Craig McNamara writes

In a way, this was 35 years in the making.   Back in 1989, a local screenwriters’ group sponsored a public reading of a movie script I had written called  The Last Couple to Prom . It was an ‘80s screwball comedy wannabe, in which the protagonist, Ben, moved next door to his high school crush, Tracy, and spun an escalating series of lies and deceptions in order to get close to her. Instead, he becomes friends with her husband and learns a secret that could end their marriage and give him the chance with Tracy he was hoping for.   At the end of the night, I received a cassette tape recording of the production … which I never revisited for the next three decades.     Back then, I was weirdly averse to outlining, or even just thinking through, script ideas I had. I would just start writing, hoping my momentum would carry me through the next 90 to 110 pages. Spoiler: More than once, it didn’t. This time it did, but it also baked in some storytelling problems th...

A few months back, I was contacted by David Wojdyla, creator and curator of a blog commemorating the life and career of Ron Anderson, the storied creative director of Bozell Advertising and "the godfather of Minneapolis advertising." David and I both worked for Ron at different points, me in the 1980s as a copywriter in Minneapolis, and him in the 1990s as an executive creative director in New York. (Today, David is co-founder of ANDvertising Inc. in Chicago. When David was looking for new material for the blog, he came across one of my award-winning Bozell ads for Surdyk's liquor store and asked me if I had other Surdyk's ads he could show. It seemed a little presumptuous to show off my work on a blog about Ron  –  but maybe not if I put it in the context of an advertising approach first laid down by Ron (and his copywriter partner, Tom McElligott) a decade earlier. The link to my post is below  –  but if  you aren't familiar with Ron Anderson, his care...

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 .

From 1985, here's fashion designer Kenzo Takada...times three. Confident, relaxed, and, with with the d.i.y. ties and pocket squares, very much in the style of the '80s. And yet... When I look at the Kenzo ad, all it makes me think of is this eccentric fellow (times four) indulging his own brand of individuality three years later: But maybe it's just me. Or is it? Let's try swapping the images and see what we get: See what I mean?

You combine with the loosening sexual mores of 1972 with the mainstreaming of the "male centerfold" (following movie star/sex symbol Burt Reynolds appearing au natural in Cosmopolitan that same year) and this -- unfortunately -- is what you get: Real socks appeal, fellas. Yes, what better way to show off your socks than by removing all those other distracting clothes? Or, more to the point, what better way to draw attention to your ad than by highlighting it in context of one of the most provocative images allowed in mainstream media of the era? (Showing women nude or with implied nudity had been fairly common in advertising since at least the '50s .) But back to the Cosmo influence: After some 80 years as a family magazine, then-new editor Helen Gurley Brown reoriented the magazine in the early 1970s, to a focus on the interests of sexually liberated young women. Women finally get equal rights to objectify the opposite sex. Probably nothing epitomized the magazine...