Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Archives for March 2012

Happy Hour Video: “Drive it like you hate it”

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My dad's best friend was Carl Ally, a 1960s adman who made the madmen look like mice. Carl was the guy a client brought in when the client was in deep shit. (And once, when a client didn't accept his campaign idea, he told the client, "I ought to go to your office and shit in your drawer.") Carl and my dad both knew that the best client was a client in trouble, because that was the client that had to take your advice.

As Volvo did, when it was close to being driven off U.S. shores. Carl Ally came up with an ad campaign titled, "Drive it like you hate it." Straight from Ally's own raging gut and utterly against the grain of the auto-glorifying style of the moment, these ads saved Volvo. Because they were real, emotionally honest and slightly insane. (Wait for the last line.)

One of my problems (I think)

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It was said of the British writer Hugh Trevor-Roper that "among the tragedies of his life was that he never wrote the big book people expected."

I've never written a book either. Have you?

"The trouble is," Trevor-Roper defended himself, "I am too interested in too many things. And then, there are the delights of idleness: of walking in the country, of scratching the noses of horses, or the backs of pigs; of planting and lifting and cutting trees (I love trees) … or the pleasures of convivial, social life: of slow monosyllabic conversation, over beer and cheese and pickled onions."

I'm not sure that's my problem exactly, but I hope it is.