April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

You Kutztown kids did a fine job of imitating us for this poster photoshoot, we must say. Despite all the time that Doug & I spend crafting our ~*~signature looks~*~, apparently we can each be simplified for parody purposes:

Doug — a mustache.
Me — glasses & a scarf.

Above: side-by-side comparisons of a couple of our favorite student impersonators vs. THE REAL THING. (We couldn’t do a real-time comparison because Doug shaved off his mustache last week. THANKS, DOUG.)

Thank YOU, Kutztown! Hope to see your internship applications filling up our inbox ASAP.

All we had to do was capture the essence of this insanely awesome experience, which resulted in the work you can view here.

At the risk of humble bragging here (or is it old fashioned bragging?), this was the easily the greatest day of work any of us had ever had. The kicker? Our hotel was the site of the third most famous event in human history, the place where Grape Stomp Lady punctured her esophagus:

Unable to resist, our crew of highly trained thespians created the following re-enactment:

Once we arrived at the track, we got much, much, more serious about approaching these finely tuned, hand-built German marvels of engineering. Our automotive muse for this excursion could only be one person.

Compare!

Steve McQueen: A ruggedly handsome, danger-tempting iconoclast who was irresistible to women and a swashbuckling bon vivant that men aspired to be.

Contrast!

Justin LaFontaine: Everything McQueen is, but with a better understanding of kerning.

Our squad of Justin and (from left to right) Kyle Arango, Corey Levin, myself, and Megan Pomplas were ready. Well, most of us were ready; Kyle was equally intent on making his Facebook friends jealous of his jet-setting lifestyle.

Our fleet of vehicles:




Oh wait, that last one is the shitbox that I drive every day.

After a few minutes of instruction, some quality pastries and strong coffee, we hit the road. Kyle and I were partnered up, and we got behind the wheel of the SLS AMG, the gullwinged super car that costs upwards of $200K and has 563 horses sitting under its meticulously sculpted hood. Kyle and I had not been this excited since Bacon Salt was invented. What followed was inspiration for a headline.

Anatomy of a Headline:
Now, we thought we had an understanding of what these cars were, and what driving fast was like, but then you step behind the wheel and are instructed to hit the gas as hard as you can. Within nanoseconds, your heart gets pinned to the back of the leather bucket seat, your head kicks back from the G Forces, and an uncontrollable smile hits your face and laughter takes over. In fact, here’s a ghetto video I took of Kyle’s first run with the SLS (I get too excited and curse in it, so beware):

The resulting headline and spread:

There’s a whole lot of work over at our main site that I’d encourage you to check out. It aims to capture the essence of fun and excitement from the event, where normal folks get to channel their inner Steve McQueen and become as giddy as children on a sugar rush. We hope you enjoy it, cause we sure had a blast making it.

And we can’t thank the people at Mercedes enough for the experience. They were generous and unbelievably accommodating during the trip, and they’ve been a pleasure to work with through our relationship. And with clients like that, you always go the extra mile (per hour?) for them.

A year ago at this time, Kelly Dorsey and I had just completed the first and second Loyola University Maryland search pieces—a two-part direct mail campaign targeted at sophomores and juniors in high school. They hit the mailboxes, and they were successful, and that was great, and we were happy.

But when we were asked to expand the two-part mailer into a four-part series, we were honestly a little worried. Visions of Rocky 3 & 4 (and every other half-baked sequel/ made for TV movie) began to haunt us. Even though the four pieces would be tied together by identical format and materials, we wanted to create something new and unexpected—and to give the reader a glimpse into the school from a completely original angle.

We started Piece Three from a bird’s eye view: deciding that we would focus on campus life, and bring to light the fact that every student has enough activities, tasks, and experiences to keep them busy all four years. At the heart of this idea is the notion that no two people can possibly experience Loyola in the same way—and that’s a good thing.

