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.

+ In case your garden is lacking something that you.. just can’t put your finger on

+ For the gal looking to avoid the bird flu, without losing her stylish edge

+ We all know how annoying it is to take your sun glasses fully off your head

+ For the man whose pillow is never cold enough

+ And my personal favorite

In the video below you can see on the left hand side what the test person watched. The video on the right was reconstructed purely based on the measured brain activity. Obviously it has ways to go until you’d be able to clearly see what someone else saw or thought about but it’s a pretty radical breakthrough in regards to reading someone’s mind eventually. Good or bad? Probably both.

When we set out for our discovery trip to the University of Notre Dame I was curious and skeptical about what we would find out and experience on campus. For a couple of reasons: 1) it is already one of the most recognized university brands in the US and therefore comes by default with a lot of preconceptions and 2) I am always careful when religion gets married with education. Given that and the nature of a discovery I kind of was the devil’s advocate on a Catholic campus.

As strange as it might sound it is not a bad position to be in when you are trying to find out how water proof a concept, philospohy or idea is. If you already bought into something you don’t listen and look as careful as you probably should. But, no risk of that in this case. And that also had a lot to do with the people we interviewed and met with. As with every journey or road trip you’d take you come across things you didn’t expect, which more often than not is what makes it memorable in the end. With universities it’s rarely the beauty of the campus or the advanced labs you might see during a campus tour (although Notre Dame’s campus is cool and the view into the stadium from the press lounge awesome).

Most often it is the stories and people you meet that embody the essence of the brand and bring it to life immediately. In the case of this trip it was definitely the meeting with 94-year-old Father Ted (Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C.), former long-time president of the University of Notre Dame, holder of the world record for most honorary doctorate degrees (150) ever awarded to one person, the first figure in higher education to receive the Congressional Gold Medal and the highest civilian honor the Medal of Freedom, former Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, advisor to several US Presidents and a thousand other unbelievable things. Simply put he was one of the most impressive people I ever met for as least as many reasons as he has doctorate degrees.

Especially amongst catholics he is a living legend, one that always fought for a better tomorrow and against the perception that as George Bernard Shaw (founder of the London School of Economics and Nobel Prize winner in literature) once said “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms.” Father Ted believes “there is no conflict between science and theology except where there is bad science or bad theology.”

With everything he has been involved with, from being appointed by President Eisenhower to the Civil Rights Commission in 1957 and by President Carter to head a delegation of Americans to a global conference on science and technology for development in 1977 to going on a fact-finding tour of refugee camps around Kosovo for the United Nations in 1999 he is the living proof of his and Notre Dame’s philosophy.

Given all the skepticism I had going into this I have to admit that Father Ted was just an extraordinary icing on an amazing cake and the whole team got convinced not only by him but the whole, extremely passionate, welcoming and open-minded community we experienced during our trip. Now our big challenge was to capture everything we learned and to translate that into a Notre Dame undergraduate brand that can convey its story to a variety of different audiences in the most engaging and truthful way. Communicating all the facts, achievements and opportunities, especially to the 16- or 17-year-old high-school student that starts thinking about what they want to do with their lives.

And now, roughly six months later we hold the seminal piece of the new brand in our hands, fresh off the press. I hope this viewbook will inspire and convince the audience as much as we were inspired and convinced. And when it comes to advocating, no question I am now on Notre Dame’s side.

See more work for Notre Dame here.

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.

British director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scottland”, “Touching the Void”) asked people around the world to document important moments of their lives on July 24 2010 and upload those videos to youtube. More than 80.000 people from 192 countries participated and submitted more than 4500 hours of digital film.

Using that material Macdonald then, together with his editor Joe Walker, cut a film that’s partly happy, partly sad, and sometimes thrilling. Produced is the movie by “Blade Runner” director Ridley Scott. Starting this July it will hit theaters in the US.

