Confessions of a would-be Ad-Man

My Dad used to tell me I should go into advertising, as a copy-writer. He thought I'd be good at it. "You'd be a motherfucker", he once said. And I heard it from other folks as well growing up.(Well, some folks just called me a motherfucker, but that's another story).

But we all have different talents I guess. I never could throw a baseball worth a damn, have little-to-no mechanical ability, and I'm a dreadful handyman(strangely enough, just like my Dad!). But I've always had the ability to make things up, to invent, fabricate. To come up with stuff.

Some of the harebrained ideas I've had include: a store specializing in footstools, called The Ottoman Empire; a support group for instrumentalists who double on bass to get more work and then find themselves "overbooked" on bass, called Bass Under Pressure; a slogan for the social service agency I worked for, which provided unemployment benefits: we're workin' hard so you don't have to! Oh yeah, and whenever marijuana is legalized(recreationally, not just "medicinally") on a larger scale than just two states, a slogan for pot brownies: a "Toklas" alternative..

Okay, not all these are sellable ideas(though I'd love to start The Ottoman Empire), but they show you that this is something I'm not-too-shabby at. I once had a 3-week gig, under my name, for which I wrote a different ad every week using a different stock picture and making up a story/scenario behind it. 

Lotsa fun. Creativity itself is fun. Things like the footstool store made me laugh when I thought of them, so it's nice to share-and hopefully at least one other person gets the same chuckle I did. So you'd think this would be a joyous occupation, spending all day every day coming up with stuff.

The difference between doing this for fun and making a living at it would seem to me to be like the difference between a friendly(and thus low-stakes)Poker game, and a high-stakes game where your ass is on the line. Same strategies for winning, only much more cut-throat, more ruthless in the latter game. 

And it would depend a lot on the client. Whose product you're trying to market, and what kind of approach they want you to take. Is it a soft-sell, where you gently sway the viewer, or do you go after them with a great guns sense of urgency? In either case, you have to convince them that this is something they need, something they can't really do without. One of my favorite such slogans was from MTV one year: watch MTV or your summer will suck!

Also, for legal reasons(i.e. the possibility of being sued), certain buzzwords have to be in place, sort of as disclaimers. For instance, if you watch, no product makes a claim to actually do what it's supposed to! No, it helps do what it's supposed to. Help is a common one. Or, in the case of a specific product, signifigantly reduces discomfort. Signifigantly. Good one. Impossible to quantify, to measure. Legal teflon.

When I write a piece of music, I think strongly about the effect it will have on the potential listener. How are they going to experience this music? How's it going to make them feel? Similarly, if I wrote an ad(and here I'm talking about for bucks as opposed to just yucks), I'd be very cognizant of how it'd go over with viewers. Would it amuse them? Confuse them? Make them laugh, or piss them off?

It's all manipulation, but the trick is not to make the viewer feel like he's being manipulated. Get 'em laughing, or excited. Get 'em engaged, so they forget you're trying to talk them into buying whatever it is they're watching. Maintain the illusion. 

If I'm watching a TV show, be it drama or comedy or any combination thereof, and I get the feeling that they're just reading lines, then we're done. If I'm watching a commercial, and get the feeling that I'm being manipulated(that is, if the already present manipulation becomes transparent), likewise- game over. The most offensive commercials to me, next to the political "attack' ads, are for agencies like the ASPCA, which shamelessly tug at the heartstrings:

  It may sound curmudgeonly of me, but these commercials actually piss me off! I've had pets my whole life, and dearly love animals, so I don't like my feelings being messed with. 

So if I were making my living in advertising, it probably wouldn't be these kinds of ads. No, I'd be much more at home doing the humorous stuff- and hopefully with some nuttiness sprinkled in there. I'm thinking of the old 7-Up ads, where the hamburger is being fitted for a suit. Or the Little Caesar's Pizza ads with the crazy dippin' fool.

Or even something like Mucinex. Although you'd try to block out the reality of the situation: that you're coming up with plot lines and scenarios for anthropomorphic globs of snot!

No, I think I did well to pursue music, being a composer and player. It's fun coming up with things that would conceivably be ads and commercials, but only as a sideline thing. Advertising is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.