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What's it like to work in advertising? It's like this.

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What's it like to create advertising for a living? What’s it like to work at an ad agency?  What’s to like – or not like – about certain ad campaigns?  What do I like in how advertising in portrayed in movies and TV?   Find out here, in essays, articles, podcast scripts, and blog posts – nothing too heavy and written with wit and style.  Like the writing on this blog?  It's like that, and more. $9.99 softcover – $4.99 ebook Read excerpts and order  here .

Pop Artifice

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Target has been around since 1959, when its first store opened in the Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb just north of St. Paul.  And for much of next four decades, its advertising was practical, safe, and largely forgotten as soon as the ad ended.     But during the mid-90s, things started changing. It began with the chain's very conscious positioning of itself as a “discounter unlike other discounters,” typified by the theme, "Expect more. Pay less." And when Target broke into the East Coast market, opening a store in Menlo Park, New Jersey,  in  1996, they turned to New York agency Kirchenbaum and Bond, who gave them a striking campaign that married household products to fashion, and helped make Target a favorite of fashionistas.   So the stage was set for Minneapolis agency, Peterson Milla Hooks, to make Target's next leap. Dubbed the “ Sign of the Times ” campaign, it turned their red bullseye logo into a design element in all of their advertising, combini...

1 play, 2 theaters, 21 performances

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A casual apology during coffee between friends leads a series of surprising confessions. That's my 10-minute play, The Besting of Friends , inspired by an occurrence in my life.  (Yes, I inadvertently lost a childhood friend's action figure. Yes, he had totally forgotten the incident when I replaced the figure decades later. No, nothing else that follows actually happened.) Over the last two years I've racked up a lot of rejections for plays I've submitted to various short-play festivals. (Part of the process, and a career in advertising has given me lots of experience in having ideas rejected.) So, at best, I was hoping that The Besting of Friends would at least make it into one of the many competitions in which it was entered. I was pleasantly surprised that it was produced  by two different theatre companies in the same month, February 2025.  The Rainy Day Artistic Collective, based in Seattle, included my play in their New Works New Writers 2025 showcase that was s...

Doing the Shark Dance

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So there I was, on the sands of a Florida beach, surrounded by a group of young people in swimwear, all eyes on me as I instructed them in the dance they were about to perform. The dance I was still coming up with barely five minutes earlier. The Shark Dance.   In 1994, I was a writer at the Kauffman Stewart ad agency in Minneapolis, where one of my projects was the launch of that year’s Tigershark personal watercraft models made by Arctic Cat. Along with writing the ads and brochure, I would be going down to Florida to help supervise the film shoot of people riding Tigersharks in the gulf.    That included a riff on  Jaws , where beachgoers are panicked by a kid yelling “Shark!” as he spots a guy on a Tigershark. And later, the four Tigershark models zooming left to right across the screen, followed by a large shark fin we had made that was pulled through the water on a submerged rig. The fin was convincing enough that two riders unconnected to our shoot zoomed over...

Red-Nosed Drunk – the audio play

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  It's Christmas Eve in a dive bar, where Santa's most famous reindeer has a lot to say about "The Big Guy," commercialism, and his role as a holiday icon. I wrote this in response to the Theatrical Shenanigans podcast’s call for holiday plays.  Since this would be an audio production, I realized I could adapt (and extend) my 2003 short essay about a conversation between a bartender and grumbling Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and not have to worry about costuming.  Produced by the podcast for their "12 Plays of Christmas" Special, December, 2024. (The title graphic for the play was created by me.)

If two minutes is funny, why not ten?

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Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...

Who is Mr. Thomson and why can't he keep his hands to himself?

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An oddly intriguing 1960s-era campaign I stumbled across recently.  Let’s handle this part right up front: Obviously, seen through modern eyes, it’s sexist as all get-out – but if you just want to reinforce your disgust at the ads, there are other web sites out there that will indulge you.    Here, I’m more interested in examining these ads as an  ad campaign  – what made them attention-getting, recognizable, and endlessly reproducible, as well as how they channeled the zeitgeist (for better and worse). So who is this Mr. Thomson with the audacity to feature himself as a handsy designer of women’s apparel?    The internet is surprisingly barren when it comes to The Thomson Company , the textile manufacturer behind the ads, the brand, and the exclamation – but digging deep, here’s what I’ve been able to find out and suss out. Though he was the public face (so to speak) of the company, our Mr. Thomson was, in fact, an advertising creation, as fictitious ...

The caveman at mid-century

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The mid-century, it seems, was the heyday for advertising that traded on the trope of the caveman dragging off a mate by her locks.  As eye-catching, evocative imagery, it was just too potent for ad men to resist -- especially when it could be presented with an anachronistic twist. Thus, we have this 1949 Arrow ad which gives women the upper hand in the mating ritual, informing us that "A man hasn't a chance in an Arrow White Shirt."    "Correct, young-man-about-to-live-in-a-cave!" the copy confirms, "Their handsome, perfect-fitting collars are irresistible." (And don't worry about their mismatched clothing. By the time she's finished dragging him home, that white shirt will be a memory, in dirty, ragged shreds.) In 1956, the scenario again made an appearance, with men and women back in their traditional roles, this time to cast bone-ribbed girdles as something out the stone age ... or something very much like it. "Come out of the bone age...