Last week, I was going through the snapshots I took during my visit to Greensboro, Alabama and was thrilled to make this connection to Walker Evans — that Greensboro is indeed one of the towns that Evans documented for much of his acclaimed collaboration with writer James Agee in 1936. Their collaboration resulted in the honest and revealing book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and grew out of an assignment that the two accepted from Fortune magazine to produce a magazine feature on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the South.

WALKER EVANS: “Storefront, Greensboro, Alabama.” Summer 1936.

WALKER EVANS: “County seat of Hale County, Alabama.” 1935/1936.

Above: Greensboro’s Main Street, then and now. Much of the architecture remains unchanged.

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In the spirit of Evans, below is some of the inspiring signage I encountered while exploring Greensboro last week — a graphic designer’s gold mine! Fun fact: Evans went on to teach graphic design (and photography) at the Yale University School of Art from 1964 to 1974.)

Last Friday I left the City of Brotherly Love for a trip to the American South. For my first ever visit to Alabama, I was heading to Greensboro to volunteer a couple days of my design time alongside a friend who works with HERO (Hale Empowerment & Revitalization Organization), a non-profit housing resource center.

Greensboro (population 2,731) is located in Hale County, one of the most poverty-stricken counties in Alabama, and draws the support of many non-profits and community service organizations. It was great to visit this town that I’d heard so much about — a design Mecca that has been receiving a good deal of press over the past few years. I met so many energetic and engaging people who were completing degrees, fellowships, or AmeriCorps service programs with various groups in town, such as: HERO, YouthBuild, Project Horseshoe Farm, Rural Studio, Pie Lab, and Habitat for Humanity.

While it was an inspiring and insightful trip, it was also an intense time to be visiting this region of Alabama. Although Greensboro was mostly untouched by the April tornadoes, many of the surrounding towns are suffering from extensive damage. The HERO office on Main Street was transformed into a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center for three of the days of my visit, as those affected community members came by for disaster assistance.

A big thank you to all the welcoming people of Greensboro that I met this past week! Looking forward to visiting again soon. (And stay tuned for an upcoming blog post that details the logo design process that my friend Julie and I created for a new program within HERO…!)

Above: Inside an in-progress schoolhouse behind Greensboro’s Main Street.

Above: A peek at the front counter and open kitchen of Pie Lab, described by the NY Times as “a combination pop-up cafe, design studio and civic clubhouse.”

Above: Two of the amazing $20k Houses ($10k labor and $10k materials), a concept created and realized by students of Auburn University’s RuralStudio. “The 20k house project seeks to address the pressing need for decent and affordable housing in Hale County. The aim is to produce a model home that can be reproduced on a large scale, becoming a viable alternative to the trailer in this area. The challenge is to build a house for $20, 000 that can be bought in conjunction with the ’502 Direct Loan.’”

But! Instead of harping on the awful, depressing shell of a storefront blighting Center City’s busiest intersection, I choose to dream. Dream about what the future holds for downstairs. Which is why I have painstakingly, for the next four minutes or so, crafted a list of some completely solid business ideas for one broad street’s anchor store space:

World’s largest KFC

Trampoline land

“Not Just Pizza”, Philadelphia branch

Giant patio suitable for summer drinking

Forever 38

Elephant Cakewalk

Amazon.com, but like, in physical form (how amazing would that be!)

Hat Depot, a depot for hats

Seriously guys, where can I drink outside in Philly this summer?

Dave & Busters Franchise

Lizard Museum, tentatively titled “House of ‘Zard”

Chuck E Cheese Franchise

Jon Hamm’s summer loft**

I’d be ok with two floors of skee-ball

Puppies

This was going to be the point in the blog entry where I suggest we all pool our tax returns and collectively make one of these failsafe businesses happen for realsies, (I was even going to leave a funny fake address where you could send the checks) but let’s face it. I’m pretty busy. I’d buy all the hats and then they’d just sit in the corner for a few months.

*and, you know. What it means for the future of publishing, blah blah blah jobs, etc.

**not technically a “business”