Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

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.)

And so we beat on: me, Mitt Romney, our dads and my mom

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I'm having a lively private dialogue with a big-company speechwriter about, the quality of Mitt Romney's rhetoric. Essentially, he thinks it's passable, I think it's shit. He suspects that's because I'm a Democrat, I think it's because I'm a communication expert. And so on. The conversation is in good faith and is engerizing rather than energy-sapping so far, so I'm keeping it up.

But I had to send him a footnote:

A funny footnote to this whole discussion: My Republican dad was an adman—creative director at Campbell-Ewald, in Detroit. My Democrat mother was a writer—a novelist, but also a copywriter, working for my dad in the late sixties. George Romney was a friend of the agency’s president, and as a favor, the creatives worked on some speeches for him for his [1968] presidential campaign, and helped him with his delivery. Guess who my Republican dad tapped to help? My Democrat mom.

How did she like that? I asked him once (after she died, alas). “How do you think she liked it?”

She was a little too blunt with George, and they took her off the job ….

And here we are—the Republican pragmatist and Democrat idealist inside me, talking to you about a presidential candidate named Romney—44 years later.

… boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, etc.

Clever doesn’t cut it

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As you might have noticed, I've been digging int0 some of my pappy's old stuff lately, for inspiration and moral backup. I have a book of memos from his days as creative director for Detroit ad agency Campbell-Ewald in the 1960s, I ran across this letter of Mar. 28, 1966, thanking a Kenneth B. Walker, for some ideas:

While some of them are quite amusing, I refer you back to my letter of several months ago in which I told you that it's fairly easy for most of our writers to coin a phrase or use a pun, but rather difficult for them to solve marketing or product problems that are usually the assignment. Keep in mind, Ken, that many of our writers have been or are novelists, gag writers for comedians, greeting card writers, movie writers and so on. So it is very, very easy for them to come up with something like, "A SUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE OFFICE!" As a matter of fact, we have books in our library filled with puns that could easily be applied to our product, if we felt this could result in meaningful advertising. All this by way of saying please don't expect us to fall backwards at a few well-turned phrases.

Dad let him down easy, concluding,

I have been busy with a new reorganization and haven't poked my nose out of the office for several months, but would always find time for a talk with you about advertising, islands, or women.

The man knew how to handle it.