An Ass from the Past

Today's post revisits us from March of 2009. It's about advertising, which I don't write about much these days. What is there to say that hasn't been said about the sorry state of our business by Professor Tannenbaum, he of the well-researched blog post.

Also, it's no coincidence that last night while speed watching the entire Mad Men opus, I came upon an episode in Season 7, their last. Don Draper has landed in Purgatory for some off color remarks he made to the Hershey client and now finds himself in a career slide. My vocational circumstances and perhaps yours if you were a boatrocker, were a little different but similar. The details don't matter.

But it did harken back to those youthful crazy times when copywriters did copywriting. Enjoy.

Spankers Hours

Kudos to the copywriter who penned a new radio commercial for Chase Bank.

The spot isn’t great by any means. It attempts to compare the joy of the new car smell with the “supposed” joy of a new checking account smell. A reach, at best.

But the writer ended the spot with, “that's the smell of brand spanking new banking.” 

And that is no small feat in our current risk-averse environment of hyper-analysis. 

Nor is that rhythmic choice of words an accident. They were chosen by a sly copywriter looking for a cheap laugh. That's what we copywriters do. After all, we're talented enough to make a living, but not talented enough to make art.

I was reminded of another lifetime. When I was hired to write copy for Lexus, this despite the fact that what I knew about Japanese luxury automobiles could not fill the bottom of a sake cup.

The dirty little secret about copywriters is that as much as we want to make our clients happy, what we really want is to make other copywriters jealous. By winning awards, securing better offices and sneaking double entendres into our work.

To that end, the Creative Director had devised a game that allocated points to writers who could worm a certain word or phrase into a Lexus ad. For instance:

cockroach…………...4 points
diarrhea……………...6 points
transsexual………....3 points
Manzanar…………...9 points

So today I tip my hat to you, Mr. Spanking New Banking Phrase Inserter. You have earned yourself 5 points.

But I still long for the day when some copywriting savant can tell me all about the new Lexus LS 460 and work in a mention of the Enola Gay (10 points.)