Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Planners, take your best shot


That's my face on a dartboard.
Correction, that's my much younger face on a dartboard.

And if you are a Planner or you are involved with Strategy or the construction of briefs with their many triangles, trapezoids and parallelograms, not to mention bullet points, asterisks, and run on sentences, today is your lucky day.

Today is about retribution.

And getting back at the old 44 freelance copywriter.

You see, fresh off the chart-busting success of my previous book, Round Seventeen &1/2, the Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Inefficient, I began work on my next opus. That's right another book is on its way.

Regardless of what you've been told, people do judge a book by its cover and so a lot of time and thinking has gone into the packaging. I had already picked the design for the front and was going over the many options for the back. That's when it struck me, more accurately that's when a certain unnamed Planner from NYC who took exception to my current WPP campaign, because of my "tired hate the planner trope" struck me.

So I've decided to let Planners have their day.

And plaster the back cover of the new book with scathing, go-for-the-jugular literary reviews. It's not even important if they have read the book -- which if they have been following Round Seventeen, they have -- it's more about the opportunity to flip the table and turn the skewer into the skewee.

What do I mean?

Here's a picture of the back cover of Round Seventeen & 1/2:


It's littered with fake nasty reviews from real literary publications.

"Blowing out a candle does not make one a firefighter, any more than clacking away on a keyboard makes one a writer." -- Tim Farnsworth, Ploughshares.

The plan is do something similar.

Only with real quotes from real Planners.

This is not just an opportunity to flex your creative muscle. This is an opportunity to exact some measure of vocational vengeance. To vent. To lash back at the irrelevant dinosaur who has ruthlessly torn into your profession and left the bloody mess scattered about the blogosphere for all to see.

It's Open Season on the Creative Department.

Lock and Unload.

Winners will be selected based on wit, cruelty and inventive invective.









2 comments:

Bob said...

The planners will need 6 months to come up with the quotes. And you'll get a week to write the book.

grandrue said...

Rich, you're the tide that lifts all boats. An adland treasure. But you're the exception that proves the rule--the denizens of the Creative Kingdom don't write--not even a run-on sentence.

I just fit three (if not four) cliches in two lines.

Your biggest fan,

(wait, that's another one).