What resulted was a piece that transitioned from the conversational “Loyola voice” straight into three first-person narratives, written from the point of view of students with vastly different Loyola experiences. Our inspirations were wide: the writing style from those Papercuts ads, the kinetic energy of the Euro trip montage from The Rules of Attraction (minus all the sex and illicit drug use), David Foster Wallace’s use of simultaneous stories and footnotes, and Maira Kalman’s hand-drawn typography.

The manuscript was long and full of blocks of text—but that was the point. We wanted each story to be something that you had to dive into to experience. Something that was so subjective that you couldn’t help but imagine the type of student who would embody this voice and engage in all these activities on campus. Each story was then paired with its own hand-drawn typeface (many hand cramps and late nights later).

Check out some of the pictures of what we came up with, below.  Of course, while this was happening, we were also concepting Piece Four…but we’ll leave that one for another blog post.

Which makes this one all the better. I was expecting a cringeworthy “oh, here’s another nostalgic look at how schmaltzy Philly can be at times” when suddenly Shmitty plants one in the face of all those lawyer fat cats—AND delivers a friggin product benefit.

If you want people to buy your celebrity endorsement ad, make it believable, and give the celeb a reason to be there in the first place.

With both the rousing tagline OPEN FIRE and the key image of the athlete exploding into multiple athletic poses, we show how Nike’s athletes, the best in the sport, come out swinging with a full arsenal of firepower. Energetic “identity” elements connect the athlete to the core product.

Stay tuned for more work to come in the next months.

At this point you’re probably asking yourself, “what is Jobathon”? And you’d be right. Which is why we’ve laboriously prepared this short informative video. Take a look!

Basically, we’re hiring. Designers, art directors, copywriters and just about any other job you can think of (as long as you are thinking of “designer, art director or copywriter”). In order to fill all these job openings, Executive Creative Director Jim Walls will be conducting interviews non-stop for at least 24 hours, or until he collapses.

Will he collapse during your interview? There’s only one way to find out.

Jump on over to http://72.10.33.187/jobathon to fill out an application, read more about Jobathon, or to just check out some mind-boggling, eyeball-searing, awesome-ness web design. It will probably be fun!

In every profession there are those pinnacle moments. The “makin’ it to the majors.” For most designers, copywriters and account execs it’s working on one of the big three: Apple, Coca-Cola, and of course, Nike.

Earlier this year we had one of those moments. Now we’re making it official. 160over90 is working with Nike Tennis. Swoosh, there it is.

It started with a small project—a quick turnaround to see what we could do. So, for 96 hours (pretty much straight) a team of designers and writers—running on nothing but excitement and 5-Hour Energy—burned and turned out some brand ideas that struck a chord with Nike Tennis’ marketing team.

They liked it. So much so, they adopted two of the concepts to be their 2010 global campaigns for Wimbledon and the US Open. Now the door was open to take the tennis category to the next level.

We got to work.

With names like Federer, Nadal, Serena and Sharapova, it was clear we had the best athletes in the game. We had great products to work with as well, including Rafa’s Courtballistec shoe and Roger’s Vapor Tour line. Now we needed to learn about the sport on a deeper level.

Our discovery process began when Nike invited our team to the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami to interview a slew of players, coaches, agents, journalists and commentators. From Patrick McEnroe, Captain of the U.S. Davis Team, to Federer’s agent, Tony Godsick and Serena’s Fitness Trainer, Mackie Shilstone, we questioned, delved into and prodded some of the greatest minds in the sport.

What did we find out? Tennis is kind of badass. When you take it out of the country clubs and “old money” estates, it more resembles a modern day duel or gladiatorial event than a genteel pastime. Competitive tennis is like trying to play chess while running a marathon and being in a homerun derby.

We poured all this newfound knowledge into the work—refining our original concepts to embody the sport, the events and what it means to wear Nike. Nike Tennis’ UK Division liked our Wimbledon work enough to tap us for their partnership with the RED Campaign. Under the line “Save More Than Break Points” we created outdoor, interactive and merchandise—you might have seen Serena wearing the Nike RED T-shirt we designed at several press conferences and interviews throughout Wimbledon.

