conversation, filibuster-style, never relenting long enough without recapping a life of dreams, with just the right blend of decades-old agency stories and ex-wife nightmares. Or so I think at the time. This is, after all, my strong suit. I love to lecture about our moral responsibilities in advertising.

Sometimes being alone allows me just the right space to find the right mix of genius and tact necessary to deliver a winning campaigns.

One thing I’ve discovered is that the first step to creativity is knowing how to ask the right questions; and it doesn’t have to happen on a hilltop while meditating in Zen mode during deep Buddhist chanting while birds chirp the rhythm of your future jingle.

No…creativity comes out when you need a solution — and none of the old solutions work. That’s when you get imaginative.

A Harvard Business Review article on creative thinking says it this way:


…Imagine ways out of the fix you’re in by imagining that the circumstances blocking your progress are being lifted one by one. This produces different versions of the challenge. One of these new hypothetical versions may well resemble a type of problem that you have solved in the past. Your mind will then fire out a whole new set of solutions, one or more of which may work. If the solution you select for the new version of the challenge is untypical for the original version, it can certainly qualify as a creative solution to the new one…

It’s like dreaming. One of the theories about why we dream states that we dream to prepare ourselves for things that maaaaaaaaybe, just maybe, will happen to us. This exercise in creativity goes the same way: by reimagining our situation to appear a tiny bit different, maybe we’ll see an out — or an in — that we couldn’t imagine before. You know, goof old fashioned mental magnet flipping.

When I’m stuck I pull out the typewriter and churn out lyrics from the Rolling Stones or The Dave Clark Five. It gets the melodies flowing in my head and the creative flows a bit better. Another motivational tool is looking at classic ads to reveal the brilliance and spark new thinking.

I stumbled across “Madman,” a Nike running classic from 1990. The mind can only remember so much, so when I see this ad, I can’t but marvel at it’s everything. The photography, the copywriting, the concept…it’s one of the seminal pieces of advertising craft.

It’s perfectly crafted with an economy of words that somehow has always driven my core feeling that less is more and more is less:

Click to enlarge

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy
Art Director: David Jenkins
Copywriter: Jerry Cronin
Photography: Arthur Meyerson
First Published: Runner’s World, January 1990

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