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-	Confessions of an Ad-man XII: Consumers in Search of Service
-	Confessions of an Ad-man XI: More Dueling With Mother Nature
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man X
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man IX
-	Confessions of an Ad-Man VII: Commercial ends up in the air instead of on the air

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In this column, I’ll provide some stories, taken from my somewhat checkered career as an ad agency/writer, president, and account executive. I filled those positions, or to be more accurate, occupied them, over a protracted period of time - something in the area of twenty-five years.

I hope you’ll find them amusing and/or enlightening. I do now but I didn’t then. It’s nice to be able to refer to most of them as memories.

Of course I had some good times too. But they weren’t nearly as funny.

The all-new-better-than-ever-same-old-thing

Many years ago I started writing in self-defense. I ran a fairly successful advertising agency and found that I was constantly in the middle of a serious conflict between my writers and my clients. The conflict was always the same:

The clients complained that the writers didn’t give them what they wanted and the writers complained that the clients just didn’t understand advertising. As with most conflicts, both sides were right and both sides were wrong. The clients weren’t communicating very well and the writers weren’t listening very well.

I took the coward’s way out. I started writing my own copy. Then I learned a great truth. To be a good commercial writer, you have to be as concerned with the message as you are with the quality of the writing. It doesn’t matter how beautifully the words are strung together or how cute or “off the wall” the concept is; if it doesn’t communicate the message, it simply isn’t good writing.

I spent more time learning the client’s business, asking questions for clarification, making notes and less time writing. Surprise number one was that the clients didn’t request nearly as many revisions as they used to do. Surprise number two was that the quality of my writing didn’t suffer. If anything, it got tighter, cleaner, crisper. Life was good.

Several years ago I started writing for clients I met on the Internet. I bought the idea that I saw expressed on writers’ lists: This is a “new medium”; things are completely different; you need a fresh new perspective on writing. I studied web sites and on-line magazines. I read every piece of spam that oozed its way into my mailbox. I educated myself in the “ways of the web”. And everything started to bother me. I got defensive about my copy. I got annoyed with clients whom I felt were over-editing my work. I raged against having grammatical errors and poor syntax inserted into my copy. Life was not good any more. So I took a step back. That’s when I realized it’s the all-new-better-than-ever-same-old-thing.