For the US Open Nike took the campaign unveiling to the next level. It was launched in a massive pre-tournament event at NYC’s Chelsea Pier. Here, tennis fans were able to interact with our “Lights On. Lights Out.” campaign in-person through photo booths with branded backdrops, colossal outdoor installations, merchandise and a popup court where Roger played Rafa.

The agency also sent our Nike team to NYC so they could experience a slam event and see their work firsthand. We got to witness some great matchups, experience the energy of the tournament and see our work throughout the area, including on the fans—many of them wearing Nike shirts with our tagline on them.

This was just the beginning.

Since then we’ve been working full force on the 2011 Global Campaigns. You should be seeing the Spring and Summer 2011 Campaigns launching with the Australian Open and the French Open. Check out our case study here and come back to see more of our Nike work as it’s unveiled. Just do it.

Do you have opposable thumbs? Can you lift a 24 by 38 inch sheet of 100 pound text stock? Do your jeans frequently cut off circulation to parts of your legs?

Then we may have the job for you.

160over90 is looking for a talented, passionate, experienced poster holder–also known as “Designer Hands”–that will help lift (har har!) our designs to the next level.

YOU HAVE:

• 1-3 years experience being photographed holding real (or fake) work

• Well-manicured hands (no Limp Bizkit tattoos and/or flipper hands)

• A robust inventory of American Apparel hoodies

• No known allergies to inks or spot-varnishes

• No double chins (lower portion of jawline occasionally appears in our work)

• A mastery of both the two-fingered and four-fingered grip (knowledge of Swiss cross-clasp grasp a bonus)

WE HAVE:

• A group of talented creative professionals

• A robust 401(k) plan

• Competitive health-care coverage

• A shitload of stuff to mock up

Salary commensurate with experience.

If you have more talent than that (and we hope you do), we also need to fill key positions like a Creative Director, Senior Graphic Designer, Senior Copywriter, Interactive Designer and Production Artist. Visit our Job Board to apply here: 160over90 JOB BOARD. (seriously, we have a ton of stuff to mock up cause we’re up to our eyeballs in work. Apply now!).

Newsprint is an immersive, temporary material. It is disposable. It crumples easily and yellows quickly.  It has a short lifetime. It is intentionally imperfect. This is what we love about it, and why, when we were asked to create a search piece for Loyola University Maryland back in January, we chose newsprint. We wanted to use a material that was as immediate, honest, and unvarnished as the messaging contained in its pages.

The task was to create a mailer for Loyola that was aimed at high school Sophomores and Juniors—a time when many prospective students are feeling overwhelming emotions (both good and bad) about college. So instead of going down a tried and trite path full of generic campus photography and preemptive university information, we decided to instead tackle the immediate emotions that students feel at that particular moment in their lives: excitement, uncertainty, nervousness, and above all, possibility. We wanted to create something that was welcoming, immersive, and relatable—a bit of relevant life advice, rather than marketing jargon.

We explained the idea to Loyola as a piece that’s about the now—one that doesn’t immediately refer to Loyola, but instead reflects the school’s ideals and the type of attention and life skills that students can garner from their time on the Evergreen campus. Loyola was so excited by the idea that they encouraged us to make a double-edition piece that would be mailed out in two waves over a month-long period.

Looking back, it was really exciting to have the opportunity to work on a piece that pushed the boundaries of what a piece of university branding can be—going so far as to have the first volume appear without any logo or mention of Loyola whatsoever, besides a discrete seal on the back cover. The first volume focuses on the types of questions and uncertainties that high school students might be dealing with, and encourages them to embrace their facets, take advantage of their ability to try many things, and to focus on what makes them happy.

The type- and photo-driven first volume was followed by a graphic-heavy second volume that goes into specific detail about the tenets of Loyola University Maryland, and the University’s devotion to care of the whole person. Volume 2 asks students to examine their own personalities and interests as a means of uncovering what university is best for them—whether or not that school ends up being Loyola.

In its playful nature, curiosity-inspiring approach, and intellectual roots, the piece reflects Loyola University Maryland on a fundamental level. And like Loyola’s tenets, it provides advice that remains relevant throughout different periods in your life.