Copywritering 8-10-24

   I’ve been copywritering for a long time. I read all the books about copywriting and read the biographies of the great copywriters and I applied their best practices in everything I wrote as a freelancer.

     So when I landed a job at BBDO Detroit I thought I would encounter a crew of similar adherents to the foundations of good advertising. 

     Instead I found a creative staff that had other things on their mind instead of the daily drudgery of producing what Chrysler Corporation wanted to say about Dodge Trucks. I wrote print, radio, and TV commercials as if they mattered and I was crestfallen to find out that the others on the staff had no pride of authorship. They cranked out the crap and tried not to think about it.

     I spent my first six weeks on the job studying everything the agency had produced in the past year and was stunned by its violation of sound copywriting principles. I kept thinking I would gasp and wake up to find it was a dream.

     Eventually I figured out what the ad agency wanted from me. Good copywriting wasn’t what they wanted.

     Okay, I shrugged and gave ’em what they wanted. Over the next calendar year I wrote more ads than anybody else in the agency. If there was a project that needed actual, you know, writing, they called me in.

        One day I was typing away, reasoning myself through an assignment by writing about it to consider all aspects, when the senior art director said, “It’s amazing how you can just sit down and write.”

       Startled the hell out of me as I didn’t know he’d been standing behind me.

     None of the other writers wrote very much. They were surprised to find out that when I went home at night, I sat down at the typewriter and wrote stories and magazine articles. They were eager to set aside all aspects of work when they got home each day.    

     They were puzzled as to why I would use my first big paycheck to buy an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter. Don’t you already have an IBM at the office? Yeah, but I need one at home, too.

     I kept writing about how the agency was going to lose the account if they kept up their anti-copywritering ways.

      A new CEO took over at Chrysler and he visited the agency and had a meeting with the top Creatives (not me, I was the junior writer back in those days). He pointed at one writer and said, “You–what’s a McPherson strut?” I could have answered that one.

     That writer was irate about it. He told me, “I’m an artist, not a mechanic.”

     When the agency got fired I was contacted by several other Detroit ad agency recruiters but I knew that they were all essentially identical to BBDO. Instead I fled back to California to resume freelancing, which I have done ever since.