Craig McNamara writes

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 an 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 darted over and started yelli...

We know storytelling is all the rage now in marketing. And like most fashionable things, there’s usually some precedent in the past. Why else do we have the phrase, “Everything old is new again”? Still, you’re not likely to come across a story today like the one in this 1938 Arrow Shirts ad. If authenticity is all, this is more, well, horseplay: It was written by  George Gribbin  of Young & Rubicam, who was  recalled  as saying,  "One of the great assets of this agency is that a man here feels he can express himself as a writer."  Certainly, he accomplished that here; sixty years later, the ad was still well remembered, ranking 98 th  of the Top 100 Ads according to Advertising Age magazine in 1999. It begins,   Joe always said when he died, he’d like to become a horse.    One day Joe died.    Early this May, I saw a horse that looked like Joe drawing a milk wagon. “I sneaked up to him and whispered, “Is it you, Joe?” ...

Yes, yes, I know, print advertising is dead, especially newspaper advertising – but ads still use space in other mediums, so apply these observations as you will.   Make the height of the ad part of the concept Look how this 1966 Mobil ad really sells the comparison of car collision at 80 mph with the impact of a car dropped from a ten-story building. You could have used a rooftop shot of the car going over; you could have shown a tighter shot of a car falling past a row of windows; you could have shown the crushed car at the base of the building; but Len Sirowitz of Doyle Dane Bernbach used the height of the newspaper space to show the full size of building, inviting us the imagine the long fall of the automobile and what happens when it hits the ground. And making a static photo feel as dramatic as the same demonstration in the accompanying TV commercial .    (The layout is even more brilliant when you consider that the ad was likely encountered by people reading the ne...

Authentic. Genuine. Truthful. These are the qualities above all that modern advertising aspires to – or claims to aspire to. Consumers today are too savvy, too cynical, the thinking goes, to be beguiled by unrealistic depictions and unattainable expectations. Yet despite this emphasis on realism, advertising largely remains an aspirational medium. Even the earthiest, unadorned people you see in ads still tend to be stylishly photographed and romanticized, still appealing to how we wish to see ourselves, even if that wish is a bit less lofty.  So unlike the scrubbed, idealized images Madison Avenue sold us during the ‘50s and ‘60s. And that’s largely true – but when it comes to authenticity, nothing I’ve seen in recent years comes close to this mid-1960s campaign for Sony’s new concept of “portable” televisions. Created by the celebrated “Think small”/”When you’re number two, you try harder” ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach , these 1965 ads present something that's largely vanished fr...

Bigger sizes and smaller prices for my two previous children's books – plus a new book also featuring fun animal illustrations by noted Hamm's Bear illustrator (and my father-in-law) Bill Stein.  Preview and order via craigmwriter.com or here .

We all have someone we look up to, someone who inspires and awes you, who motivates and challenges you by their example.   Mine was my best friend.   I met Jeff Vlaming when we both worked in the advertising department of our college newspaper. We hit it off right from the start, and for the next 40 years, we kept each other laughing and endlessly discussing movies, TV shows, books, comics, and music.   I’ve never known anyone else like him, his talent bursting out in all directions at once.    Jeff sold his first TV script while still living in Minneapolis. When he and his wife, Kathy, made the move to California, he beat the odds by getting his first staff writer position on the critical favorite,  Northern Exposure . From there, he moved to  The X-Files  and began a long career writing and producing for many popular sci-fi and horror genre shows, including  Weird Science ;  Xena, Warrior Princess ;  Battlestar Galactica ;  R...

As a panelist on a TV talk show, ad man and creative revolutionary George Lois was once asked to define advertising. After listening to the more scholarly definitions offered up the other ad execs on the panel, George commented, “I think these guys and me are in a different business,” and offered a more blunt, visceral definition.    Lois:  “Advertising is poison gas. It should bring tears to your eyes. It should unhinge your nervous system. It should knock you out.” 1   That’s George in a nutshell. Visceral. Bombastic. But in a less provocative mood, he summed his approach up this way:    Lois:  “The common denominator of all my work is the unremitting quest for The Big Idea, because The Big Idea – a surprising solution to a marketing problem, expressed in memorable verbal and/or graphic imagery – is the authentic source of communicative power … [and] picks up force and speed because its element of surprise changes a habit or point of view.” 2 He capi...

What’s your favorite song by The Carpenters? That would seem to be a simple enough question – but when it comes to the ‘70s sister-and-brother duo, it can be a little more complicated. Because often, you don’t just have to choose a song, you have a choose a version. Richard Carpenter didn’t just sing harmony to his Karen’s lead vocals. As producer,  arranger, lyricist, and composer, he was deeply involved in the production of the tracks – and a bit of a perfectionist. So over the years, as their hits have been re-released, he’s used the opportunity to remix many tracks  to improve sound quality and add new instrumentation and flourishes – on songs like  Ticket to Ride ,  Top of the World , and  Superstar . And it hasn't been just Richard Carpenter re-doing works long after they’ve been completed. Think of Neil Sedaka, re-recording his 1962 bubblegum hit,  Breaking Up is Hard To Do  as a soulful piano ballad in 1975. Or the group Chicago, re-arranging t...

In 2016, I was helping my father-in-law, commercial artist Bill Stein (1923- 2020), prepare for a move by sorting through his flat files of artwork and sketches accumulated over his 60+ year career. Lots of Hamm’s work, naturally, and a drawer filled with Inky Lou posters. But there were other critters and creatures, too – animal and human, whimsical and fantastical.  I hadn't realized how many times Bill had to help brand a company through the personality and antics of an advertising mascot. I put together a booklet for him, "Critters & Creatures," that compiled examples of the characters that Bill had drawn (and in several cases, created), along with his brief memories about each of them. This is my introduction to the collection, along with four of the best-known mascots. * * * In the world of advertising, they’re known as “critters,” the popular pitchmen of the Leo Burnett Company . The Chicago ad agency was behind such 20th Century marketing icons as Tony the Ti...

One of the goals of an effective ad campaign is a consistent, identifiable look that’s distinctive of the advertiser and can unify the campaign across different mediums and messages. And that can apply to movie posters, too. (And not just for series like Star Wars  and  Indiana Jones .) While reading Mel Brooks' recent autobiography ,   All About Me , which is illustrated with posters of many of his movies, I realized something that I hadn’t, back when the movies came out years apart. Several of the posters for first half-dozen or so movies had a kind of “house-style” to them. In fact, the poster for 1974’s  Blazing Saddles  was the first for designer John Alvin, who would go on to create posters for more than 135 films, including  Blade Runner ,  The Color Purple ,  Beauty and the Beast , and  The Lion King . Alvin di ed in 2008; today, he’s remembered as a “master of the tease,” the image that sells the movie without the hyperbole and hucks...

What follows is a completely rewritten version of a post written for this blog over a decade ago; same viewpoint, just better expressed. Appropriately, it's one of the essays in my book, Thinking Too Hard and Rethinking Too Much: Stories and Essays from a Career in Advertising . If there was anything new to be gained from the [then] recent passing of advertising legend David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, I hope it will be a long-overdue re-evaluation by my generation of his ideas and principles about advertising.     Oh sure, the industry press carried the expected pronouncements of admiration from various creative superstars, but in nearly every case, it ran along the lines of “the quintessential ad man, built up a darn big agency” – backhanded compliments that discredited his actual creative accomplishments, if only by omission.     Trust me, I understand. I was here in the 80’s, the decade of  Ogilvy On Advertising , the book wherein Mr. O...